Audio Training

[John Livings]

Hi Allen,

The main 2 books I study For Recording and Cleaning up Audio are:

Audio Postproduction for Film and Video, Second Edition (DV Expert Series) (Paperback)

Producing Great Sound for Film and Video, Third Edition (DV Expert Series) (Paperback)

Both by Jay Rose

I bought mine at Amazon, Used.

Most Helpful, I recommend BOTH.

This forum is also great along with the Broadcast Video forum

Just my opinion,

John

[Bill Davis]

Jay’s books are great.

And I highly recommend them to anyone wanting a good grounding in practical audio theory.

That said, I’m not sure you’re going to find precisely what you’re looking for in any form of print.

That’s essentially because audio sweetening is more like cooking than like driving.

In a task based deal like driving, you learn the pedals, switches, rules of the road etc then with some basic practice you’re good to go.

But cooking really isn’t all that “task based”. It’s about learning the properties of the ingredients and how they REACT to each other. You add cinnamon to this combination – it’s great. You add cinnamon to THAT combination – it’s HORRIBLE. Cooking is too complex to distill down into simple rules.

Likewise audio sweetening.

Take a simple voiceover. Each voice has specific frequency fundamentals that make it unique. It also features patterns of delivery that are distinct. Let’s say your voice talent hits their “s” sounds hard – So you naturally try to find the frequencies of those splashy sounds and trim them. So you drop a low pass filter on things. Which removes the splashy-ness – but also reduces intelligibility to unacceptable levels. So you consult your tables about human speech, figure out the general high frequencies involved, and try to tone down the splashy-ness with a notch filter, or a bit of parametric EQ…

But NONE of them get you the sound you want. Maybe rather than dropping the frequencies around the S’s – maybe you try propping UP other frequencies to make the “s” sounds fit better in the overall mix? Or not. Perhaps compression will help on THIS recording. Or make those “s”s sizzle twice as bad.

That’s half a dozen reasonable approaches to trying to generate one “recipe” for solving this one problem.

And the truth is, nobody can tell you which one will work. BECAUSE THE VOICE and it’s relation to the OTHER SOUNDS in the track are UNIQUE to your mix. The way that voice sounded on the day it was recorded saying those words recorded properly or improperly – digitized at a particular level using this particular microphone which was set up in this particular space – HAS NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE.

I’m not being difficult – and yes, there are some conventions that can help in some situations and resources like Jay’s can guide you to them. But in the end, the ONLY way to become a good audio mixer is the same way you become a good cook.

Study, study, study the basic skills of the trade…. then
practice, practice, practice.

Good luck.