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Mix Rescue: Jazz-Trio

Jesper Buhl
Production Mixing
By Mike Senior Published April 2008

In this article...
Rescued This Month...
Spill, Balance & Phase
Parallel Compression
Remix Reactions
Final Tweaks
Minimal Mixing

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Here you can see how the instruments were set up for Jesper's recording, with the bass isolated from the
drums and piano using part-glazed screens.

We help a home recordist on a budget to add that elusive polish to his jazz-
trio recordings.

Many of the songs sent in to Mix Rescue do indeed need salvaging, but occasionally something
comes in that makes a pleasant break from the norm. Jesper Buhl's recording of his jazz trio
was one such welcome submission, where he had managed to capture respectable signals
from the ensemble performance, despite budget constraints, by careful placement and
isolation of the piano, upright bass and drums within his home studio, which is a 7.5 x 7.5m
converted garage.

The bass player, Rico De Jeer, was set up towards one corner of the carpeted room, allowing
him to be isolated pretty e ciently from the other instruments using three large studio panels
(complete with glazed sections to preserve sight lines). The drums and piano were set up more
towards the other side of the room, and Jesper had tried to reduce the levels of drum spill on
the piano mics by turning the instrument so that its lid opened in the opposite direction, as well
as by arranging four 2 x 4-foot absorber panels around it.

The drums were played by Chris Barchet and recorded with a pair of Oktava MK012 cardioid
small-diaphragm condensers running through Rane MS1B preamps into an Emu 1820M
soundcard, the audio interface for Jesper's Cubase SX2 PC recording system (itself isolated in a
purpose-built box to reduce noise). In addition to these mics, the bass drum had an AKG D112
in front of it and a Superlux ECOH6A large-diaphragm electret mic on the batter-head side.
There was a Shure SM57 on the snare, as well as a separate small-diaphragm condenser on the
hi-hat although session gremlins ate the hi-hat signal before it could reach the recorder, so
this last mic's signal wasn't available for mixing. All of the close mics were ampli ed by a
Behringer ADA8000 preamp/converter before reaching the audio interface.

Another Superlux ECOH6A microphone was set up in front of the bass, after Jesper had tried
and rejected both an SE Electronics SE2200A and a Studio Projects B3 in this role, while his Readers' Ads
Grotriam-Steinweg baby grand piano had two Studio Projects C3 mics (in cardioid mode) in a
spaced stereo con guration over the strings. These mics also passed through the ADA8000. VIEW ALL ADS CREATE FREE AD

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Jesper's original mix was already sensibly balanced and by no means bad but I felt that
the drums seemed a bit too wide and the bass wasn't quite present enough. There was also a
slightly unnatural reverb added to the piano, and it seemed rather 'stuck on'. So I asked him to
send over his original multitrack les and loaded them into my own Cubase SX2 system to see
if there was a better result to be had.

Rescued This Month...

First taking up piano lessons at the age
of seven, Jesper Buhl joined his rst band
in his early teens, playing blues and rock
& roll. By high school, however, he'd
moved more into the jazz eld, following
the inspiration of such masters of the
ivories as Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans. On the same subject
When Miles Davis went electric, he All About Library Music: Part 7
became interested in synths and jazz November 2017
fusion and moved to Copenhagen to Producing EDM
pursue his musical interests. For 10 years November 2017
he played with his band Blue Turtle, Behind The Scenes At BBC Radio 3s In Tune
before studying at the Hilversum November 2017
The Jesper Buhl Trio (left to right): Jesper Buhl, Rico The Mix Review
Conservatory, and subsequently formed
De Jeer and Chris Barchet. November 2017
another electric jazz fusion combo called
Inside Track: Kesha Praying
Dino On The Loose, as well as becoming involved with the trip-hop-meets-jazz group
November 2017
Warp Expansion Protocol. This month's Mix Rescue song is 'What Is This Thing Called
Love?' and was performed by Jesper at the piano, with Rico De Jeer on bass and Chris
Barchet on drums. Latest Videos

www.jesperbuhl.com

www.ricodejeer.com

Spill, Balance & Phase

Jesper's main concern with his original tracks was the level of spill from the drums on the piano
mics, despite the steps he'd taken to reduce it, so I started my listening there. As I'd suspected,
it turned out that the spill wasn't too much for this style of music. More to the point, it Dynaudio 9S & 18S - AES 2017
happened to sound fairly pleasant, albeit with slightly elevated cymbal levels. I felt that the Uploaded 6 days 17 hours ago
biggest problem was that panning the piano mics evenly placed the drum spill over on the
right-hand side of the mix, so I resolved to pan the piano mics a little to the left of the drums to
re-centre the spill. Placing the low piano mic 75 percent left and the high piano mic 35 percent
right did the trick, while still leaving lots of stereo movement in the piano sound.

I listened to the drum overheads next, which

had very low levels of spill from the other
instruments but a very wide stereo image, so I
reduced the panning to 50 percent left/right.
The timbre was pretty good straight away
(although with very little bass drum level), so I
Here you can see the parallel compression setting Jam Racks Studio Furniture - AES 2017
had a quick listen to the bass mic. This had a Mike used to improve the sustain of the piano part. Uploaded 1 week 3 hours ago
fair bit of spill on it from both of the other Similar settings were used on the other parts,
instruments, but again Jesper had managed to independently.
keep this sounding fairly benign. I panned the
bass 20 percent to the right, in order to balance the piano image, but without giving a seriously
lopsided low-end picture.

Despite Jesper's e orts to isolate the instruments, the bottom line is that spill is an inherent
part of recordings like this. With so many mics picking up the same sounds (either directly or as
spill), phase-cancellation between the di erent mic signals becomes an important factor, so it's
pointless trying to process any mic in isolation. For this reason, my rst real mixing task was
simply to fade up the piano, bass and drum-overhead mics to give a rough balance, and then
listen to how they interacted with di erent polarity settings. After a little experimentation, Rupert Neve Designs - 535 Diode Bridge Compressor - AES
however, I liked the default settings best another point on Jesper's score-card! so I turned 2017
my attention, rst of all, to rounding out the balance of the drums coming through the Uploaded 1 week 3 hours ago
overheads, by using the close mics.

The bass drum was most obviously missing in action, so I checked out the two relevant close
mics. The AKG D112 at the front of the kick presented a rather unappealing and coloured
sound (which I'd probably have tried to remedy on the session in Jesper's position), so I faded
up the batter-side mic instead. This didn't have the same amount of body to it as the D112, and
also included an undesirable low-frequency ringing, but the spill from the rest of the kit was
very well behaved indeed, and the resonance was quickly taken care of with an 8dB notch at
100Hz. Again, I checked the polarity of this mic against the rest of the mix, but this time found
that an inverted setting gave a more solid sound.

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As it happened, the level of snare spill on this
mic was so high that I found myself reaching
almost instinctively for some processing to
reduce it. However, after a moment's thought I
realised that this snare spill was, in fact, exactly
what the overheads needed to bring the snare
forward in the mix, so I stepped away from the
plug-in menu with my hands in the air... In the
event, this snare spill was something of a
stroke of luck, as the snare sound coming
through the close mic was a bit dodgy woolly
and resonant, with some nasty spill
emphasising the stick noise from the ride
A spaced pair of Studio Projects C3 mics were used to
cymbal. Although the drum sound was now
capture the piano sound, while four acoustic
pretty much in the right ball-park, I tried mixing absorber panels were arranged to try to reduce spill
in the D112 as well to see what it would sound from the drums.
like in context, and discovered that a little bit of
it gave a more rounded sound to the kick, once I'd found the best polarity setting.

Parallel Compression
With the majority of the mix balance in place, I could concentrate on some processing. My main
aim was to try to increase the sustain and detail of each of the parts, and for this I turned to
parallel compression in other words, using compression as a send e ect rather than as an
insert. The advantage of the parallel approach is that you can smooth the levels without as
much impact on the transients and performance dynamics that are so important to acoustic
music styles.

By now I'd bussed each of the parts to its own Group

channel in Cubase, and from each of these groups I
set up a send to a separate instance of Buzzroom's
Gran Comp. Starting with the piano compressor, I left
the release time set to automatic but set the attack as
fast as possible, e ectively ducking the transients and
therefore favouring the sustain elements in the
compressed signal. With a fairly low ratio of 1.7:1, I
adjusted the threshold to give a few decibels of gain
reduction, before mixing some of the compressed
feed with the uncompressed signal. I then made
identical settings on the bass and drum compressors,
as a starting point.

I liked the e ect I was getting from the three

compressors straight away, and while I chose to use
more compression than some purists might, the
changes were still fairly subtle, bringing up the A little shelving EQ was used in each of the
parallel compressor return channels, to help
ambience from the room and improving the audibility
tailor the e ect to each part.
of softer details. However, I did make some tweaks to
my initial settings, to improve things further. The cymbals were already quite prominent in the
mix, so I gave them a little less support from the compressor by cutting 2.5dB from the
compressed signal with a high shelf at 2.5kHz. In a similar way, I felt that the piano's low notes
seemed to need more sustain than the high notes, so I cut a decibel from the piano's
compressor signal with a 1.5kHz high shelf. However, this left the high notes slightly low in
level, so I increased the level of the high-strings mic by 0.8dB to compensate.

Conversely, with the bass compressor I cut a decibel at 360Hz, using a low shelf to highlight the
upper harmonics a little more. I also increased this compressor's ratio to 2:1 and switched to a
release of 65ms, to make the sustain e ect more overt. Despite this, the odd note would
occasionally poke out unduly, so I bussed the compressed and uncompressed signals together
and applied a traditional insert compressor to the resulting Group channel, just to catch these
few moments (for the rest of the time the insert compressor wasn't doing anything at all).

Remix Reactions
Jesper Buhl: "Even though my original mix wasn't exactly screwed up (reading SOS for the
last 10 years must have paid o to some extent!), it was quite obvious that something
was lacking. It didn't sound exactly like a record, only quite close, but at the same time I
couldn't think of anything I wanted to change in my nal mix.

"When Mike had nished working his magic, everything sounded more de ned and
punchy, as if all of the instruments were suddenly out in the room belonging together,
and not behind screens. A friend has compared it favourably to some of his favourite
'50s jazz recordings, saying that it has precisely the same atmosphere and sound, and I
tend to agree. 'More powerful' is another description several of my music-playing

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buddies have used. Everybody loves the new panning (my drums were way too wide) and
the piano also somehow seems wider and more impressive.

"I've already learned a ton of new tricks for example, using compression on the sends
instead of on the inserts but it's going to take a while before I've digested all the advice
on o er here! This has been a real eye-opener and I'm grateful to SOS, and Mike in
particular, for giving me this opportunity. As a bonus, it seems that Mike and I have been
using the same version of Cubase, and he's o ered to send me his Cubase Project le so
that I can use his settings for my entire CD everything was recorded in one session, so
all I should have to do is change the automation for each track. Isn't that just great?"

Final Tweaks
The general sound was now shaping up nicely, with the parallel compression adding a nice
sense of immediacy and atmosphere, so I bussed all the tracks for each instrument to three
Group channels, to allow easier control over the relative levels. I was now keen to try to 'glue'
the instruments together a little more, as well as creating the impression of a slightly larger
space, so I red up Christian Knu nke's SIR convolution reverb plug-in and surfed through
some impulse responses until I found a three-second 'empty club' preset that sounded
promising. Because SIR doesn't o er true-stereo processing, I reduced the send to the e ect to
mono, to avoid any odd stereo artifacts that might have drawn undue attention to the e ect.

I applied a little reverb to each of the three

Group channels, increasing the reverb's pre-
delay to prevent it pushing anything too much
into the background. Although I liked what the
reverb was adding to the bass overall, it was
also bloating the low end a tad, so I high-pass-
ltered the reverb return gently, progressively
reducing the reverb level below about 200Hz.
The cymbals were also hitting the reverb a little
hard, so I cut a couple of decibels out of the
reverb at 4.8kHz to keep the balance from
becoming over-bright.

Listening again for tonal problems, I noticed

that some of the lower bass notes seemed a
little uneven, booming out and making the
occasional phrase awkward and lumpy. I set up
a very narrow peaking lter, hunted around at
the low end, and then notched the o ending
frequency (105Hz) by a couple of decibels to
sort this out, but once this was attended to, I
felt that the whole of the low end of the bass
part could come up a notch, so boosted 1dB at
81Hz with a low shelving lter. Another narrow
little 5dB notch proved useful at 175Hz on the
overhead mics, to take out a slightly tubby Only one reverb was used, a convolution patch from
ringing on one of the toms. the SIR plug-in. Once a suitable impulse response had
been found, some careful pre-delay and EQ tweaks
were applied to optimise it further.
The only other processing that was required
was some compression of the high frequencies on the overhead mics and the bass mic. In the
case of the overheads, I felt that the level of stick noise on the cymbals was a bit distracting, but
didn't want to just cut high-end from the overheads (as that would have compromised the rest
of the drum sound). Setting up just the high band of GVSTs GMulti multi-band compressor to
respond quickly to level spikes in the frequency range above 5kHz helped take the edge o the
problem, although I kept the compression ratio low (1.4:1) and bypassed this e ect using
Cubase's automation during the bass and drum solos, where it wasn't necessary. For the bass,
a similar setting was used for the region above 2.5kHz, to rein in some over-enthusiastic string
slaps.

A little more fader automation was the next step, to push up the levels of the bass and drum
solos when they occurred. In the case of the drum solos, I also turned down the piano mics a
touch, in order to reduce the amount of spill/ambience slightly in these sections. As a nal
polish on the mix, I used Buzzroom's Gene Comp to apply some low-threshold 1.1:1-ratio bus
compression and followed it up with GVSTs GMax limiter, skimming only the very loudest peaks
with a short (50ms) release, to enable me to achieve a little bit of extra loudness.

Minimal Mixing
To be honest, with acoustic music like this the majority of the work needs to happen in the live
room, so Jesper's e orts while tracking made it possible for me to concentrate on polishing
(rather than salvaging) his tracks at mixdown. In this kind of happy situation, the mix
processing can be kept subtle and precisely directed (with fewer undesirable side-e ects), and
the natural spill between the instruments will often work in your favour, giving a lively, organic
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quality to the nal result. This project also serves as a powerful reminder of just how much can
be achieved through great musicianship and common-sense mic technique even when using
budget equipment.

Published April 2008

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