Acoustic Treatment with Bobby Owsinski (Frank Zappa, The Byrds)- Warren Huart: Produce Like A Pro

Hello everyone, I hope you are doing wonderfully well. I'm sitting here with big Bobby. Oh, since you keep it up, perfectly fine, well, I took a little time to practice that one practice makes perfect, oh yeah, and I have a Polish wife, so if I'm wrong about this, I'm in serious trouble, so I have many questions to ask you, please, now, obviously, you are a mentor to so many people. books and a lot of great resources available where people can figure out, one of the ones I saw recently is really the one I want to talk about because even though there are tons of your mixes that I've followed and had fun with, tips and tricks that I have stolen from you the big question that I think is on many people's minds now is the

acoustic

s of the room specifically because of this revolution in DI W is where can we sit at home in any environment bedrooms garages basements all these types of environments the problem Lo What we face is that they are not ideal now that we have discussed it for about six or seven years, yes, yes, and it is not new, but it is still relevant because let's face it, it is an enduring topic of the physics of physics that we don't they change. with the technology, the physics of physics, there will be a link and all that kind of good stuff happening here, so the question is in that video you made.

I don't remember the budget you proposed, it was very low. you can improve tremendously, yes, that was a presentation I gave at Nimbus Nimbus recording Nimbus studios Nimbus in Vancouver is a recording school which, by the way, is a wonderful facility, one of the best when it comes to our business and the Bob Ezrin school Bob Ezrin school, yeah, it was how to fix your

acoustic

environment for $150 or less and basically the idea is that your listening environment is probably the thing you least think about now, not because you're a professional, but a lot of people are getting into in this, especially musicians.

Those who want to do their own recording will buy expensive speakers they will buy expensive equipment but the last thing they will think about is the acoustics of the room, which is the most important because it is a symbiosis of how the speakers in the room work. They are working together, but it's not rocket science, it doesn't take a huge amount of money to fix your environment, all to understand, although there are two parts to this, there is insulation in the room, there is

treatment

, so if you think Let's put some acoustic foam on the wall and suddenly the kids next door won't hear the neighbors.

It doesn't work that way. Insulation is expensive to get, but in-room

treatment

is inexpensive if you can swing a hammer. and you can buy many of the materials locally, it won't cost you much to make a big difference, will it sound like this room? No, but you'll get pretty close. I mean, you'll get 90.% of the way there, but as we know, mixing everything you and I do every day, it's the extra percentage that costs the most money and takes the most time. That being said, this will give you a good path through everything. It's about creating the right environment for you to listen and it doesn't take much.

Fantastic. Are there specific things that stand out to you? With that budget, they will make big improvements to a room. Well, the most important thing. Do you want to create what they call an RF Z that is a reflection of your zone around your listening space and this happens in every good playing environment whether you realize it or not? It's built in, so you don't want to have reflections bouncing around in your ears, you want to hear exactly what's coming out of the speakers without any reflections canceling out the frequencies, so the way to do that is by absorbing those frequencies into the walls and also into the roof, and that's the great part. part of the ceiling, so what you have to do is build some acoustic panels or buy them because now you can get them in many places and you put some on each side of the listening environment and above your head, and you're very far away.

Now to create that RFC, of ​​course the next big step would be to fix the wall behind you so you don't have things splashing on the back of your head, but again, that's not too difficult either because I didn't cushion it with panels either. acoustic or you can spread the sound, you can make it sound in different ways and you will do it very economically and cheaply with the shelf full of things that just can't be randomized, yes, you randomized it, yes, fantastic now with insulation. you touched on that, I mean, it's a completely different type of discussion because in my studio it's a room within a room, yeah, and it costs an absolute fortune, so yeah, yeah, there's no way around that because it takes a lot of material. because we are talking in masses. and the next thing is the mass, which means it also takes a lot of work and one of the biggest things that people forget is the fact that you have to think of it like a fish tank if there are air spaces that the water drains out of. and it's the same with your room, if you have air spaces then you will have to ventilate the trains, so now everything you created some insulation is no longer useful to you, so not only do you have to add a lot of mass, but there is also You have to seal it very well, which poses the following problem: if you have a sealed room, it is very uncomfortable to be in there unless you exchange the air, then you enter an expensive air conditioner, so there we have multiple problems with creating this isolated environment. , not to say that they cannot be made at a price that is within the range of what many musicians or engineers can afford.

Yes, you can do it, but it won't cost $150, I'm sure you know I have. known over the years of studio construction, when we only have a separation between the control rooms and the live rooms, we take the concrete floor and break it up, yeah, yeah, that wasn't a big investment. I don't think that's among many of us, but I also wonder, it's all about priorities, yes, it's about that, in the purest sense, I wouldn't want to hear the kick drum or the bass amp in the control room , but the reality is that for most people you can look beyond that.

In those types of situations you can still get great results, yeah, I mean, I think we both know situations where you've probably been in this and I know you're in an environment and you just learn to deal with it. used to that, you learn what works and what doesn't and you figure it out, your ears automatically figure it out if you know what to listen for and you can make it work. It's like speakers. I never believed that a perfect speaker existed. a speaker that you're absolutely used to, I think it's not that kind of learning in general from your room.

I mean, yeah, for me, that's actually what mastering engineers have done for me. Yeah, you know, I've mixed something up. I'm sending it to Gavin. and Gavin comes back and says yeah, that's really good, but you had a 200 Hertz boost, yeah, so even though I don't hear that in my room, I'm starting to notice it, so maybe I'll get a little bit out of 200 on some areas where it was building up especially for those of us who have consoles where a 150 200 always seems to have a build up no joke yes that definitely happens and you know it's funny because there's a problem in every room for the most part and when you find that problem or you learn how to fix it or it takes a lot of money to fix it so usually the best way to do it is the quickest way to learn how to fix it and I'm sure that's probably the case for you and I know it's for me or it's like no and no, I have this problem and I know it's going to take a lot of time and money and experimentation because even the best acousticians experiment a lot, that's one of the things that amazed me when I finally got into this and it was like all those guys , the experiment like everyone else does to get things right, you know, and it's all said and done, there's a lot of art in science too and there's a lot of craftsmanship, so it's not not what we think about all the time and I mean just because it's absolutely dead doesn't mean it sounds good, oh I never did, yeah, although there's one place where that works and that's voiceovers, right where they want a pretty dead vibe and they need a dead vibe, but apart from that, not like a Foley study, sometimes they weren't really amazing.

I remember sending a mix to Mark Ender maybe 15+ years ago and apologizing for a bit of vibe in the vocals that Mike was hoping for with the guys, you know. as gray as that for two people to be a little upset with me, you know, and he's like, oh well, I won't have to use as much reverb, yeah, yeah, okay, I think that's part of our job, is to fix it, but what? I love this kind of $150 suggestion: you take something that may be completely unusable and you take it to a place where it's usable because, in garages, in particular, in particular, everywhere, steel or aluminum doors, they are You know all these kinds of things that happen.

It's almost impossible to work with, it's really difficult, but the fact is that if you create this reflection-free zone, you're a long way from getting to that point. The next question would be good. How many acoustic panels do I need? Well, you need as many as As big as the area should be now, how big should it be? If you have reflections coming back at you then you need more panels so there is a way to solve it and that is the old mirror trick and you put up a mirror. against the wall and every place where you can see the speaker, that means you need an acoustic panel, so eventually I get to a point where you don't see the speaker anymore and you don't need a panel there, well, this is In my mind I'm remembering opinions about speakers because when people give you their opinion, you know this fellow that you see is here, the channel closes, the atoms, you know, all these different brands.

I'm always intrigued when I talk really, really. Well, and someone comes back and says, "Oh, I don't like those that are too bright, too low, medium." I say it's bright or boring but it's interesting until I walk into a room like this that is extremely well balanced. I don't know if I really know my speakers, in fact, you know what they're really telling me, yeah, so I take that information. I think that's the beauty of having a mastering engineer, yeah, is that I can put it on hold, I can let something else be that last process, the last person I can talk to, yeah, and it's really beautiful our string studio, which is actually the old Oasis oh yeah you know we're in America with Eddie Schreyer and I remember the bass on my mix was so horrible but I didn't know it because my speakers were like that but of course yeah and my room was anything but the speakers weren't going to put out 20 or 40 Hertz, at least not consistently enough that it would have really bothered me and then I walked into this room with giant speakers like this and said, "Oh, I'm embarrassed because all this is low." Rumble goes on and all this kind of stuff, so I think we can sometimes underestimate a good listening environment, but the most important or just as important thing is that we can't underestimate the work of a great mastering engineer.

Are you an MS 10 guy? He didn't use it anymore. use them all the time, all the time, all the time and then I started monitoring other speakers and was able to enjoy them for longer periods of time and didn't get as tired until they eventually turned on once or twice a day. maximum and then not for a couple of days and I started because I had my own room, I started tracking and mixing on the same speakers and I didn't have that Enna ten mentality of going, these are my tracking speakers, yeah, because for a time.

I'm sure like most of us, because of those 7 DB left in 1.5, you get used to the box breaking and the guitars running around, but after a while you know how to identify that same aggression in other speakers , so you don't need them as much, but for a long time that was the only way I knew how to tell if a guitar or drum sounded good was to check them on honest ends. I never could get them to work for some reason, probably that's probably That's what was probably done right and it's interesting because I went to a friend of ours and we will remain anonymous as a very important mixing engineer and I told him and the reason why Which one is not, I mean, I can tell you that we don't even know the size that it still

produce

s. him - Tenzin loves them anyway I said okay how do you do this and he said okay?

I especially turn on the bass. I told him how do you make your bass work and he says, well, I turned it up high enough to be able to. I see the cones wrinkle up and then I know I've got it right, well I don't think he can do that so it just goes to show you what you need to do to make it work but it was like little gods. I love those, yes. oh yeah, all those speakers, but there's a litter of all the guys I knew, they were mixed by Dave Jerden in particular with the mastering lab crossovers, yeah, it was the way to go, my only live crossover absolutely, they always said the same as that when when it started distorting on the kick drum, they knew they had it, yeah, there were always these messages on four speakers.

I don't know if that's good or bad, well I think in a world where we have so many options, it would be considered bad, but at the timeI understand where you're going and the question you're asking because we were also talking off-camera and it will remain nameless, which is why it came back off-camera earlier about a specific mixer that's so tied up. in a way of doing things, his sound is very influential in the mix, not even because I think about Chris's mixes, he does my stuff and he still has my personality, yeah, have your personality, everyone comes out of it the way in which he still mixes. maintains the integrity of the recording, yes there are some mixers that sound like they mixed it more than Chris's.

That may not be the case, yes, and one thing we had was a mix that has beyond a template and has such a complex way of mixing with busing and all these types of influences that took the sound of a woman, let's say, modern, but very direct. and it gave me a little bit of confusion at least one sound that took away from what we were trying to achieve now we ended up getting what we wanted with that guy well, some songs were pulled back fourteen in a kind of Cajole it, but that's the end of it.

Most of the guys or gals I work with who have mixed outside material of mine, we always end up much faster getting a result that has the integrity of the original recording, so templates really aren't. necessarily bad because they will save someone a lot of time, as you know, getting from A to B, but in some cases it is a little more difficult, yes, that's right, working with someone's template depending on what it is and I think that in It actually goes back to what we're talking about before between mixing with the template on a console versus mixing in Addy, aw, we're different, they're a lot easier and a template to put out, someone comes back to you and says, "Not really." I don't like that vocal sound, I want it to be brighter, darker, left, right, pink, purple, whatever it is, you can change it a hundred times faster than routing through SSL with split up and bust over here and this patched over there and blah, blah, blah. and yeah, and that goes through this bus and this blah, blah, blah, and it hits that compressor like this and it all comes down to this mole and that parallel, I mean, that's how I'll see.

I have a great question. I have a version of that. and what I'll do is have a project template that I'll go through on the first song to figure out what works and this assumes now that it's a band that plays together so all the songs sound good. Same thing and usually I'll do it on a project and outside of that first song, I'll figure it out right if I want this sound to stay for the rest of the record, which usually doesn't happen, but usually that's my template and then I'll do it. Remember that at least as a starting point for all the other songs you may not stay there, but it is a starting point, so it is a modified version, it saves time because once you realize that first, the Mastering engineers do the same thing they work very hard at.

On the first song, they figure out the EQ and then everything else is pretty easy from there, except if it's a compilation, for example, where there are different mixers and different environments, but if it's the same album coming from the same producing artists , it's usually pretty easy. Yes, no, yes, I think that's the fault, I would say, but that falls on the

produce

r, the engineer and the mixer. Yeah, you know, I'd say that's quite a possible tangent here. I mean, that comes down to what people are always talking about. about classic albums, how you put a revolver and say: here's a song with just a horn section, not even a band member, yeah, here's a song with acoustic guitar and orchestra, yeah, here's a song with , you know, Taxman, which sounds like indie rock.

Well yeah, it could also be Smashing Pumpkins Gish here, you know, it's like that, with all this different variety and I'm sure you know that if I gave Gavin and Reuben to master each song and they did it, they went back and made the George catalog Harrison that each song would acquire would require, I'm sorry, a lot of different analysis, but these days and it's probably as fan-driven as the genre, whatever it is, there's this kind of mentality now at the labels, as a producer, I can tell you what the stamps have. I have a big problem because if they get a hit song, they want the next album to have ten versions of that hit song.

I'm kidding, you know? But it's always been that way, especially in the more modern nature of mobile devices. of stamps, yes, I mean, I always get on and my spectators will laugh at me silently or very loudly. I always harp on about what my personal favorite band is, Queen, and they taught me about the game, which is an album from 1980, and the reason they choose 1980 is a year because there's no one alive who ever talks about that 80s. They were a great year, yes, music, yes, it was summer, yes, 67 76 for punk in England, everyone talks about maybe 90 to 91, never mind all this kind of stuff, but 1980 the game had four singles by big hit, the obvious ones played the game classic queen, save me classic queen, another one bites the dust disco, yeah that's where there's a little thing called love, 50's rock and roll, yeah you know completely different genres and no one, everyone and Another Bites the Dust and A Crazy Little Thing Called Love or two of the most played radio songs of all time and they're on the same album.

Queen can get away with it then because they were a massive hit, that being said the mentality was different and now you're wondering if an A&R guy would let that slide, yes actually they were technically a hit in America, it died out hugely For them, they had had a little bit of success around the time of Bohemian Rhapsody, but it hadn't really clicked and it came back in quite dramatic fashion. because they were able to go on the radio with another one that bites the dust, they had crossover surgery and the fact that they were able to take that risk and had walked away from their label at that time talking about labels as if you couldn't make disco music there .

There's a bunch of you that know guys from England, you know that, so I think I think it's a great song, like a great song, you know it was their opinion, although it's not a disco icon and that's always been the secret , it is the synergy of the genres, it is his opinion. about whatever is happening and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but when it works it's fantastic oh, I always loved world music but not the indigenous world. I loved when he took the style of the region and took Western music and Júntelo because there is always him, a Gabriel, that's him.

Oh absolutely undisputed king, no joke, no joke, nowhere is there much respect for your odds, but again, you've got something and you still have it, there are so many interesting things that happen when you get that John fusion, I agree I agree, I think it's important. I've had a lot of these discussions and I try to incorporate a lot of our questions and answers and stuff because, to me, that's really what we should always try to do is push the boundaries, yeah, and if I mean, you know Zeppelin, you know the heavy rock band or a rock band, it's like I think Jimmy Page recently said a few years ago, but 75% of our records are acoustic guitars, yeah, most of your songs or when you think it's heavy it's a guitar electric, a pretty clean bass and drums at times and it's funny because what people considered a heavy guitar sound we now have considered every day and back then it was a guitar through a Marshall and it would appear, but that's A clean sound, yes, yes, yes.

I see DC back on the black highway to hell, yeah, absolutely Metallica came out and it was like this five amp wall hit you in the head, you know, that kind of thing and that was the new heavy and it changed the world, yes, absolutely, yes, okay, this has been absolutely fantastic, we were able to talk all day, we could, so we should do another one where we talk all day, just whatever, you call him Marvis, well, thank you very much, Bobby, I really appreciate it. Please, have you ever left a bunch of comments and questions below?

I would like to know all your opinions. You know, we came here specifically to listen and talk a lot about the whole process that we do here before mastering because I have a strong belief that I don't like the word experts, but I think there are people here with a lot of acquired knowledge, you know, the engineers mastering are really the last stop for me. I learned more from mastering than probably from my own mixing. I agree, Marvis. Have fun recording a mix. Leave lots of questions and comments below.