It's 12:35 p.m. when I walk into Engine studios in Chicago. In 25 minutes The M's will be playing live for a small audience here, but their performance is going to reach a lot more ears. KEXP, the radio station from Seattle which is sponsoring this concert (and 10 others over the course of three days), will be broadcasting this performance live over the airwaves in Seattle as well as streaming it live in multiple formats over the internet and cell phones, keeping that stream available on their website for two weeks, possibly podcasting the performance, burning it to CD for later playback on the air and archiving it for possible inclusion on a live CD at a later date. That's a lot to think about for FOH engineer Scott Colburn, but he seems cool as he walks around the 11-piece band in his socks, swapping XLR cables on the lead vocalist's mic and checking the DI boxes on the string section (two violins and a cello — yes, it's a rock band). Of course, this calm might come from the fact that everything that can go wrong, already has. This morning, just after install, the ISDN line that fed the broadcast back to Seattle failed. The signal starts at a wide mixture of mics and DIs on the band into a Trident Series 80B board, where Colburn mixes. Each of the channels on the board runs out to a Pro Tools rig recording the session, and the stereo mix from the board is multed into a second board in a different room, a Spirit Folio, and channels 23 and 24 on the Pro Tools session. The DJs do their mix on the Spirit desk, and the stereo mix from that board gets patched into a Telos Zephyr box, which samples the mix at 64 kbps/channel, and sends it out over ISDN back to the production offices of KEXP in Seattle, where they reverse the process and broadcast the stream. Except today the ISDN refuses to work. Instead of broadcasting live, the shows are being recorded and FTP-d to Seattle. The live broadcast, well, isn't.
The show must go on, though, so at 1 p.m. the band hits the first note, and Colburn works the faders. The M's is a huge group, 11 people, all playing live in a recording studio–a lot of big sounds competing in a tight space.
"I had a big discussion with the string players," says Colburn, "Where we decided to go DI for the strings, even though I really hate the DI strings sound. It was really kinda necessary if I was gonna hear them at all." Colburn struck an open mix, aiming for a Phil Spector "massive, huge, live sound," using two Sennheiser 421s and a Shure 58 and 57 on vocals and guitar, even though he thinks they're a little too open. "I would have preferred to have beta58s all the way around, but they weren't available, so I'm using what I have."
He's got another 421 on bass, a d112 on the kick drum, a SM57 on the snare and a pair of Earthworks hyper-cardioid mics above and pointing straight down at the drum set.
"I'm approaching the drum set as an instrument that's being picked up by the two mics which are the overheads, then I supplement the kick and the snare with close mics on that," he explains. "It's an effort to reduce the amount of channels I have to deal with, and also to have less mics open to reduce the amount of bleed that's gonna happen."
It doesn't completely work, though, as he battles bleed throughout the set.
"When we went on the air, the first two songs sounded the way I had envisioned it, but after the interview the second two songs just fell apart for me," he notes, with a healthy dose of self-deprecation. I tell him the mixes sounded fine to me–lush and dynamic with a nice crisp rock feel.
"I wouldn't say that the mixes were bad," he replies, "But I just wasn't happy with them, and there was nothing I could do to be happy with it."
Mixing In The Milk
Colburn's his own harshest critic. This manifests as an intense drive to improve the quality of live sound mixes for KEXP, including experimenting with a surround mix for live performances, and upgrading the conditions of the KEXP remote broadcasts. When KEXP broadcast from the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City Colburn took it upon himself to visit the museum and negotiate with them to have KEXP provide the mixing equipment and engineers.
"It was a big relief for them," he says. "It was still minimal equipment, but the improvement was noticeable." Eventually the live performances were moved to a studio, but the negotiation between a live mix and the broadcast quality went on.
While he tries to make every live performance sound as good as the CD that was played before it, he's adamant in his live mixing philosophy.
"I don't like the typical pop mix which is like the vocals kinda on top and in your face and the band's got this whole other dimension to it," he says. "I don't want somebody so close to my face that I can smell their breath when they're singing. Because you've never gone to a concert and heard the vocals right in your face, you know? You don't hear it that way because there's room and space in there." He likes his mixes like breakfast, and says vocals should be "Here, in the center, and the music is like cereal and milk in a bowl that surrounds the vocals and supports it that way."
But to get that sound out of a live performance and onto the broadcast, without upsetting the band's manager and keeping the sound consistent, requires jumping through a few hoops.
"When I'm doing the broadcast mix I remove that space and bring the vocals back up straight and on top of the music." It sounds counter-intuitive, but he continues, "The reason that I put them on top of the music is that I know that when it goes to the station and goes back out over the air it's gonna hit another limiter, which is gonna pull that vocal down and it's gonna put it in the place that I actually do want it to be."
So the live audience's mix is a little different than what actually hits the airwaves, but everybody's happy. "At this end, the people that are listening, the people at the station, the DJs, they hear the mix of a pop music mix that they're used to hearing and they appreciate. And so everybody's satisfied that way. I know that in the end it sounds like I want it to sound, but here, live, it sounds like everybody else wants it to sound."
And at the end of the day, everybody's happy in Chicago, too. The Engine techs have worked with phone company and gotten the ISDN working. At 9 a.m. the next morning local band Catfish Haven blasts into the studio and dances their way through a bluesy rock set, electrifying the live audience that's skipped work to come watch the show, those listening over the radio and people online as far away as Iceland. It's live mixing, with a reach a lot farther than your typical array.
