Exchange of ideas and opinions is of course welcome in any sphere, but are there some things we worry about in audio production which perhaps we should just let go? I'm not suggesting that we should be slapdash or lazy in our work. All I'm suggesting is that there are some things which don't matter as much compared to the amount of time some of us consume debating them might suggest. Here are some examples.

Stereo Imaging Rules

When stereo was first introduced, there was a period where people were figuring out how best to use it, and listening back to that period there are some choices made which by today's standards might seem a little odd. These days there is a broad consensus around how to place elements in a music mix. There are technical reasons why some of these conventions exist but some of these technical reasons frequently don’t apply in the way that they used to. For example although deep bass is difficult to locate in the stereo panorama, by placing it in at the centre of a mix the power-hungry bass energy is shared equally between both sides of a stereo amplifier and reproduced by all the bass drivers drivers equally. This is a good way to ensure the best possible performance from a limited playback system.

Lots of off-centre bass energy, or worse out of phase bass, is difficult to cut to vinyl but in spite of the relative resurgence of vinyl it is still very much a minority medium and these restrictions don't really apply in the same way that they used to. There are other conventions such as mixes being symmetrical. While adhering to these does fulfil our expectations of what a record ‘should’ sound like, choosing to ignore them them isn’t wrong, ignoring these conventions might even be just what was needed.

Drummer Perspective

Another example of a stereo imaging rule which doesn't have a technical requirement behind it is the matter of choosing drummer perspective. By this, I mean which way round a drum kits kit pieces are presented in the stereo image. Is the hi hat on the right or the left? Where is the floor tom? The convention of placing the hi hat on the right and floor. tom on the left is intended to present a drum kit as if it were recorded from in front of the kit. Played by a right-handed drummer. However, this isn't a good rule. Left-handed drummers exist and there's no reason at all why you shouldn't present a recording of a drum kit from the players perspective, as if miked from behind. You might say that that isn't representing how the kit would sound to the audience, but if you are hard-panning elements of your drum kit you are either presenting a drum kit from extremely close up or a kit which is as wide as the stage. Arguments about presenting things faithfully as they sound in the room kind of fall away.

Analogue vs Digital

There will be some people who howl at the suggestion that the analogue versus digital debate isn't useful but I don't really think it is. I'm not saying that analogue isn’t different to digital and I'm certainly not saying that, when used well, it doesn't sound nice. But what I am saying is that it's really not very important. Wanting clean sounds which are uninfluenced by the equipment being used to process them compared to wanting your equipment to impart its sonic fingerprint onto your audio are both very valid creative choices. The thing which is probably less important is exactly how you achieve that. Without wanting to bring this phrase out too early in this article, it really is a case of if it sounds good it is good.

How Things Sound In Solo

Having access to the multitrack of a project, offers a unique perspective which isn't shared by the audience. I'll admit that access to a multitrack is still something that I relish. The freedom to dig around in a multitrack session is addictive, and if it's material you already know, but have never had access to the multi track, it's undeniably a great deal of fun.

The main reason I’m as enthusiastic as I am about the potential of truly effective, artefact free de-mixing technology isn't because of the effect it will have on the recording industry. To be honest there are more potential negatives than there are positives in all the inappropriate remixing which will inevitably come from unlocking multitracks of historical recordings from their stereo releases. The reason I like it so much is because I'm basically quite nosey!

Once you have access to the multitrack, you can hear the spill off other off-mic instruments captured with the recording, you might hear headphone spill, you might hear previously unnoticed gating, the list goes on. But the masking effects of audio and the ability of spill to disappear once it is reestablished in context with the rest of the recording is so easy to underestimate. As with lots of other ’cures’ for audio issues, chasing down spill can be counterproductive and can damage the audio more than the spill ever would. Context is everything and just because you heard it doesn't mean anyone else will.

High-Passing Everything

I remember I used to do this. I probably picked it up in my live sound days where the uncontrolled environment of a concert could produce all sorts of low frequency bumps and pops and engaging a high pass filter across every channel apart from the kick and the bass guitar was almost expected. Line level sources might escape these filters, but they were on more than they were off.

A recording studio isn't like that and, once recorded, a performance is a known quantity and isn't going to throw up any surprises. It was quite some time ago that I was challenged on this default use of filters and I realise that it was just something that I'd been doing without asking myself why? I realised that actually things were better more often than they were worse with most of these filters left bypassed. People point out the fact that a high pass filter rotates the phase as well as cutting the low end. This is true, but it's not something I worry about. I've gone looking for issues caused by this in the past and while they can affect the audio, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Certainly not the problem it’s sometimes made out to be and it’s only going to cause an issue if the same audio has two routes to your ears, one through the filter and the other bypassing it.

But regardless of the technical worrying. I found the electric guitar tracks I’d been high passing as a matter of course usually sounded better without, and I wasn’t opening the door to a plague of bumps and thumps by doing it. If there’s a problem, fix it. If you don’t notice the problem, it’s probably not that important

Worrying About Things You Can See But Can’t Hear

A DAW presents us with a huge amount of visual feedback about our audio. Just being able to see the waveform of our recordings was an enormous novelty years ago. It's also allowed us an entirely different perspective on what we recorded. Sometimes it’s extremely useful. For example I can identify ‘umms’ and mouth clicks in dialogue far faster visually than I'd find them by listening to the recording. However, it does open the door to unhelpful obsessing over details which we may be able to see, but we don't hear. An excellent example is the temptation to tune vocals which sit slightly off the line in tuning software. They might sound fine left as they are. After all ‘perfectly in tune’ and ‘perfect’ aren't quite the same thing. Similarly quantising performances onto the grid because there's a line there and an event doesn't fall on it is a really bad reason to change something. If it doesn't sound good that's different, but if it's just because of how it looks that is not a valid decision. I remember a friend explaining to me about a very frustrating session he had with somebody who insisted that because a drum performance wasn't lining up with the grid it needed to be ‘corrected’ although when it was pointed out that the drum performance was off the grid by the same amount on the same beats in every bar, this person couldn't understand that what everyone else understood to be groove wasn't the error that person was seeing it as.

It's a funny story, but it's one that makes a good point. I've commented before about how because we can align the phase of different signals, using some really clever and very effective plug-ins, this should always be thought of as ‘aligning’ the phase, not ‘correcting’ it. Very often sounds which aren't perfectly aligned can sound great. I always raise an eyebrow when I hear people say that they always run their drums through Auto-Align before doing anything else to make them punchier. I always wonder whether they needed to be punchier? Alignment plug-ins are great tools, but they should only be used to fix things which don't sound right.

There are lots more examples of things we probably ought to relax about. I'll reiterate, my earlier statement that I'm not suggesting people should be slapdash. Just that a good recording of a good performance probably doesn't need anything else doing to it. Our job isn't so much to do as to assess and decide based on our experience, taste and judgement. Unfortunately, there is no plug-in for that, but give it time…