1. Range Manipulation
Hallo, my name is Anna Grigoriadou and I love
singing and playing the piano. This lesson is for week
4 of Introduction to Music Production at coursera.org. I
will be teaching the range manipulation.
2. Musical dynamics is one of the most
important ways we adjust the energy over a
course of a piece of music. A large part of the
reason of music is to manipulate the emotions
and the energy of the listener. We control
dynamics in a variety of places within the
production process to heighten that experience.
To increase the highs and decrease the lows,
really get a nice, emotional journey over a piece
of music.
3. To make the louds louder and the
quiets quieter, we can actually reduce
that dynamic range. And we, we have to
make those choices very carefully. and
we have numerous tools that we use to
kind of control that. We want to make
sure that all of the changes we make in
the post-production process are true to the
underlying material.
4. A) Macro scale
If we zoom out, we look at the entire song and
see the relative levels between the sections. And we
can automate, use a volume fader, and automate
those differences.
5. B) A little bit of a smaller scale
We manipulate the dynamics of a single performance.
And this is very common with a vocalist. You find, often, that the
vocal will get louder during the chorus and quieter during the verse.
Or just word to word. Some words just come out louder, and some
come out quieter. And, while mixing, it's a major concern for us
because we want to keep that as the focus most of the time. Mix
engineer's job is to keep a clear focus for the listener. So, if the
vocalist is loud on some words and quiet on others, sometimes, like
say you have a guitar behind it. The vocal can kind jump in front of
the guitar, and then when it gets quiet, get lost in the volume of the
guitar and kind of become in and out like that. We try to avoid that
maybe by keeping the vocalists right in the front. So there's a
technique we call riding the vocal, which is taking a volume fader,
when the voice gets quiet, bring the volume up and when the voice
gets loud, bring the level down.
6. C) Microdynamics
Another type of dynamic control we have is even smaller
scale. And this is kind of microdynamics, where we can control the
dynamic shape of each individual drum hit. And we can control the
transient. Now the transient is a moment where the amplitude
changes a lot In a short amount of time for example a clap or a drum
hit. There's this big peak right away, and then it decays fast, and that
big peak is a transient. And you'll hear this term used all over the
place. Computers analyze for transients, there are functions in DAWs
to tab to the next transient, to slice on transients. It's a really important
concept. And dynamic controls like compressors and gates let us
manipulate those. So if we start manipulating transients and dynamics
on the fine, kind of microscale like this, we're controlling things like
the punchiness or the impact of drums can be manipulating with these
kind of tools.
8. Don't forget!
Always be thinking about the listener.
Use the dynamics as a way to move the listener
through the mix, and have them focus on the most
important thing at any moment in time.
