KNOB-TWEAKING & HOW TO USE PRESETS I’ve had interns over the years who just loved this tweaking. Many have turned out not to be the engineers they sought to be, but have come to recognize their love of sound design and have successfully pointed their career in that direction. Couple those sound designers with the ever increasing power of computers, and the virtual world has allowed manufacturers to go well beyond those embarrassing “songs” and provide deep banks of pre-made sounds. As professionals, then, we have to re-evaluate our hardcore notion of what presets are and how to use them. There’s really good stuff in there! On the other hand, we all still hear productions all day long that use the same sounds over and over again. Clearly there must be a middle ground that is neither a showstopper for the workflow nor boring, lazy, and talentless. I use presets as a starting point. Maybe I’m looking for a particular kind of sound, or maybe I’m looking for inspiration. A preset gets me “in the ballpark.” From there, it’s not hard or timeconsuming to figure out what needs changing. Perhaps the LFO needs to be sync’d to MIDI, or the waveform of that LFO needs to be a triangle instead of a sine. Maybe the modulation and delay are perfect, but the oscillator or the wavetable needs to be altered. Whatever it is, it’s quick and easy from the starting point of the preset.
WHEN NOT TO USE PRESETS There are processors that I won’t use from a preset: compressors and EQ. Arguably these are in a different category, they’re less “effects” and more about shaping tone (see my columns from June and July 2015 for more). In those cases, the outcome is so dependent on the starting audio that a preset isn’t really helpful. Those devices just need you to understand them, and use your ears.
RECORDING
their “thing.” We should be deeply grateful for those sorts of musicians. They have swollen the ranks of sound designers, a field once reserved for oddball synthetists and Foley artists wielding coconut shells.
Ultimately, it comes down to getting the work done, and the art made. How you get there depends on your preferences, talent, and workflow. I always say, “If it sounds good, it is good,” meaning it doesn’t matter how you got there, so long as it’s undeniably good. Sound designers love to tweak and tweak, and I thank them for having a different set of skills and desires than I. My clients hire me to make them sound great. That’s my thing. Presets, carefully designed by those happy tweakers, and tweaked further by me on-the-fly, help me make my clients happy. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Award winning mix engineer and producer Jordan Tishler runs Digital Bear Entertainment in Boston MA. A large Augsburger designed mix/overdub room with SSL console and racks upon racks of analogue outboard gear, tape machine, and gazillions of instruments, Tishler has credits including B Spears, JLo, Iggy A, MOTi, Justin Prime, SIA, and London Grammar. Contact me about producing your next record, or mixing the one you’re working on now! For more, visit www. digitalbear.com.
PERFORMER MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2015 41