Pro Techniques from David Rideau
By Randy Alberts
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David Rideau |
Los Angeles-based producer, engineer and mixer David Rideau has worked with Janet Jackson, Sting, TLC, Kirk Franklin, George Duke and JLo and often sits side-by-side with producer friends extraordinaire Jam & Lewis and Tom Scott in the big chairs. He's been nominated for three Grammy Awards, has lots of gold and platinum records, and is also a discerning journalist-in-a-lab-coat for magazines like Audio Media and Pro Audio Review, yet no one's ever turned the story mic his way for anything more than a technical sidebar. But in what must be typical Rideau behavior, he instead graciously defers to the some of the world's best talent he's been blessed to work with the past 20 years.
"Tom is cool and Jimmy and Terry are just great," says Rideau, who is currently working on the upcoming Daniel Rodriquez CD project (the Singing New York Cop) and recently finished co-producing Scott's new solo disc, Newfound Freedom. "But I've been lucky like that in getting to work with a lot of great producers and artists over the years."
His Own Pro Tools|HDLuck having little to do with it, Rideau studied acoustics and music at Arizona State before moving to L.A. as an assistant and, later, an independent engineer He worked with Tom Scott & The L.A. Express and George Duke in the '70s before moving on to land some of the best engineering gigs in Los Angeles during the '80s and '90s with Babyface, George Benson, Shalamar, Bobby Brown and others. An early Pro Tools adopter who only recently purchased his first personal system thanks to improvements in Pro Tools|HD, he never thought he had to get his own until now.
"As a tool, I've always loved Pro Tools but I've always been a huge analog guy when it comes to sound," Rideau admits. "Analog is the holy grail to compare anything else to, which isn't a fair comparison because it can't really edit or do anything beyond sounding really good. That's why I've always used but never owned a Pro Tools system until HD came out and we did some extensive A/B testing at Westlake Audio."
Drawing a Crowd is Easy
In what Rideau considered an
almost unfair test for Pro Tools|HD at Westlake, he and Pro Tools guru
Pablo Mungia miked an acoustic piano with two Neumann 149s at his favorite
studio and recorded a solo performance. The Neumanns were routed through
a pair of Neve 1073 mic preamps and then a mult of the output was created
and sent both to the input of an SSL SL9000J console and the input of
the 192 I/O. For easy A/B comparison, the output of the 192 was brought
back to the next pair of inputs on the SSL next to the direct feed. As
the piano was being played live in the studio, Rideau just matched the
levels without any EQ or effects, and then critically compared both signals.
What he heard was apparently spilling over into the halls at Westlake.
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Rideau in front of his HD rig |
And what did they have to say?
"Everyone there that day agreed that there was virtually no difference between the live and Pro Tools|HD recording of the piano recorded at 192 kHz. I've had a problem in the past from a phase standpoint with Pro Tools systems. Well, that test was a huge breakthrough for me and I just said, 'OK, I'm ready to buy a system now.'"
Pro Technique 1 —
Thinking ahead like a movie mixer with stems
Whether you work on music demos or create film
and TV edits every day for a living, Rideau and others say you should
be aware of the benefits
of stems. Mix stems, which are also becoming popular among music mix
engineers, are individual mix components split out to multiple tracks
to facilitate easier access to and control over vital audio elements.
This allows producers and mixers to make last-minute changes to a soundtrack
or song at the mix stage of a movie. This can be a helpful habit to adopt
even if you use Pro Tools for composition only.
"I'm not alone in using stems more these days in Pro Tools for music or any sort of project," remarks Rideau. "It's a smart thing to make this process a part of your daily routine."
Rideau explains that he may, for instance, print all the guitars through the stereo bus to a stereo track in Pro Tools when he's done with his master mix. This way he retains all stereo bus dynamics, EQ and effects processing to keep the new separate stereo track of guitars sonically consistent with his overall mix.
"You can do the same thing with stereo stems for the drums, percussion, background vocals, lead vocals and bass. Anything you'd like to retain some control over up until the end. Some people are happy just to record a master stem, a TV stem, an instrumental version stem and a capella version stem. That gives you a lot of control after your mixdown for basic radio edits. But I've seen people creating stereo stems for everything up to 100+ track counts and getting really insane with stems. Where you want to be in the end is to have all those stereo pairs of faders up at unity gain within Pro Tools and have it sound exactly like your stereo master mix.
Pro Technique 2 —
VU meter as the ultimate plug-in
Now don't get Rideau wrong, he really digs that Pro Tools allows people
to compose, record and edit at home as well as in the studio. But if
you ask him what percentage of his time he spends a day trying to save
and often losing distorted tracks recorded at home by less than experienced
engineers (read: musicians), be prepared for an emphatic "20 percent"
on reply.
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A Coleman Audio 2-channel VU meter |
"If there's one tip I can give anyone recording at home, it's to stop relying solely on the Pro Tools signal meters and use a better reference," pleads an ever-hopeful Rideau. "Most engineers I speak with agree. Let's face it, the good and bad news about that is that there's a lot of good and bad recording techniques being used on tracks that are sometimes making it to the final mix. There's a whole new generation of musicians and engineers who have never worked within the analog world and don't understand the importance of owning a VU meter."
That's VU, as in "volume unit," a device for measuring the signal level of sound fed into audio equipment. Rideau explains that far too often, he spends as much as half of his day cleaning up or tossing great instrument and vocal takes, all of which could've been saved by inserting and staying focused on one's VU before even getting to the computer.
"Your signal can be distorted before Pro Tools yet still look OK at the Pro Tools input meters," concludes Rideau. "For example, you could be overloading the signal with your mic pre-amp then putting that signal through a compressor and still have it look legal in Pro tools. Despite the meter never going red in Pro Tools, you're still recording a totally distorted signal. Get a VU meter that you can insert anywhere in your signal chain as a level reference, then your Pro Tools tracks will sound a lot better."