Musical dynamics is one of the most important ways we kind of adjust the energy over a course of a piece of music. A large part of the reason of music is to kind of manipulate the emotions and the energy of the listener. And we control dynamics in a variety of places within the production process to kind of heighten that experience. To kind of increase the highs and decrease the lows, really get a nice, kind of emotional journey over a piece of music. Now, the musicians themselves, like we talked about earlier, will look at their score or just perform in a way that kind of heightens that. When things get to the chorus and get exciting, they'll play harder and louder, and when things to the, to the verse and kind of the quiet ambient section will play quieter. And we kind of have that natural dynamic range built into it. As in the post production process we can use numerous tools to kind of emphasize that. To make the louds louder and the quiets quieter, or 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. But whatever you do with these tools, please be aware of the underlying music. there's a tendency to kind of remove all the dynamics from the music. We don't want to do that. We want to make sure that all of the changes we make in the post-production process are kind of true to the underlying material, right? So, the first way we mic-, manipulate dynamics is kind of on a macro scale. I can kind of zoom out and look at the entire song and see the relative levels between the sections. And I can actually automate, use a volume fader, and automate those differences. So I might want to make the verse a couple decibels quieter, and the chorus a couple decibels louder. Just to increase that dynamics and make it more exciting. So that's kind of, a macro dynamics control, and we would do that with a volume fader and volume automation. little bits work great. Be careful that it's not obvious, but it can be very very effective. We can go to a little bit of a smaller scale and manipulate the dynamics of kind 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. Remember the 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, kind of 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. So that's a great kind of manual dynamic range control that we use regularly. It's a really common procedure. 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, say, each individual drum hit. And we can control the transient. Now the transient is an important word that we haven't brought up yet in this class. And a transient is a moment where the amplitude changes a lot In a short amount of time. Think about a clap or a drum hit, right? 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. I mean, 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. And we get down to that level though it is just changing volume, and all these dynamics plugins are just changing volume, it's doing it so fast that we would rather have some kind of algorithmic control. It'd be tedious to go in and draw a slight automation at the, every drum hit, right? So instead we set up a series of instructions, kind of a program for the computer to, to use to automatically change those levels. Again, always be true to the original musical content. Always be thinking about that and about the listener. And 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.
