Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1512678
42 W I N T E R 2 0 2 4 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y b y C A S A s s o c i a t e S a m C a s a s Dialing in A s a mixer working in commercials for the last 20 years, a thing that was impressed upon me early in my career was that your commercial better sound loud. Clients will be very unhappy if their commercial sounds quieter than the commercial before or after it. Learning from my commercial mixing mentors, I was taught that you always put a compressor on dialogue and voiceover for clarity and to punch through the music. It was almost like an automatic part of the process. So, I adopted the practice and never gave much thought to alternative ways of approaching dialogue mixing. Later in my career, I was interested in expanding my horizons. Speaking with multiple film and television mixers, I found that some mixers choose to never use a compressor on a voice. The idea that "the fader is your best compressor," intrigued me. Have I been doing it wrong all these years? Sure, a compressor can add some coloration to a signal, but is that a bad thing? How much do things like genre, where the program is going to play, and delivery specs affect one's approach to compression and dynamic range? With this idea posed, I had the great fortune of speaking with three mixers whose work I really admire to get their perspectives. Re-recording mixer and sound editor Steve "Major" Giammaria CAS is a multiple Emmy nominee, CAS Award nominee, and Golden Reel winner; Alexandra Fehrman is an Emmy-nominated re-recording mixer and supervising sound editor; and Sal Ojeda is a multiple Emmy nominee and Golden Reel-winning re-recording mixer and sound editor. DYNAMICS CAS ASSOCIATE SAM CASAS: I'm of the opinion that, thankfully, there isn't a definitive right or wrong way to approach the process of mixing. If the client is happy, you've done your job. With that, Major, I'll start with you; a lot of compression, no compression, what camp are you in? STEVE "MAJOR" GIAMMARIA CAS: I'm somewhere in the middle. In my signal chain, my faders push into my compressor. So, basically, I'm adjusting the threshold with the fader. I can grab a fader after the compressor if I need to, but most of my fader moves go into my compressor. I'm not hitting it too hard; I think 2.5:1. Then there's a compression depth range limit on it so if it's taking off more than 6 dB, it just stops. So, in a screaming scene, I can push through it if I need to and then it goes to a bus, which has a little safety limiter and a little tickle of multiband compression that's not doing a whole lot. It just kind of controls some of the low end and gives a little bump in the 3.5 kHz to 4 kHz range just to make it shine. But real subtle. I've done a lot of research on attack and release times and how they affect intelligibility. For me, it's all about dialogue intelligibility, especially on television. Our industry is not big on actual scientific research in terms of intelligibility and stuff like that. So, the closest I could find were some papers written by an audiologist that was doing hearing-aid research and how attack times of their compressor affected intelligibility. [See excerpt and summary on page 50.] So, using that—and my own ears—I figured out where the sweet spot is.