When I accepted an invitation from the AES to go and speak at their regional convention in Mexico City during the Sound:Check Expo, I thought “it’ll be an adventure”.

I didn’t realise quite how right I was…

The idea came from Dynamic Range Day supporter and AES member Norberto Cuevas, who runs Azul Studios in Xalapa, Mexico. I knew Norberto a little because he has hosted DRD events at Azul for the last couple of years, and posted the photos on our Facebook wall.

AES Mexico liked the idea, and asked me if I’d like to go and speak. Initially I said I didn’t think I could – right after DRD, I usually have a backlog of work, and this year was no exception, especially since I’m finishing up my Home Mastering EQ videos, beta-testing the new Perception plugin and running the third ever Home Mastering Masterclass course (!)

But Norberto and Valeria from the AES were gently persistent, and when SAE Mexico asked me to go and do a workshop for them as well, I decided it would be worth the effort to make the trip happen.

So, exactly 7 days ago, I set off for Mexico City with nothing but a case of clothes, a sprawling mind-map on my iPad and a copy of Keynote – plus the firm intention of finalising my talk during the eleven-hour plane journey.

Which I did ! The flight went smoothly (apart from security searching my bag and confiscating my larger-than-permitted 100ml tube of toothpaste) and after a somewhat mind-numbing two-hour wait to get through security at the other end, I was ferried across town, dropped at my hotel and was soon having dinner with various members of the AES team, plus Ross Hogarth and none other than Steve Lillywhite !

They were all great company, and next day I enjoyed exploring more of the Sound:Check Expo exhibition with them, in the impressive World Trade Center building. I was even spotted by students from VYA Training, who had celebrated Dynamic Range Day with Norberto the month before.

The afternoon ended watching Thomas Dolby perform, followed by Steve’s witty, amusing and often insightful presentation. He’s a natural storyteller with a seemingly endless supply of great anecdotes, and a real knack for weaving in some serious inspiration and advice for aspiring producers and artists along the way.

(Although he didn’t include my favourite anecdote in his talk – who else could look Bono straight in the eye and tell him U2′s work with Danger Mouse sounded like Boney M ?!?)

That evening the whole team took us for the most delicious taco meal I’ve ever eaten – but by this point I was trying not to talk too much, because of a nagging suspicion at the back of my mind…

…and the next morning my worst fears were confirmed. I’d lost my voice !

Well not completely, but certainly to the point that I was sure if I went to do my workshop at SAE as planned, I’d have nothing at all left for my AES presentation on Tuesday. Lying jet-lag-alert awake in my hotel room at 3am, I emailed SAE to explain that I needed to postpone my visit until Wednesday, or possibly cancel completely – and resolved to stop talking completely for the next 36 hours.

Too late, I also decided to switch off the air-conditioning and turned the shower on full-blast to try and get some soothing moisture back into my inflamed vocal chords…

Steve urged me to see a doctor, but I was convinced things would improve if I kept quiet, and dug my head into Pro Tools to prepare my demo of the Percetion beta that would be the conclusion of my talk the next day.

In the afternoon I caught most of Ross’s excellent talk on microphone techniques and production methods – you’d be crazy not to, considering the remarkable range of musicians he’s worked with, from Fleetwood Mac to Van Halen, Ziggy Marley to John Mellencamp.

(The best moment though, was when Ross strode out to speak to the students playing a demo drum kit at full volume in the room next door – especially given that his headset mic was still on, broadcasting the imortal line “Seriously – what the f**k ?!?” loud and clear to the conference room, followed by a huge round of applause from the audience !)

But when I tried to ask Ross a quesion a few minutes later, all that came out was a strangled squawk – and suddenly I was really worried, and headed off to bed for an early night. By this point I was getting deeply frustrated – the thought of travelling halfway round the world to give a talk and then lose my voice at the last minute… aargh !

Next morning arrived – today was the day, and not much had changed. At 6:30 that evening I was supposed to go onstage for the final two-hour presentation of the convention, and at breakfast with Steve I could barely raise a murmur.

Time for emergency measures. I finally took Steve’s advice and asked Angel to call me a doctor. Meanwhile I set to work feverishly expanding my Keynote slides with extra detail, partly so I could speak less if necessary, and partly so I could ask fellow speaker and mastering engineer Michael Romanowski to take over for me if I simply couldn’t speak. Luckily we share very similar opinions and methods so at least this was a realistic fall-back plan.

The doctor came and pronounced me free of infections or virus – my vocal chords were inflamed, possibly because of Mexico City’s high levels of air-pollution, probably made worse by talking loudly after coming straight off a long flight and sleeping with the air-conditioning on… hindsight is a wonderful thing.

He prescibed some medicine, followed by a glass of warm milk with two spoons of honey and another of melted butter – I have no idea how much this drink really helped, but it tasted delicious ! Finally he warned me that I must not talk AT ALL until my presentation in the evening, and left me to my slide-wrangling.

I regretfully decided to skip Skywalker Sound’s Lesley Ann Jones‘ talk (and the rest of Michael’s) and tried to take a quiet afternoon, with only limited success. I then headed over to the World Trade Center, and on the way met the AES director, Jorge, in the elevator. He asked me how I was and I waggled my hand uncertainly – then took pity at the look on his face and said huskily – “it’ll be fine !”.

The fact that my voice sounded a little stronger when I said this was comforting, but I couldn’t help wondering – would it last the full two hours ?

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. My voice lasted OK, despite sounding distictly gravelly, and my talk went down well. The title was “Lust For Level – audio perception and the battle for great sound” – hopefully I’ll be able to post the video for you to check out at a future point.

Everyone seemed pleased – the AES team told me there were many broadcast professionals there since there is currently no loudness regulation at all in Mexico’s media, and the topic is a pretty hot potato. And everyone seemed to “get” the subject, so – a great result, in the end !

I was especially pleased that both Ross and Michael jumped in at a couple of points to add their voices in support of my message that “loudness is pointless” – it was great to get some extra weight added to the argument.

After a final meal and goodbyes, I packed and grabbed some sleep. My final day in Mexico was a whirlwind of last-minute site-seeing with Norberto and his lovely family, the delayed workshop at SAE, a dash to the airport, the return flight (which I slept through in it’s entirety) and finally the drive home… what a final 24 hours !

It was a fantastic trip – unexpectedly challenging but ultimately very positive. All the speakers I met got on well together and I really hope to stay in touch with several of them – and the range and quality of presentations was excellent.

My overiding impression was how dedicated, friendly and supportive the AES Mexico staff were – they’re all volunteers, and organising an event like this must be a huge challenge and commitment, but they all went out of their way to make us feel as comfortable and looked-after as possible.

Thanks again to Jorge, Valeria, Jaime, Angel, Humberto and Mintel – both for giving me the opportunity to make the trip in the first place, and making us all feel so welcome while we were there.

And if you were there and came to say Hello afterwards, thanks – and maybe I’ll see you again another time !

AES Convention Mexico @ Sound:Check Expo 2013 is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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Some of you will know about the Home Mastering Masterclass already. It’s an 8-week online course, where you get to be a fly on the wall of my home studio, and hopefully learn something in the process – you can read all about it here, or just watch the trailer above.

The next course starts this Friday, 5th April – and if you sign up before then you can get an excellent 33% discount.

I’ve run the course twice before, and both times it’s been a great success – the members have loved it, and hopefully you will, too !

And every time I run it, a message comes through clearer and clearer – mastering is simple. We all like to make it complicated, but the truth is, in essence the process is very simple:

That’s it !

Well OK, it’s a little more complicated than that – I wrote about the process in more detail here. But it really is true – at it’s heart, mastering is a simple process, and the more we keep that in mind, the better it’s likely to turn out.

Which doesn’t mean there isn’t a mass of information on the Home Mastering Masterclass course to help you do the best job you can of it, though !

So please check out the trailer, or click here for more information to see if you want to find out more – and perhaps I’ll see you on the course !

And either way, remember – if mastering ends up getting too complicated, you may be doing it wrong !

Mastering – keep it simple is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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an SSL Buss Compressor.

Wait, what ?!?

The prize in a competititon intended to raise awareness of the loudness wars is… a compressor ?

Exactly the kind of tool that was used to make many of those crushed, distorted “casulaties” in the first place ?

Right.

Because, as SSL’s chairman Antony David tweeted on last year’s DRD:

Compression and limiting is about managing dynamic range, not removing it

We have nothing against compression. (At least, not against dynamic compression, anyway – mp3-style data-compression is different – see here for more info.)

It’s when compression is over-used, on everything, that there’s a problem – which is exactly what’s happening with the loudness war.

Pop and rock music have always had a much narrower dynamic range than acoustic music – it’s part of the sound. Ever since the 60s, compression has been an integral part of the way pop and rock music is produced, and we wouldn’t have it any other way – provided it’s used for creative, musical reasons, and not because of an urban myth.

Even the winner of 2011′s DRD Award, “Build a Rocket, Boys” has moments that are very compressed – but it has real light and shade, drama and build. Overall it’s a very dynamic-sounding album, and sounds great - especially by today’s standards.

(By the way, you can help suggest this year’s award-winner – just click here.)

So having a classic compressor as the prize for this competition makes perfect sense. And what better way to manage the dynamic range of your mix than with an industry standard like the SSL ?

Other great prizes this year include the TC Electronic LM-6 Loudness Meter plugin and free membership of my Home Mastering Masterclass course, with more to be announced soon.

So, what are you waiting for ? Entry is simple – for more details, just click here.

Good luck !

Dynamic Range Day Competition 2013 Announced is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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(I do have some reservations about the film, which were expressed really clearly in this post from Tape Op magazine – but it’s still a great watch.)

BUT

At the end of the film, we see Dave recording an album inspired by Sound City Studios – and sadly the amazing analogue sound Dave loves so much and talks about into the film hasn’t survived 100% intact onto the final CD.

Not because of some imaginary intrinsic flaw in digital audio, but because of the Loudness Wars… again.

Take a look at the video to see what I mean – and if you agree with my viewpoint, please help spread the word by sharing it wherever and whenever you can !

You can hear the whole Sound City album here.

How the Loudness War is crushing Dave Grohl’s analogue ambitions is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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It’s almost time for Dynamic Range Day again, and as usual I’m getting some questions.

One of the most common is – “So you say you’re against the Loudness Wars, but you give an award to albums that measure only DR8 – why don’t you ask for more dynamics than that ?”

In other words, shouldn’t we be campaigning for far more dynamic range, for higher DR values – DR14, say, like the Pleasurize Music campaign ?

I wrote an answer to this a while ago in a post called It’s not about the numbers, but here I want to take a different approach, using… more numbers.

The limitations of the TT Meter

The image above shows the loudness values of Steven Wilson’s awesome new album “The Raven That Refused To Sing“. As you can see, it’s very dynamic – the loud sections are “loud”, with a crest factor of only 8dB or so, but there’s still plenty of variety and contrast throughout.

But it only measures as DR9. That’s only one dB off the DR8 minimum we recommend. So how can the album be as great dynamically as I say it is ?

The answer lies in the limitations of the “DR” value as calculated by the Offline TT Meter.

The truth is, it’s a VERY blunt instrument.

The DR value only tells us how loud the loudest moments of an audio file are, and averages these values over all the tracks of an album. This is a quick, convenient, familiar shorthand – which is why I still use it regularly – but it tells us nothing about the internal dynamics of a song or album, and in some cases can be highly misleading.

Below the waterline

A more sophisticated analysis is to use an ITU-based loudness meter. For example, here’s the loudness graph for one of my personal “benchmark” albums for great sound – “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd.

You can see that the overall loudness is lower, but also that the “loudness range” of “Raven” is actually 16LU (loudness units) – 2LU more than “Wish You Were Here”, despite having an overall integrated loudness of -12LUFS, which is 4 dB louder than the Floyd album. (An LU is roughly the same as a dB)

And looking at the graphs you can see that beneath the tip of the DR iceberg, “Raven” is actually more varied in it’s dynamics.

Notice I’m not saying it sounds better – just that the “DR” value is almost entirely useless as a way of distinguishing between these albums. Even though “Raven” is louder on the CD, and the loudest sections have a much smaller crest factor than “WYWH” – it sounds just as dynamic, if not more so, than the older record.

When is DR8 not GR8 ?

Now take a look at this graph, of Blur’s 1997 album “Blur”.

This album measures DR8 – only 1 dB less than “Raven”. But it’s easy to see from the graph and the “loudness range” value that it’s much more restricted dynamically.

Again, I’m not saying it sounds worse, necessarily – just different. The style is worlds apart – deliberately dense, distorted indie rock textures as contrasted with Wilson’s lush, open prog soundscapes. It suits the material and I really like the sound of this album, too – but it goes to show how much information is hidden when we try to pigeon-hole an album by a single DR number.

So why am l always quoting DR values, still ?

So is it time to stop using DR values ? Maybe the goals of Dynamic Range Day and it’s Challenge should be updated to request a minimum “loudness range”, LUFS reading or some other metric ?

I don’t think so. Not all albums will have (or need) a wide “loudness range” – we’re not trying to stop people making dense, intense music, or creating heavily distorted textures. We just want people to realise they don’t have to make their music sound like that in order to “compete”. As ITU volume normalisation becomes common-place, we’ll be more free than ever to mix and master our music to sound exactly as we like it, and know that people will hear it the way we intended.

As I said above, DR values are quick, convenient and familiar. And in many cases they can still give a reasonable snapshot – if all the songs on an album read less than DR6, for example, the chances are it will sound pretty crappy – but even that isn’t guaranteed.

In general, lower DR albums tend to have more limited dynamics – especially beyond DR8, which is why I chose it as the threshold for Dynamic Range Day’s Award and Challenge - but it’s still only a crude estimate.

The way an album really sounds has far more to do with style, arrangement and production than it does with DR value, peak level or any other technical distinction.

To really understand loudness, to make better judgements and comparisons, we need to use more sophisticated tools – and of course, we need to listen.

How loud is too loud ? When DR values just aren’t enough is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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Well recently I’m hearing people talk more and more about “resolution” in digital audio, and I’m here to tell you -

There is no resolution.

It’s a red herring – an idea-virus left over from the earliest days of digital audio, perpetuated by gear manufacturers to try and sell us more kit we don’t need. Here’s why.

It all starts with the myth:

“Digital can never sound as good as analogue”

This statement simply isn’t true, but it doesn’t stop people repeating it like some kind of mantra. The reasons they give usually hang on the fact that digital audio samples the audio – “freezing” it at regular moments in time – and claiming that it can therefore never sound as smooth and continuous as the original analogue signal.

You can see it for yourself, they say. Zoom in far enough on a digital waveform and eventually you can see the blocky, grainy, digital “stair-steps” – so it stands to reason that you can hear them, if your hearing and equipment is good enough, right ?

Wrong.

There are no stair-steps.

The same flawed reasoning is used to explain why we need ever-higher bit-depths and sample rates – since digital audio contains these audible “pixels”, the smaller they are, the better it will sound, supposedly.

Wrong again.

And it’s easy to see why.
 

Is digital audio inherently flawed ?

Hold your hand up in front of your face, close one eye and look at the world through your fingers.

You’re “sampling” what you can see.

In between your fingers you can see the world, and where your fingers block out the light, you can’t see the view.

This is sampling. Breaking the world up into chunks and using the chunks to record what we see – or in audio, breaking the waveform into samples and recording those to store what we can hear.

Afterwards, we re-assemble the chunks to play back the audio. But surely this method is fatally flawed ? Everything between the samples, everything blocked out by your fingers, is lost forever. “Quantising” the image into slices like this introduces a fundamental error.

The thinner your fingers, the finer and more accurate the picture of the world, sure – and the more frequent the samples (ie. the higher the sample rate) the more accurate the audio reproduction, the higher the resolution, right ?

But digital audio can never be perfect, because the sampling steps are always there ?

No.

This analogy misses out a fundamental part of the digital audio equation.
 

A hand-waving analogy

Look through your fingers again, at your sliced-up, sampled view of the world.

Now start to wave your fingers up and down slightly – move them faster and faster.

Everything starts to look a bit flickery, a bit less crisp and clear – but suddenly you can see all the details of the view.

Because your fingers are moving, you can see between them for some of the time, and this enables our eyes to build a complete view of the image behind. Not by guessing the missing pieces, as we have to when the hand is still, but actually by seeing all the information, over time.

We have added noise to the system – the hand-waving – but the noise reveals what would otherwise be hidden behind our fingers, in between the sampling steps – it actually removes the quantisation error.

In digital audio, this noise is called dither.

It solves the problem of quantisation error completely.

Sure, we’ve had to add a little noise, but it’s no-where near as crude as the analogy of looking through your waving fingers – that’s more like 8-bit audio. The amount of noise is huge in comparison to what we’re trying to see or hear.

In digital audio we can increase the bit-depth so that the dither noise is actually less than the original natural noise that was in the audio in the first place. At that point, the added noise is virtually irrelevant. But crucially, there are no stair-steps – we can always hear everything that was there to begin with, just with more or less noise.

Even in the crude, noisy, 8-bit “through the fingers” version we can still see the entire, smooth, original image – it’s just very noisy. The same applies to audio – take a listen for yourself:
 

 
In a properly implemented digital system, increasing the bit-depth doesn’t improve “resolution”, it just reduces noise.
 

Green-tinted spectacles ?

Look through you fingers again. Now imagine you’re wearing a bright green sun-shade.

You’re in the Matrix. Everything you can see is tinted green. Even though our finger-wobbling dither prevents there being any “gaps” in the samples we can see, all the red and blue has been filtered out – we’ve put a high and low-pass filter on our vision, just like we do in digital audio.

Because (say the digital sceptics) we’re only recording a limited frequency range, right ? Audio doesn’t stop at 20 kHz, so why do we stop sampling it there ? Higher sample rates will give us a more accurate representation of the original signal, so it must sound better, right ?

Wrong.

Swap the green Matrix sun-shade for a pair of photochromic sunglasses – the kind that go dark in bright sun and clear in the shade.

Suddenly we have our colours back – removing the high and low-pass filters was a good thing, right ? The photochromic lenses adjust the “recording levels” of the light coming in to a comfortable level for our eyes, and we can see everything again.

Well, not quite.

Those filters weren’t actually removed at all – they’re just working at different frequencies.

All decent sunglasses always filter the incoming light, not just to reduce it to a comfortable brightness for us, but also to protect our eyes from harmful UV radiation which could otherwise damage our vision.

Even when they’re completely clear, the photochromic lenses are still filtering out all that very high-frequency light. We don’t notice though, because we can’t ever see it – with or without the high-frequency filtering sunglasses.

Digital audio does the same thing. The anti-aliasing filter (when recording) and the converter’s reconstruction filter (when playing back) remove all the unnecessary high-frequency information from the signal, allowing us to hear as much as we like of the original signal, depending on the sample rate.
 

We don’t need what we can’t hear.

A video camera that recorded ultraviolet light would certainly reproduce a more “accurate” version of the original view – but we still wouldn’t be able to see the extra information. All that extra UV light would do is give us a sun-tan while we watched it !

In the same way, recording additonal high-frequency content may give a closer representation of the original audio signal, but we still won’t be able to hear it. Remember, the random dither noise removes any imaginary restrictions of “resolution” in the signal – so all the sample rate does is extend the high-frequency response.

In a properly implemented digital system, increasing the sampling frequency above the limits of our hearing doesn’t improve “resolution”, it just increases bandwidth.

In fact, high sample rates may even make things sound worse, in some cases.
 

Digital audio is not flawed

Many of the analogies in this post are borrowed wholesale from the legendary DSP engineer Paul Frindle, whose “Oxford” plugins are widely regarded as some of the best-sounding in the business. And part of the secret is that he’s always understood that dither is a key requirement for great-sounding digital audio.

He summarised all this very clearly in a conversation I had with him on Facebook a while ago:

“The thing is that there is actually no difference between digital and analogue signals – all have a dynamic range set by the ratio between the max level and noise. The difference is that analogue comes with it’s own noise (caused by the reality of signal in the physical world) whereas any digital representation in math requires us to re-insert the physical random component the math does not provide us. [ie. dither - Ian]

It is a theoretical requirement of the system, it doesn’t mask the distortion – it removes it… ANY digital data representation of a signal in the real world has artificial certainty (which reality doesn’t) and it has to be removed for the signal to be harmonically accurate – i.e. like a signal in the real world… It’s a deep subject that shows our math is an artificial human approximation of reality – but the approximiation has too much certainty. Fascinating implications to that concept…”

The “stair-steps” you see in your DAW when you zoom up on a digital waveform only exist inside the computer. (The spoon only exists inside the Matrix !) When digital audio is played back in the Real World, the reconstruction filter doesn’t reproduce those stair-steps – and the audio becomes truly analogue again.

So if the recording, processing and playback systems are working correctly, you will hear a perfect representation of the original analogue audio – up to the frequency specified by the sample rate, and with a noise-floor determined by the bit-depth.

Therefore as Paul says, the concept of “resolution” is irrelevant in a correctly-engineered digital audio system.

There is no spoon.

Lets stop worrying about the numbers and get back to work on the music.
 
 

Update:

Soon after I wrote this post, Chris Montgomery from Xiph.org and author of this excellent blog post, made a video clearly demonstrating exactly the topics I’m discussion in this post – if you want to see the proof for yourself, I strongly recommend you watch this video:
 

 
For more info, click here.

What The Matrix can teach us about “resolution” in digital audio is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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Answering questions about the lip-syncing allegations, she said:

“I am a perfectionist. One thing about me, I practice until my feet bleed, and I did not have time to rehearse with the orchestra. It was a live television show and a very, very important, emotional show for me – one of my proudest moments. Due to the weather, due to the delay, due to no proper sound check, I did not feel comfortable taking a risk. It was about the president and the inauguration, and I wanted to make him and my country proud. So I decided to sing along with my pre-recorded track , which is very common in the music industry. And I am very proud of my performance.”

So that settles it, right ?

Well, maybe.

When is a quote not a quote ?

Watching the reporting of this story in the mainstream media over the last ten days has been highly… educational. Seeing the quotes and rumours spreading, being re-quoted and misquoted – a web-wide case of chinese whispers. One article even referred to me as “the engineer who worked at the inauguration” !

(The misunderstanding probably arose because of the way the title of the interview was mis-shortened in a tweet about my interview with MTV.)

Only a handful of news outlets have reported the press conference entirely accurately – and that’s why I’ve bolded two parts of the quote above – because the way they have been used and “interpreted” by the press is interesting.

Instead of “I did not feel comfortable taking a risk“, Beyonce is being widely quoted as having said “I did not feel comfortable singing live“. And the phrase “I decided to sing along with my pre-recorded track” has been taken by many to mean “I decided to lip-sync“.

But we already know she sang live, and that we heard her in many, if not all, of the broadcasts. So why are people still saying she lip-synced ?

Good question.
 

How live is live ?

Ever since music recording became possible, we’ve lived in a strange era of “not 100% live”. So:

• Milli Vanilli – 100% lip-sync
• Beyonce’s press conference – 100% live
• The Wall Street Journal video – 50% live, 50% tape
• The New York Times video – 75% live ? On balance, the clues still make me think we’re hearing the live vocal
• Some-other-YouTube-clip-I-haven’t-seen-yet which only used her pre-recorded vocal – 25% live ?

The key point for me is that those last three options are all just different perspectives on the same performance.

Virtually every live performance these days involves some kind of pre-recorded element. Deadmau5 famously said that at his gigs he just turns up and hits play. Almost every “live” album or DVD involves re-records and overdubs.

And they’re more satisfying as a result.
 

Does it really matter ?

Beyonce sang along with a backing track – does that automatically mean she was lip-syncing, even if we heard the live performance ?

Does the fact that she sang a live vocal categorically mean she didn’t lip-sync, even if not everyone got to hear it ?

The fact is, since her mic was live but the pre-record was also on a tape, you could have heard entirely different mixes depending on which network or web feed you were watching. You could have heard the live version or the pre-record, or both at once !

And that means the answer to the question “did she lip-sync” is – it depends.

It depends on the audio mix you heard, and it depends on your point of view.

What is without doubt is that Beyonce has now sung three entirely excellent performances of the American National Anthem, and that she will be singing live at the Superbowl half-time this weekend, whereas countless other singers’ “performances” won’t ever be heard – in front of paying fans at every concert they give.

Is Beyonce really the one we should be giving a hard time ?
 

Did Beyonce lip-sync ? The Final Update… is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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If Beyonce had mimed at the inauguration and we had been listening to the backing track, that would be news. Because if someone like Beyonce, or Elton, Adele mimes, that’s “news”.

But she didn’t.

And you can tell she didn’t, by what she was wearing.

Yes, really. The video above explains it all – see for yourself !

So now the only question is, what was everybody getting in such a “flap” about?

Beyonce sang live. How can we tell ? From what she was wearing. Yes, really ! is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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Here’s what we know.

[Updated after press conference]

Beyonce sang live at the inauguration. We know this, because we can see and hear it in videos like the one above.

Beyonce’s mic was live. We know this, because we can see and hear it in videos !

Beyonce sang along with a backing track. We know this, because the band have said they were asked to mime she said so, in her press conference.

The backing track had a safety performance of Beyonce’s voice on it. This was to be used if there were technical problems, or for some reason she couldn’t perform – for example, illness. We know this because we’ve seen photos of it being recorded and we can actually hear it in at least one video.

But any musician will watch the video above and tell you she’s singing for real – even though we can hear the other “safety” recording playing in the background.

Her performance was great. We know this, because we can see and hear it ! So great, in fact, that it’s almost impossible to tell a difference between the live vocal and the safety recording, and we have to use clues to be sure which one we were hearing.

These clues also tell us that the live performance was made available for broadcasters, and used in many, if not all cases.

So, although she sang to a backing track, Beyonce did not mime.

And as if all of that isn’t enough, US Magazine quote a source in the Beyonce camp as saying:

“She did sing… There was a [pre-recorded] track, but Bey sang 100 percent.”

 
What we DON’T actually know

A representative from the band assumed that because the band were miming, so was Beyonce – but has since corrected himself, saying “no-one in the Marine Band is in a position to assess whether it was live or pre-recorded”. An “inauguration official” has said categorically that Beyonce didn’t sing live – but we know she did, because we can see and hear it for ourselves.

Why has the “official” said this ? My guess is it’s a simple misunderstanding. A backing track was used, therefore she didn’t sing, right ?

Wrong.
 

Who cares ?

This is all a storm in a tea-cup, right ? Media fluff, irrelevant ?

Well maybe, but it annoys the hell out of me.

This site is all about getting your music to sound great, and the place to start is with a great performance.

But the charts today are crammed with artists who can’t sing. They’re auto-tuned, they’re edited, they’re multi-tracked, they NEVER sing live…

And no-one bats an eyelid.

Beyonce is one of only a handful of artists on the planet who can sing live so well that it could actually be a studio recording we’re listening to.

This was an incredible performance !

But instead of celebrating that fact, the media has jumped onto the word of two “sources” who have no way of really knowing and are assuming she faked it.

The irony makes my teeth hurt.

Mike Doughty agrees that she sang live, and made my favourite comment on all of this nonsense:

“For me, the most compelling evidence that Beyoncé was doing it for real is the HELL YES smile on Joe Biden’s face [at the end of the song]. Now, that is, clearly, a dude standing two feet from an electrifying lady singing like a motherfucker.”

Right now we need more artists with Beyonce’s talent, fewer auto-tuned muppets – and a music press that knows the difference.

Who cares if Beyonce mimed or not ? is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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[Update - Beyonce has finally gone on the record about the "controversy" and confirmed this - for more info click here.]

The video above clearly shows Beyonce singing live at President Obama’s inauguration, despite the fact that many news outlets are claiming she mimed.

You can also clearly hear the pre-recorded backing in the video, made earlier in case of technical problems. (Thanks to Daniel Holter for posting a heads-up on this video.)

But the live vocal is the one most people heard.

 

The evidence

You can tell by listening carefully to the two performances audible in the video above and comparing them to this live feed:
 

 
For more clues that she sang live, listen for these points:

1. When she starts singing, her voice is hard to hear – the microphone gain is too low. The sound-man quickly corrects this – but if we were listening to a recording this wouldn’t happen – in fact back-up recordings are used to solve exactly this kind of problem.
2. At 1’16″ in the video above, she tilts her head slightly closer to the mic and the sound gets suddenly more bassy. This is because of an acoustic effect known as the “proximity effect”.
3. At 1’52″ she takes out one of her earpieces. Some people are citing this as more evidence she was lip-syncing, but in fact it’s what singers do when they’re having trouble hearing the pitch of their own voice through the earpiece. By taking it out, she can hear her own voice more clearly and sing in tune more easily. (In fact, if the pre-recorded vocal was going to her earpiece, she may well have been finding it distracting.)
4. At 2’17″ she smiles slightly, and you can hear this “smile” in her voice.

None of these clues are conclusive, but to fake all of them, plus the details of the performance itself, would make Beyonce the best lip-sync artist in the world !

And anyone who has heard her sing live knows that’s not where her true talents lie…

[Edit - see below for more...]

So why are people saying Beyonce mimed ?

Because the band did mime.

Why ? Apparently Beyonce hadn’t been able to rehearse with the band, and wanted the security of using the version she had certainly been using to practise in the run-up. Or perhaps because it can be next to impossible for a large group of musicians to play in tune in extremely hot or cold temperatures – and it was cold at the inauguration.

The original reports were “confirmed” by representatives of the band, who said that Beyonce asked for the pre-recorded backing, and that’s almost certainly true. (The band has since issued a formal statement saying that “no one in the Marine Band is in a position to assess whether it was live or pre-recorded.”)

Any singer would find it seriously difficult to put on a great performance to a band that was struggling to play in tune, and for something this high-profile it’s understandable that you’d want the best chance to get it right.

But the video at the top of this post uses both audio feeds, probably by mistake, and combined with the other clues leaves me in no doubt that Beyonce sang live – and that her live performance is what most people heard.
 

Update:

So, it’s been 24 hours and Beyonce’s team still haven’t made any comment – meanwhile CNN are quoting an inauguration official who says she decided to use the pre-recorded version the night before.

There are several different versions of the video available, all with slightly different sound – how can this be ? Why are there two voices audible on some versions, and not on others ?

The answer is that it’s standard practise at an event like this for all the audio to be made available to broadcasters, so that each of them can do their own mix – their own blend of presenters, music and ambient crowd noise.

All of which makes it very difficult to know exactly what we’re hearing! And some people are even claiming that Beyonce’s mic wasn’t switched on at all.
 

Plot thickening

But here’s a clue I haven’t mentioned before – in the first WSJ clip above, you can clearly hear wind noise on the mic (and Beyonce’s scarf flapping) at 0’36″. This proves the mic was live – and that it was used in this broadcast, at least.

And you can hear the same thing in other versions, crucially in the video on Beyonce’s blog, too, at 0’48″ – even though this version has been cleaned up to be the least “live-sounding”, with reverb and compression, and the wind noise reduced.
 

Conclusion

My verdict ?

• The mic was live
• Beyonce sang
• Whether she wanted it or not, the live mic sound was made available and used in many, if not all of the broadcasts
• Her performance was every bit as good as the “safety” pre-record – in fact it was so close that it’s hard to tell them apart !”

We have no way of knowing exactly why Beyonce chose to use the recorded backing, or if she really wanted us to hear her live performance. But we did – and it was great.

She didn’t mime, she sang great – what’s all the fuss about ?
 

Update 2: Confirmation !

I think there’s a reaction to all of this from Beyonce hidden towards the end of this post from US Magazine, and I think she confirms exactly what I’ve been saying in this post…?

“She did sing,” the source explains to Us [Magazine]. “There was a [pre-recorded] track, but Bey sang 100 percent.”

“[Using a pre-recorded track at live events] is very very common,” the source clarfies. “The track was only there as a backup.”

“And the source tells Us that Beyonce is … disappointed by the hubbub”

Update 3: In detail

Since originally writing this post, I’ve become more and more convinced that not only did Beyonce sing live, but most of us heard her. To see exactly why, take a look at this video:

The Final Update

Beyonce has finally gone on the record about the “controversy” and confirmed that she sang with the pre-record – for full details click here.
 

Beyonce DIDN’T mime at the inauguration. BUT… is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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