[Step By Step Mixing: How To Create Great Mixes Using Only 5 Plug-ins (Audio Issues Book 1) Free Down
Kody Coste
Mixing is a huge subject, and in this issue of Sound On Sound, we're hoping to have something to say about it both to beginners and more experienced engineers. In this article, I'll be looking at the basic skills you need to know in order to get a mix together, and drawing on advice from some of the biggest names in the business. In this month's Mix Rescue, meanwhile (see pages 44-53), Mike Senior introduces some of the more advanced techniques that are used in modern rock music.
Step By Step Mixing: How to Create Great Mixes Using Only 5 Plug-ins (Audio Issues Book 1) free down
Download ✵✵✵ https://t.co/RJUrCXX4qZ
My next step is to mute or delete any unwanted sections, such as the chair squeaking before the acoustic guitar starts or the finger noise on the electric guitar before the first note is played. Where a real drum kit is part of the mix, either gate the tom mics or use your waveform editor to physically cut out all the space between tom hits. It's usually easy to identify the 'real' hits in the waveform display even when there is a lot of spill, and if you're unsure, you can always audition the section just to confirm you're not cutting something you should be keeping. Toms tend to resonate all the time, so this stage is important. Any gated drum track tends to sound very unnatural in isolation as the spill comes and goes, but once the overheads and other close mics are added in, you'll find you can't hear the gates or edits at all.
If you wish to add some form of global processing to the drums (I often use Noveltech's Character enhancer plug-in and maybe some overall compression), the subgroup option may be best, but keep in mind that if you have a reverb unit or plug-in being fed from sends on the individual drum tracks, this will need to be returned to the same group, otherwise the reverb level won't change when you change the overall drum part level. If you don't plan to use any global drum processing, the fader-grouping option is simpler, as you don't have to do anything special with your effects sends, and the drums can share the same reverb that you use on everything else if you want them to. Of course, once the faders are grouped, they will all move together, so if you need to make a subsequent balance change within the drum kit, you need to know the key command that disengages the currently selected fader from the group while you adjust it.
Other obvious candidates for grouping are backing vocals, additional percussion, keyboard pads and any doubled guitar parts. With any luck, you'll be able to get your unwieldy mix down to eight main faders or fewer. Some or all of these might require stereo groups, of course.
The subgroup mixing process is simply to balance the components within each group, so that you can then balance the groups with each other. I often start out with everything in mono (panned centre) so that I don't rely too heavily on stereo spread to keep the sounds separate. I would also recommend that you don't go to town on processing and EQing individual tracks at this stage, as the requirements are invariably different when all the faders are up. Another very important tip here is not to set the track levels too high, otherwise you'll run out of headroom while mixing. A track level peaking at -10dB should be fine, and DAW mixes always sound cleaner to me if you do leave plenty of headroom.
A good pair of headphones can be invaluable, both when checking tracks for clicks and pops, and for ensuring that your mix will work on iPods and Walkmans.It is interesting to note that different engineers have different approaches to setting up the initial balance. Some, including me, build a mix from the rhythm section up, while others push up all the faders and then start to balance all the parts with each other. I think the latter way takes a lot of experience, so if you're not an old hand at mixing then perhaps the building approach is more logical. For pop, rock and dance mixes, starting with the bass and drums makes perfect sense, and in my own projects I'll often bring in the vocals next to see what space is left for the other mid-range instruments. On the other hand, if it is an acoustic instrument ensemble with relatively few parts, I'll probably set up each instrument to be the same nominal level and then tweak the balance from there.
Once you have a reasonable initial balance, listen to the mix and also compare it with some commercial material in the same genre to see how the balance stands up; only once you've identified potential problems should you resort to compression or EQ.
Always use a pop filter with whatever mic you use, even if it is the SM58 you gig with, as popping can't be easily removed once recorded. Most mics will give good results in certain applications, so the trick is to match the character of the mic to the sound of the vocalist. For example, a dull or soft voice might benefit from a mic with plenty of presence, whereas a thin or shrill voice can be made to sound richer using a warm-sounding tube mic or possibly even a live dynamic mic.
Bass guitars are also trickier than they may seem. If you use a straightforward DI box, you may end up with a sound that seems great when you hear it on its own, but it simply disappears when the rest of the mix is playing. In pop and rock music, bass guitars benefit from a bit of dirt, so a miked amp or an amp simulator will probably give a more usable sound than a straight DI. In fact a lot of what you hear from a bass guitar on a record is often really lower-mid, not just bass, which is why you can still hear the bass line on a small transistor radio that probably doesn't reproduce frequencies much lower than 150Hz or so.
Try not to reach for EQ unless there's a definite need for it.The conventional tools for adjusting the spectral balance of a mix and its individual elements are parametric EQs and filters. Like compression, EQ is something that shouldn't be applied automatically; it should be used only where you have a clear aim in mind, whether that aim is to fix a problem, sweeten a sound or introduce a creative effect. In most cases, problems are best addressed by cutting frequencies that you don't want, rather than boosting the ones you want more of. Where you must use boost, it sounds most natural if you use a fairly wide bandwidth and use absolutely no more than necessary. Cuts can be made much narrower and deeper without sounding unnatural.
As a rule, those instruments that occupy only a narrow part of the spectrum are easiest to place in a mix, as they don't obscure other parts. Rich synth pads and distorted guitars, on the other hand, cover a lot of spectral real estate and so are harder to place effectively. Bear in mind that distortion (of whatever kind) adds higher-frequency harmonics to the basic sound, so a distorted bass guitar will have harmonics across the mid-range, and a distorted electric guitar will have harmonics that reach into the higher end of the mid-range before the frequency response of the guitar speaker or speaker simulator rolls it off.
The mid-range is the most vulnerable part of the audio spectrum, where our ears are very sensitive and where many different instruments tend to overlap in the frequency domain. You will often find that some of these broad-spectrum sounds can be squeezed into a narrower part of the spectrum using high and low cut filters to trim away unwanted very low or very high frequencies. For example, a miked acoustic guitar with no EQ produces quite a lot of low-mid that sounds great in isolation, but might cloud a more complex pop mix. Taking out some of the low end makes the guitar sit better in the mix without spoiling its perceived character, even though you might think it now sounds thin in isolation. To some extent, a mix is an illusion and it is about what you believe you hear rather than what you actually hear.
It's often the case that filtering out the low frequencies on some of the elements in a mix can make the overall sound clearer, without noticeably affecting the sound of those instruments in the mix.Where the mid-range is overpowering the rest of the mix, there's scope for cutting frequencies between 150Hz and 500Hz to take out any boxy congestion. By contrast, bass guitars often need a little boost in this area, especially if they've been DI'd, as that's the part of their spectrum that contains their sonic character. If a part of the mix, or the whole mix for that matter, needs a bit more high-end clarity, try combining a broad, gentle boost (+3dB) at around 12kHz with some subtle cutting in the 150 to 300 Hz region (perhaps just 1 or 2dB). You'll also find that some bass sounds can sometimes be made more manageable by actually taking out some of the very low end altogether using a high-pass filter; frequencies below 50Hz are rarely reproduced by domestic playback systems, yet they still take up headroom and can place unnecessary stress on loudspeakers. High and low cut filters are also ideal for narrowing the frequency range that a particular instrument occupies.
In addition to using filtering to narrow the space taken up by specific mix elements, you can also try creating more space between notes and phrases, for example, by muting or editing sustained guitar chords instead of just letting them decay naturally. Usually it is possible to arrive at a compromise solution combining EQ with cleaning up the arrangement to get all the parts sit in the mix without getting in the way of each other. Again, use your CD library as a reference to see what sounds work on other people's records. Once you analyse them in detail, you'll quite often find they are rather different to how you originally perceived them.
It pays to be aware that not all equalisers sound the same, so try out whatever you have to hand to see which gives the most musical sound. It's usually a good idea to clean up the unused low extremes of the frequency range for non-bass instruments anyway. It's surprising how much LF rubbish can be present in recordings; even if this cannot easily be heard on small monitors, removing it will often make the mix sound much more open and cleaner!
795a8134c1