Overall picture.
Making powerful tracks begins with the writing of the song, then the performance, and then the mix.
Don't mix with headphones. Use them only to monitor single sources or to detect noise, hiss, or rumble and check how the bass sounds on headphones.
Phones are often very misleading when it comes to the question if all instruments are well balanced. Vocals tend to be mixed too loud, while “wide” signals such as pads are often too low in volume.
It's always good to have a second pair of ears listen to your song mix when it’s done. Or even while your mixing.
When you start work on a new mix, rather than solo the individual instruments and commence equalizing, compressing, and so on, try first to make the song sound great using only fader levels and pan positions. This approach will not only get you focused right away on the bigger picture, but it will also help you hear what's working and what isn't. For example, you may find that certain instruments are fighting for the same sonic space. In that case, try panning them far apart in the stereo field. Later, you can differentiate them further with EQ.
Knowing the style
Before talking about how to get a great live mix, you need to know what one is and depending on the musical genre, the definition can vary quite a bit. For instance, although a big, in-your-face, chest thumping kick drum sound would likely send a hip-hop band to seventh heaven, the same sound would
be inappropriate for a soft love song.
Fundamentals:
Remember that the sound from the P.A. should reinforce what's coming directly from the stage.
“Before putting any drums into the mix, listen to what's coming off the stage and ask yourself, ‘What can't I hear?' “Then bring up the buried instruments to get them balanced with what's happening. Once you have the quieter stuff represented, you can listen to the drums and the bass. Standard sound checks that start with drums can end up with this huge drum sound that everything else
has to get on top of.” Of course, that philosophy works best in a smaller room in which all audience members can hear a reasonable portion of the acoustic stage sound.
SubGrouping - method 1
Say you’re micing a large band, and you have a couple of mixers handy. One commonly used technique for keeping levels under control is called subgroup busing. You can control entire groups of sounds with a single fader (or 2 faders for stereo).
For example, say you have seven drum mics on seven separate input channels, all nicely mixed . If you want to raise or lower the level of the entire set without the hassle of moving all seven faders in perfect balance to each other, you can just use small mixer and then go out of that mixer into your main mixer.
SubGrouping – method 2
Or you can do ”true” subgrouping, if you have a mixer that includes buss faders. You can have your drums all be assigned to buss 1 &2 which then goes to the stereo out of the master fader. Thus controlling the overall volume of the drum kit itself.
You can do the same with background vocals etc. That way, sections can be easily controlled from the master section while individual faders are still
available for tweaking.
Cleaning up
Clean up individual tracks with mutes, gates, or however. To do this, you have to solo each track, listen carefully for any unwanted noise, and then clean it out. You can use gates if needed for analog equipment. If your doing computer editing then you can just cut out the noisy breaks the tracks.. You should also check for unwanted noise on continuous-playing tracks-for example, amp hiss on an electric-guitar part.
Reference
One helpful things you can do is compare your mix to a similar commercial CD. Though this can be done at any point in the mix, wait until later in the mix. On the other hand, if you don't have an immediate sense of direction for a mix, listening to a few finished mixes may give you some ideas.
Be careful when referencing though, as there's really no standard in mixing, so your mix could sound quite different from someone else's and still be very good. The point of referencing is to make sure your in the ballpark - not to tell you how to throw the ball. Referencing is most useful when making final decisions about levels for bass, vocals, and effects.
You don’t have to listen to a song over and over, in fact that will often discourage you and/or make you alter your mix so drastically that you’ll end up ruining it.
Points on Referencing:
1. The commercial song has been compressed, enhanced & otherwise optimized by some mastering house. So give yourself a little leeway, and expect that your mix will not come out as punchy & present.
2. It's good not to only reference to one secular song, but rather check your mix against a couple different songs. Because even amongst good mixes, there is still loads of variety.
Monitoring
As we've all heard time and again, it's important to monitor at various levels, including loud, soft, and a couple of points in between. But the single most helpful monitoring trick is to listen not only at very low levels, but also in mono.
Mono
Mono compatibility refers to how a mix holds up when played through a mono system (that is, when the two channels are summed to one). Phase problems, though perhaps not apparent in stereo playback, can result in dropouts, comb filtering, and other weirdnesses when the mix is played mono. Stereo effects, too, can be a culprit — what sounded spacious in stereo may evaporate or turn to mud when reproduced in mono.
Gain strategy
It's always a question where to "push it" to get more volume. Should you raise your mixer Gains (or "Trim") or should you push the individual Channel volume faders?
If you want the best signal to noise ratio, keep this in mind:
Digital Mixers: High Gains, Low Channel volumes. Also, better to push the Master Fader & keep the Channels low, then vice versa.
Analog Mixers: Low Gains, High Channel volumes.
And another rule of thumb:
Outputs High, Inputs Low.
In other words, it's generally better to play your guitars, samplers & sounds modules at the highest possible levels (without distorting of course!).
Same for your computer audio. The higher the volume (or velocity) you can run your tracks & outputs, the more you can take advantage of the whole available digital audio range. Turn your computer tracks & outputs up, & turn down the mixer channels, if there's a choice. There are exceptions of course, but this is general advice.
One thing to be careful for! When mixing your drums, or whole song for that matter, if you are doing it at aloud volume, you are fooling yourself a bit in that you think that it’s sounding good, when actually your just enjoying the volume. So of you like hearing things at aloud level, be sure to regularly pull back the level, so that you can get a more realistic idea of what people will end up hearing.
Lead vocal
Even if there are imperfections in your mix, you should try to at least have the lead vocal sound good. That’s what people often judge a song by, how good the singer sounds. The public may be able to excuse all the musicians for their faults, but they won’t excuse the singer, as the vocalist needs to carry the song.
Ride The Fader/volume. In most audio production programs you can create a volume envelope and follow your vocal level. This is very useful and highly recommended that you follow your lead vocals to dip the loud parts and raise the low “hard to understand” parts.
EQ
A mistake that novice mixers often make is boosting every band of EQ on every channel. Though this may initially make the signals sound "better", the seeming improvement is largely due to the signal just being louder. (Remember, boosting EQ levels adds gain.)
Whenever possible, cut rather than boost-or use a combination of cuts and boosts-to get the sound that you want. In general, experienced engineers end up using a combination of cuts and boosts on any given channel.
Soloing an instrument to EQ it can be helpful, but the only thing that really matters is how the instrument sounds in the mix. Therefore, be prepared to change the EQ once all the other instruments are brought in. Often, after an instrument is equalized appropriately for a mix, it sounds quite unappealing when soloed.
EQing your lead vocal:
Use EQ to improve the presence, sibilance, or warmth of the vocal only if it needs it. Don’t automatically go “fixing” things if they are not “broken”.
High Frequencies:
At mixing time, listen to the high frequencies in your Lead Vocals. (Let's call "high frequencies" from 5000Hz up to 20000Hz.) See how they compare to the high frequencies of other elements in the mix. For example, if the High Hat is bright & the Lead Vocal is dull, then you’ll need to balance it out.
Here are some elements in a song that dwell in the same neighborhood as the highs in the Lead Vocal, starting with the most common troublemakers: Tambourines, Shakers, High Hats, Cymbals, other high percussion.
Maybe high frequencies are not so clear on your monitors. It would be best to hear your mix on several sets of different speakers.
It might help to turn up the treble all the way on your amp (if it has tone controls)- and see what starts to hurt your ears first. Maybe a more pleasant way to hear highs relative to each other is to play the mix through headphones, but hold the headphones a couple feet away from you. Start with the volume low, or off, & gradually turn it up, and see which sounds show up first. Those are your strongest trebles.
De-Essing:
Another problem is where your vocal is generally nice, your track is nice, but then those sibilant "s, ch, or t" sounds (& others) just pop out & lash at you.
A de-esser is basically a compressor that just compresses a certain frequency range; typically between 1 KHz and up. The “ss” frequencies for singers vary, but typically they’re around 6 to 10 Khz.
Be careful though not to de-ess too much, otherwise your singer will sound like he or she has a lisp.
Low Frequencies:
You've all experienced the difficulty of deciding how "warm" to make your Lead Vocal, I'm sure. You don't want it to be thin & weak. But if the lower end of the vocal is too warm, it may sound mushy, or may sound too "big" and "in front" compared to the track. (That's because of the "proximity effect"---when someone is closer to you, or to the mike, the lows in their voice are more emphasized. Thus, adding lows can make a voice sound "closer" to you.)
How warm you want the Lead Vocal is very subjective & it also depends on the gender of music.
If you like "warmth", how much of it you can keep may also depend on the quality of your highs-- the "presence" of your Lead Vocal and also how many instruments are playing in your song.
So the lower end of the Vocal is the hardest to adjust. I'm talking about from around 250Hz on down to around 100Hz. The problem is that almost all instruments have frequency content in the 100Hz – 250Hz range. Guitars, keyboards, snare, bass tone, etc.
So what to do? Well, you may have to make some decisions. One thing for sure, if two sounds have the same frequency content, and they are coming from the same direction, the louder one will "mask" the softer one—you won't hear it! That's "Masking". If the piano & voice are sounding at the same note range, then you'll need to decide if one of them will be a little thicker & the other a bit thinner & brighter (or vice versa). (Will get back to this point)
Obviously, it may help to make sure they're not panned to the same position.
Female vocals are a little easier to deal with because their note range is usually a little higher than the mid-range of the
music track. But guys are right down there. If it's a problem, you may want to
consider dropping an instrument that's competing with or "masking" the Lead Vocal. It's no wonder that so many popular
songs do have the Lead Vocal EQ'd a little thinner. Anyway, this leads to the next section:
Low end ("mud-range")
The Bass & other elements can get very thick if you don’t watch for that in your mix. Like from 130Hz to 190Hz.
Concerning the Bass specifically: You want those true lows from about 80Hz or 90Hz on down. You want the attack, maybe up around 2K or
3K. You may want the nice growl or upper bass harmonics around 600Hz. But generally, you DON'T WANT a lot of content in your Bass in that Mud Range.
Not only the Bass, but often a Snare, a Keyboard, an acoustic guitar, or Lead & Back-up vocals will have too much frequency content in this range.
Try to bring up the overall bass of your song and you’ll often find you mostly get "muff", instead of defined bottom end.
So I would suggest that if possible, you really watch the 160 Hz area, and "hollow out" your Bass & other instruments just a bit around that range. Don't overdo, but try it. Maybe you could get by if just one instrument is stronger in the mud range. But if a couple instruments or voices are wallowing around down there, it's not going to sound great.
Effects
Choose effects carefully and limit the number of different effects. For example, very few songs need more than two or three different reverbs. Numerous hit songs have sounded great using only one. The idea here is to create the illusion of everything being in the same space. Hall and room reverb settings are good starting points; in general, it's best to save the more unusual effects for individual instruments.
If you want to use reverb, try sending every channel to the same global reverb. To hear your reverb and see what your doing, solo it to hear the size, decay, and overall coloration of the reverb “space”.
The primary reason to add reverb and other effects to a sound in your song is to enhance it, so don’t drown your mix. Which effect or effects you choose, and how
much of each you add, depends on the style of music and the sound, but in general it shouldn't be distracting.
For example, too much reverb can make a lead vocal hard to understand.
When selecting a reverb decay time, I would keep reverb decay time to 1.5 sec for fast songs, and 2.5 sec for slow songs. I wouldn’t go over 3 sec. other wise the song will be changing chords and the reverb will be dragging over them too long and interfering.
Find one or two reverb settings that sound good with 90 % of everything you'll use on the song.
Masking
When two sounds are at similar frequencies, the one that is slightly louder will make the softer sound unable to be heard.
Because of masking, every instrument in a mix sounds quite different when it’s soloed (listened to by itself) compared to how it sounds in the mix.
When instruments put out sounds, they put out the tuned frequency and they put out energy at multiples of the tuned frequency. Going to a piano and playing the A above middle-C will cause a sound of the tuned frequency at 440 Hz. But
the piano will also put out energy at multiples 0f 440 Hz, at 880 Hz, 1320 Hz, 1760 Hz, 2200 Hz, 2640 Hz and so forth. The "multiples" are called harmonics. The energy level of the different harmonics determines the "tone" of the instrument and
is the main factor as to why a piano and another instrument playing the same note sound different.
When an instrument is played with other instruments, some of the harmonics are masked, making the instrument sound different "in the mix" than "by itself."
The instrument's tone can be adjusted so that it sounds the best, when playing with the other instruments. Getting a mix that sounds good now may not sound as good when the other instruments are added.
Equalizing the instrument's sound while mixing is one effective way to overcome masking.
This is especially true for the bass and for the vocals. Typically the bass guitar has to have accented midrange attack and
string sounds to sound good in a mix. The tendency is to boost the fullness of the bass when you listen to it by itself. This
will cause the bass to get "lost" in mix of instruments 90% of the time. The vocal usually has to have over-accented
presence and be slightly "thin" sounding to sound good with other instruments playing.
When equalizing guitars, the 2.5 kHz range of frequencies are often boosted to give an increased "attack" to the guitar.
Often, to sound good in a mix of instruments, the guitar has to have an unnaturally loud attack. If, however, there are several guitars, you should not boost all of them at the same attack frequency. If you boosted 3 guitars at 2.5 kHz, you will insure that one guitar will cover up the sound of another. The correct procedure in this case is to use slightly different frequencies on the different guitars, like 2.5 kHz, 4 kHz and 5 kHz.
Mixing the final to tape.
Just as photographers will shoot several rolls of film to get one usable shot, you should “print” several versions of the final mix. That way, you increase your odds of getting the "right" mix. This is another way to increase the "time buffer," so you can choose your best mix at a later day, when you’re ears are fresh.
Try to print at least four versions of a mix. The first being the one that you think is right. The second is the same as the first, but with a bit more bass. The third is the same as the first, but with a bit more vocal. And the fourth has both more bass and more vocal.
If you can, also try to mix a version without lead vocal another with no vocals included.
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