Help me Get Levels Correct

Ask questions and get answers about how to make music in any particular way. Hardware or songwriting or whatever.
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eggnogadam
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Help me Get Levels Correct

Post by eggnogadam »

I use FLStudio.

Listen to my Bag of Bones fight track.

I never was able to get the drums kicking yet BEHIND the guitar. I wanted the guitar and the vocals to be the main audio and the drums and bass (was there a bass? I can't remember) to be the backbone of the piece yet have a solid bottom end that would make my mirrors bounce in my car.

I didn't really achieve that.

Can anyone suggest a site I can go to for a RELATIVELY FAST "how to" on this subject? Or perhaps lay down some good guidelines for me, please.

Do I need to do some slight panning to separate these instruments?

any/all help is appreciated!

Thanks!
-Egg-
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Re: Help me Get Levels Correct

Post by Manhattan Glutton »

It's one of those things that comes with time. There's no quick and easy answer that will get you a satisfying sound. You can Google a frequency range chart of instruments, but it won't help too much.

The answer is: EQ and compression. Without listening to your track again, generally speaking, you want to EQ-up certain ranges of certain things and EQ-down other things if they're interfering. Typically, you want to compress/maximize your drums, bring up the mid/high of the kick drum, bring up mid of bass guitar, make sure rhythm guitar isn't overwhelming the low-end. Bump up the mid-high of vocal tracks (sometimes roll-off the low) while simultaneously compressing the sibilant range so that the ess isn't agitating. A lot of it depends on your equipment.

When you start out, you turn knobs frantically - things sound horrible.
Eventually, you realize this and stop turning knobs out of fear - things sound OK.
Then you figure out what you want - begin turning knobs again gently and with purpose - things start sounding pretty good.

In other words, less is more. The better source material and speakers you have, the easier this will be to accomplish.

Also, fyi, too much low-end can ruin your mix. It may be inaudible to your ears with headphones, but it'll have an impact on the rest of the song (making things sound dull and unfullfilling) - and then you'll get it in a car with a subwoofer and the car will explode. Usually when you master, you want to roll off a bit of the low end. This is why you raise the mid to high of the kick and the bass guitar - because cranking the overall level will get you nothing.
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Re: Help me Get Levels Correct

Post by JonPorobil »

Hey, just a quick follow-up.

When people who really know what they're talking about say things like "the guitar shouldn't have too much low-end" and the like, what's a general guideline for what constitutes "low?" What ranges should we be looking to roll off of a guitar, and what ranges should we be looking to boost in a bass?
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Re: Help me Get Levels Correct

Post by Manhattan Glutton »

I barely know what I'm doing - so I don't want to give that impression. :) I've got my bass and guitar tones that I don't mess with and avoid EQing.

It mostly depends on what sound you like and are aiming for - thin and clear will err toward no lows and vis versa. If you're not satisified with your guitar tone, I'd reassess it rather than try to EQ. And as always, it's probably better to bump the frequency you want to hear (usually 3k-ish) and lower the whole track than try to do the reverse.
If I had a dollar for every one of my songs j$ has called a 90s pastiche, I'd have $1 for every song I've written.

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Re: Help me Get Levels Correct

Post by Billy's Little Trip »

The thing that took me the longest to get the way I like it was separation and width of my final mix. In the beginning, I was getting used to a DAW and leaving behind my analog and tape studio. More width gives you more room to place the different instruments in their own place on the stage (I imagine a band on a stage when I mix). But too wide sounds weird because there's an empty hole in the middle. I widen the instruments just wide enough to fill the center with lead vocals, snare and kick.
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Re: Help me Get Levels Correct

Post by JonPorobil »

Manhattan Glutton wrote:I barely know what I'm doing - so I don't want to give that impression. :) I've got my bass and guitar tones that I don't mess with and avoid EQing.

It mostly depends on what sound you like and are aiming for - thin and clear will err toward no lows and vis versa. If you're not satisified with your guitar tone, I'd reassess it rather than try to EQ. And as always, it's probably better to bump the frequency you want to hear (usually 3k-ish) and lower the whole track than try to do the reverse.
Okay, but what numbers? General guidelines? I know the human ear can hear from approximately 100 Hz to 20,000 Hz. So when someone says "roll back the lows," they mean 100 through... what, 500? 1000? I just don't have any frame of reference.

I'm pretty sure my piano does a lot of this work for me, as does SuperiorDrummer, but I'm really not liking how my guitar and bass have been sounding lately.
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Re: Help me Get Levels Correct

Post by jast »

Here is some rough orientation for frequency ranges. Don't rely on it forever, just use it as a starting point. You want to develop an intuition for this kind of stuff and that doesn't work if you stick to hard-and-fast rules indefinitely. Remember to never stop experimenting, and to evaluate your experiments, always compare several versions. For getting a sense of whether what you're doing is good, you need clear contrasts. If you keep working on something without comparing it to some earlier state, the contrast between two consecutive steps tends to be too slow for you to notice anything important about. (This is general advice that's intended to be useful for anyone who would like to improve but doesn't know how.)

http://www.digitalprosound.com/2002/03_ ... cerpt1.htm
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Re: Help me Get Levels Correct

Post by JonPorobil »

Yeah, that.

Thanks, Jan.
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Re: Help me Get Levels Correct

Post by nyjm »

3. Cut if you’re trying to make things sound better.
Man, it took me YEARS to figure that out. Wish I would have run across this earlier. This is actually a very handy guide. Wow.
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Re: Help me Get Levels Correct

Post by Manhattan Glutton »

Basically, whip out your FX that looks like this and sweep your track drastically, and then pull back to only a few dB difference when you find a spot you like. Eventually you learn what you like about certain instruments. It's art, not science... yet.
If I had a dollar for every one of my songs j$ has called a 90s pastiche, I'd have $1 for every song I've written.

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Re: Help me Get Levels Correct

Post by fluffy »

What I like to do is first consider the thing that I want to be most dominant and see where it spikes in the spectrum analyzer, and then set that frequency range aside for that instrument, and notch everything else around it. Then see what dominates in the next-most-important element post-EQ, lather/rinse/repeat. After a while you get an ear for what frequency ranges map to which sounds.
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Re: Help me Get Levels Correct

Post by nyjm »

Manhattan Glutton wrote:sweep your track
What does this mean, exactly?
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Re: Help me Get Levels Correct

Post by Manhattan Glutton »

Literally, take the eq point in your parametric eq plugin and, while holding your mouse down, sweep across the spectrum while the song/track is playing.
If I had a dollar for every one of my songs j$ has called a 90s pastiche, I'd have $1 for every song I've written.

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Re: Help me Get Levels Correct

Post by nyjm »

So it's a technique to do while listening to the track as it plays in order to find the best sound?

Sounds like a slippery slope to me... do you EQ every track you have?
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Re: Help me Get Levels Correct

Post by Manhattan Glutton »

The technique I describe is more for investigation to identify problem areas or whatnot. For example, you can find out that you want more 3k in your guitar, but then take the EQ off and put on another FX that gives you the same thing but more 'naturally'. Like a reverb on that range, distortion, aural exciter, etc. Generally if you're adjusting the EQ a lot, you've got a bigger problem. But you can easily give a 'dead' track more life or make it more present in the mix.

I think I said above in the thread - I usually only EQ vocals and drums.
If I had a dollar for every one of my songs j$ has called a 90s pastiche, I'd have $1 for every song I've written.

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Re: Help me Get Levels Correct

Post by Lunkhead »

Sometimes I try to use frequency sweeping to see if an unpleasant aspect of a track (like a ringing in a drum or acoustic instrument, or some other undesirable noise) is focused around a specific frequency, so that I can try to make the problem less prominent by using a notch/narrow-band cut on that frequency. It doesn't always work (it's definitely better to get something recorded without any such issues) but sometimes it helps a bit.
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