How to make great mixes

[thehipcola]

speaking of what we were just talking about, I'd say if you feel you must do a mix early on in the recording cycle (which is pretty much always the case for me, I mean just listening to your last take inspires a hundred mixing ideas), try to just focus on your tracks for this session, then finish your recording for the night, take a break, and then do an early mix. At least for me I don't even usually start vocals (except for ideas, sometimes a raw acoustic guitar / vocal track) until later on in the recording phase. So it's always good to hear a mix over a day or two to get your vocal ideas straight. But separation of recording tracks / mixing definitely needs to occur. I think it helps the rockin'

That's what you are taught in school too. At least it was years and years ago when I went....I never do that though, so I thought I'd just paint the other picture. I always mix as I go. As soon as I have two tracks down, I'm tweaking things. By the time I'm laying vocals down, the tune is already pretty well mixed. I agree that space between tracking and vocal dubs is a good idea, for me it's essential because that's when I write them... But I think you can mix while you track with good success. I think I developed this habit because of SongFight's deadlines...I just didn't have time to do a 'mix' session, due to life and work etc.... it had to be pretty much ready to go when I wrapped up the last tracking session. So...kids, don't be afraid to mix as you go. If you have time, it's always fun to zero everything, pull off all your plugins/effects and start over, but good results can be had if you work on a mix as you track.

[deshead]

i also fully pan keyboards as a stereo track. i always try to use panning as a means of filling out the space so as many different instruments can be heard in the mix.

The most extreme commercial example of this I've heard is Thornley's Come Again. They double-tracked and hard-panned all the instruments, including the bass. This leaves a giant hole in the middle for the kick, snare, and vocals. It's unreal how quiet they were able to get his vocals and still retain definition.

I listen to my favorite commercial tunes and compare mine to them, A/B style back and forth.

A tip for this if you're working in a DAW: load the commercial tune right into the workspace on its own track, and use the Mute/Solo button to flip. I like this approach because it lets me line up the parts that sound "the same" for a more direct comparison.

But I think you can mix while you track with good success.

I agree. The main thing you have to be careful of is frequency masking.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hb ... /mask.html
http://webphysics.davidson.edu/faculty/ ... pitch.html

Adding new tracks can affect the sound of existing ones in complex ways. If you start a mix from scratch with all the tracks in place, you compensate for this naturally.

Des you used to have a link on your site that gave a great chart that would tell you what frequencies are good for what instruments

Was it the chart at the bottom of this page? http://www.ethanwiner.com/equalizers.html

There's also this chart which shows the range in which the fundamental frequency for each instrument is found. Pretty ...




EDIT: unlimited photo sharing my ass! Rogers can suck it.

[roymond]

That's what you are taught in school too. At least it was years and years ago when I went....I never do that though, so I thought I'd just paint the other picture. I always mix as I go. As soon as I have two tracks down, I'm tweaking things. By the time I'm laying vocals down, the tune is already pretty well mixed. I agree that space between tracking and vocal dubs is a good idea, for me it's essential because that's when I write them... But I think you can mix while you track with good success. I think I developed this habit because of SongFight's deadlines...I just didn't have time to do a 'mix' session, due to life and work etc.... it had to be pretty much ready to go when I wrapped up the last tracking session. So...kids, don't be afraid to mix as you go. If you have time, it's always fun to zero everything, pull off all your plugins/effects and start over, but good results can be had if you work on a mix as you track.

It's a curious challenge, and that's how I work out of necessity as well. But I also sort of like it. Often everything in one night and yes, at the end of recording vocals it's pretty much done. But while I like creating the mix as I go, a day or two to reflect and tweak is definitely the way to go. This also helps record "into the mix" which can create a more cohesive sound in both tone and performance (like the parts were supposed to fit together, instead of sounding like they were just mixed together after the fact).

In the interview with Nick Mason I posted last week he was saying (I hope I don't butcher this too much) how they're ironically getting back to the days when they only had four tracks and had to capture a mix/EQ/etc. right then and there to bounce down to stereo before moving on. Then going through the same process over and over. It was spontaneous and forced some hard decisions early on. With DAWs now, he feels the process is similar but for a different reason...that the composition and recording process is one (for him) and he likes that certain decisions are made like that because it frees you up creatively to be able to move forward based on the current state of the song, rather than leaving endless possibilities hanging out there waiting for a formal "mixing" session.

[boltoph]

Des you used to have a link on your site that gave a great chart that would tell you what frequencies are good for what instruments

Was it the chart at the bottom of this page? http://www.ethanwiner.com/equalizers.html

Yep, that's it. I like it because it really gives a nice guide to where instruments have their eq identity and what frequency boosts will generally sound good with a particular instrument. Lately I've been a big fan of 'bass growl at 600hz'. I tend to like it anywhere from 550-800hz though. That whole page is a good read about eq'ing. The other colorful chart you posted really makes me want to have more piccolo and violin in my tracks.

This has probably been posted before but Tape Op magazine is also a good resource, in general. I read a great article in there about Motown sound engineering. They said back in those days they didn't master stuff. They just remixed. If there was too much bass in the mix, you'd remix, tuning the extra bass out of the instruments that had too much bass.

[roymond]

There's also this chart which shows the range in which the fundamental frequency for each instrument is found. Pretty ...

That's why my piccolo is always so muddy...thanks!

[thehipcola]

Des, you're a veritable treasure trove of info goodies! That last diagram brought me back.... I swear it's right out of my Recording Engineer's Handbook. Cool!

Great idea for solo'ing a commercial track along side your own mix. I'll use that one for sure.

Agreed too, that adding tracks will change your mix in very strange ways sometimes....I find that I'm constantly adjusting everything each time I add or effect a track in my mixes. Especially gain...sometimes the weirdest track combinations push your mix over the top. But to be clear, I totally agree that starting a final mix from scratch is great and highly recommended. Provided you have the time to do that, which is always the case here in SongFight. An added bonus of recording using a DAW is the ability to save a mix, and then start over, so you have total recall if you want it. It's pretty interesting to go back and remix your earlier stuff from scratch to see how your ears and techniques have changed your sound.

Great great thread everyone!!!

[starfinger]

in the last Electronic Musician, they interviewed a bunch of big-named producers about techniques to be more efficient and effective, and one of the tips they extracted in a sidebar was "mix as you go"

-craig

[jack]

i usually avoid mixing on the fly because i always end up listening to my tune over and over trying to mine ideas. i think it's great that works for you guys but personally, i haven't found much success with it.

i personally view recording as 2 sort of sessions. the actual recording and mixing. and it helps that sometimes i'm in the mood for one or the other but rarely am i in the mood to do both. for me anyways, if i'm recording tracks, i just want to record tracks and worry about tweeking them later, as i want to bleed all the creative energy i can while i've got it. mixing is so much more meticulous and i've found it messes up my concentration and ability to execute recording tracks going back and forth. i just find it disruptive to keep switching back and forth, or the lull time between recording tracks. i gotta keep moving.

i do think it's cool that some of you guys do this however, and i'm slightly jealous and envious. but i'm also backwards. in fact, after i have all my tracks recorded and set up in a better-than-rough mix, i'll save the session with a new name and drop all the levels down and completely remix it from scratch.

[ken]

in fact, after i have all my tracks recorded and set up in a better-than-rough mix, i'll save the session with a new name and drop all the levels down and completely remix it from scratch.

This is good. The idea is to check the new mix against your first quick mix and see which is better or worse and why.

Ken

[blue]

Mister Mostess, you should very much relax. Your mixes sound pretty freakin' great.

My super-secret weapons are:

Group tracks + compression -

Grouping like crap into a group track and then putting a little compression on it makes a world of difference. Likewise, leaving things out of a group will give them a different feel from the rest of the mix.

Never use reverb -

Ever. Well, almost never. If anything gets abused to death on songfight, it's reverb. Lay the fuck off already.

Delay! -

A hinty hair of delay will not add a bunch of whuffy crap-ass into your mix, but will thicken the sound of vocals and the like.

Double tracks -

Lots of people have heard of the NY sound or whatever - making a copy of a vocal track and compressing one and leaving the other naked. Well, here's a tip - 90% of the presence in the sound is coming from just having a doubled track in your mix. It's a nice, clean way to get a sonic boost from a track without having to fight for bandwidth, and, yeah, you can really muck around with all kinds of crap on one copy and still keep everything audible on the other. Very fun with vocoder.

Cut the shit out of the bass on everything that isn't a bass -

All vocals and most guitars get everything below 110 hz taken completely out - and sometimes all the way up to 2 or 300 hz. I am the destroyer of bass.

Full Mix EQ -

Dunno about you guys, but a full mix lift starting around 8khz really brings out cymbals and guitar picky and vocal life for me.

Multi-band compression -

It's a must have. Find one, turn a mix you're familiar with up to rocking level, and move shit around until you're hearin' it.

Have a look -

If something is bothering you in the mix and you can't figure out where it is, get a nice freq analyzer and put it as your last bus plugin. I like to keep my bass nearly flat, then a slow slope down from.. I dunno.. 2k to 16k or so. Above 16k is for babies and dogs, and neither of them like my music much.

Also, if you're having trouble getting with a thick mix and one instrument or the other keeps coming in and out, it's OK to line up the peaks by sight. It doesn't have to stay there, but it's always a good start.

Normalize each track -

You do this anyways, right? The thing I'm worrying a little about lately tho is that normalizing has to mean some kind of algoryhtm drawing lines for me, rather than the actual sound that got recorded, so I dunno. I might go back to trying to record things at a high volume. But, with digital, for starting out, there's no need to go above -10db. Stay safe, normalize later.

If you REALLY want to be a perfectionist freak, spend a weekend with a bunch of old live recordings and listen to the levels, especially any kind of one-mic ensemble stuff you can find. There are natural levels to recordings, and, for whatever reason, I think our brains feel better about music when the mix follows a bit of a natural curve. I guess most people's asses like mixes with the bass drum way up, but what the hell do asses know?

I'm pretty deaf all the time these days, so I mix a lot more by sight than I'd like to. Also, I almost always do a spot mix to hear the song, and then go back and rebuild it in drums - bass - guitars - vocals - candy order, and then work on that as my real mix.

[obscurity]

Never use reverb -

Ever. Well, almost never. If anything gets abused to death on songfight, it's reverb. Lay the fuck off already.

You'll get my reverb unit when you prise it out of my cold dead fingers, and even then I'll haunt you for it.

[HeuristicsInc]

Double tracks -

...Well, here's a tip - 90% of the presence in the sound is coming from just having a doubled track in your mix. It's a nice, clean way to get a sonic boost from a track without having to fight for bandwidth, and, yeah, you can really muck around with all kinds of crap on one copy and still keep everything audible on the other. Very fun with vocoder.

Yes, I've been doing this a lot lately with my vocals... you know I like to have a lot of crazy effects on the vocals (including vocoder). Leaving one copy uneffected makes the words much clearer than just having the effected version. Tweak the levels relative to each other so that you have the right mix of understandability and effects. Also, if you use pitch correction you can use this mixing trick too, to cut down on the robot-like feel of the pc vox. I think we used this method on the "Lemurs" track.
This is something, by the way, that I've learned SINCE my first vocal-track submission "spacecadet" - if I were to record that now the vocals would sound a lot better, I think.
-bill

[Freddielove]

Group tracks + compression -

Grouping like crap into a group track and then putting a little compression on it makes a world of difference. Likewise, leaving things out of a group will give them a different feel from the rest of the mix.

Thanks for the info Blue, great stuff. By grouping, do you mean bouncing it to one track or just applying the same effects as a group? Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this one. I have learned a lot.

[blue]

in nuendo/cubase, you can create a single track and then run a bunch of other tracks through it instead of sending them to the master out. i dunno how you'd do it in other programs.. maybe some kind of bus routing.

[Mostess]

Mister Mostess, you should very much relax. Your mixes sound pretty freakin' great.

I will print this, gild it, frame it, hang it at eye-level and aim all the track lighting at it.

That said, I don't believe it for a second. I'm getting better ("Brand New Car" was a bit of a coup for us). But goddamn it's hard work.

Thanks for that post. It was incredibly useful.

[Mostess]

.. maybe some kind of bus routing.

I use Adobe Audition (nee CoolEdit Pro) which allows bussing. I've quickly learned to bus everything into like kinds, just like blue suggests. And then only mix the busses.

The good thing about bussing (as opposed to bouncing to a new track) is that it's still very easy to change the levels of the tracks in the same bus. But really I've found that once each bus sound decent when it's solo, you don't need to mess with it much. It's more important to focus on the relative levels of the, say, guitars vs. vocals than it is the first rhythm guitar vs. the second.

I have to disagree about reverb, though. Though I'm quite guilty of having overdone it (i.e.: Baseball vs. Opera), it's an ass-saver when your recording sounds kind of dull. Like it was recorded in a basement. Which it was. The hard part about reverb for me is that I hear it so clearly on headphones but hardly at all on speakers, so I'm never sure how much to use. That and the ever unanswerable: reverb then compression or compression then reverb?

[Tonamel]

Reverb then compression if you're using the reverb as an effect. Compression then reverb if you're creating a sense of space. Seems to work for me.

[the Jazz]

Regarding compression, is there a rule of thumb about how low to place the threshold or how high it should be scaled? I have a hard time hearing what's best, and usually just end up using compression to flatten the peaks and get rid of clipping. I'm sure there's a way to do it that's better for my mix.

[jack]

using a good compression plug in (like t-racks) gives you plenty of options to play with by just trying the different presets. i'm sure there are probably other similar options in either VST of RTAS format.

normally, i do reverb before compression. but i'll bet there are certain applications on certain instruments with certain frequencies where it works better to compress a dry track and reverb it. like gating the track.

[Adam!]

Reverb then compression if you're using the reverb as an effect. Compression then reverb if you're creating a sense of space. Seems to work for me.

Yes. For something even more extreme, a tight reverb before distortion as an effect. It can sound wicked on an otherwise dull synth.

Also for reverbing vocals try compressing the hell out of a track, then reverbing it at 100% wet, 0% dry. Then put the uncompressed (or less compressed) track in front of it. This gives you a dynamic verb, so that when you get really loud and need to cut through the mix the verb is quiet, but when you get quiet for the spacey breakdown it's reverb city. Or you can do the opposite of this and reverb the uncompressed track to get the Angst-Rock effect, where the really loud parts are all echoey like your all alone in the universe (works best to really cheese-up lines like "I'm screaming but no one hears my paaaaaaain, in this genre the songs sound all the saaaaaaame!") and the quite parts are dry and intimate.

Like over-limiting, the more reverb you use the less people actually hear what's being reverbed.