My Eternal Mixing Problems

[Reist]

So, I tried remixing the song with the tracks I gave you guys. Mind you, this is without all kinds of cool parallel compression and exciting things like that. This is basically me trying to beef up my sound without altering much. Also, it's not going to be great, since I haven't had a chance to use your new recording techniques yet. Tell me what you think.

Newer Version
Old Version

[deshead]

The kick drum sounds a little rounder ... But I think even if you'd started with this newer version, we'd still have given you the same advice up-thread.

Mic placement, that's definitely where you need to be looking.

[Reist]

Cool. I should record a new song and post it for more advice. Time to get working.

[blue]

The kick drum sounds a little rounder ... But I think even if you'd started with this newer version, we'd still have given you the same advice up-thread.

Mic placement, that's definitely where you need to be looking.

his mic and bass drum both suck. it's never going to sound good.

i think aggressive EQ and compression are your only hope. (or living with a thin sound.)

[Adam!]

i think aggressive EQ and compression are your only hope. (or living with a thin sound.)

Agreed. Thankfully, I'm up to that challenge. I totally threw subtlety out the window, but there isn't much call for subtlety in this genre anyway. I added a simple bass part to help fill out the low end a bit, got rid of the left guitar channel because the phase problems were just too much to handle, and panned the remaining guitar track dead center. It's mixed on headphones only, so it could actually sound really terrible.

If anyone cares I can go over what I did in a little more depth.

[deshead]

Mic placement, that's definitely where you need to be looking.

his mic and bass drum both suck. it's never going to sound good.

It's probably not your intent, but that kinda reads like you're saying "there's no point in trying."

Even without high-end mics, JR, there's value in learning the effect of different mic placements. Blue's right, you're not going to get pro sound with CADs .. But you can certainly get usable sounds. And you can definitely improve on your current sound.

I added a simple bass part to help fill out the low end a bit

It needed that! Nice work Puce.

Did you hear the version I did, up-thread? Subtlety can indeed suck it.

[Paco Del Stinko]

Puce - I'd like to hear a little more depth if you can take the time. I'd also be interested to hear how it all relates to this recent comment by Blue:

and you don't have to trust me about the drum:guitar ratio - it's Puce's Law.

Is it OK to ask for an explanation of the law? The treatments you guys gave all sound very good. Des is right too, JR - Just make the best of what you have, technique and methods of this and that can be learned with what you have available. It's all good experience even if they're lessons of what not to do.

[Reist]

Work at playing the cymbals softer. It won't sound right (at first) from behind the kit, but your overhead track will be cleaner and more focussed.
- Find a way to get more kick drum into the overheads. One trick that often works in small rooms is to use "underheads" instead. Get the OH mics lower, pointing up. Maybe 2 feet off the ground, on either side of the kit, pointed at your head.
- Make sure you gate the tom tracks in the mix .. There's a lot of LF ringing there that's only going to add mud.

Very cool advice. I was already gating my toms (just didn't gate them for the export that you guys used). The studio playing could take a lot of practice, but if it helps, I'll give it a shot. Hopefully I can get a setup for those "underheads" too. Should I turn my set around for that?

his mic and bass drum both suck. it's never going to sound good.

Thankfully, I'm up to that challenge.

Snap. That was great. It's magical hearing your own song mixed great like that. Thanks! I should hire you to mix my cd, but from the sound of that mix, you probably would cost a pretty penny.

If anyone cares I can go over what I did in a little more depth.

That would be great. I'm sure that I could never mimic that sound, but it would be cool if you gave some pointers on how to get a sound even near that good.

[Billy's Little Trip]

I did a few mixes. I'll play with it more when I get back home later. I didn't have much time to mess with it this morning. The mild compression sounded a bit better, but I know I can get more out of it.

What I did:
#1. Made a second copy of the guitar, offset one and panned them to around 50 left and right. EQ'd to taste and ran them through a tube pre amp to warm them up a touch.
#2. EQ'd each track until I got the tones I liked.
#3. Compressed and De-essed the OH's to taste
#4. Compressed the kick to taste
#5. Compressed the snare to taste
#6. Compressed the toms to taste
#7. Added a touch of a mild room reverb to the drums
#8. I made a second copy of the snare just when the doubles start and end and put the copy on it's own track to crank it up just for the doubles because it gets really light and loses bounce.
#9. I made a second copy of the kick, left it un-compressed, EQ'd to just get some slap and faded it in to the mix.

I did three mix downs:
#1. Heavy compression
#2. Light compression
#3. EQ'd with light compression.

Esnips is slow, so give it a minute. Also, the mixes would have to be re-EQ'd when the bass is added because I'm filling out the bottom with guitar and lows from the kit on these mixes.

[Reist]

Man! I'm loving these mixes. Thanks Des, BLT and Puce. I'm excited to hear more detailed descriptions of the EQing done to get these sounds, since they all sound so much better than the original.

[Billy's Little Trip]

I was trying to keep a live feel, but after listening to my mixes again, I kind of let the crashes get a little wild. The heavy compression fixed that, but killed the snap.

Des, I also just noticed that you addressed the light snare through the doubles. If you tell me you have some kind of track normalizer, I'll be giddy with giddiness.

[Adam!]

By request, here's a walkthrough of what I did to the drums. I'll follow it up with some notes on the guitar, bass, and mastering, plus some parallel compression stuff I did. So, without further ado, Part 1. Beware of the ever-shifting tenses.

Kick

I started with the kick, which I found too muted sounding. I wanted a nice punchy kick with a lot of presence / beater, so that it would cut right through the mix so you could hear all the double-kicks clearly. I started with a +15db high-shelf boost at 8khz to completely change the tone of the kick and get a lot more highs. That wasn't enough though, so I also did a +12db peak boost at 4.5khz (with a Q of 1.5; all my boosts will be with a Q of 1.5 unless otherwise noted) to get more beater sound. I did a -15db cut at 800hz with a fairly surgical Q of 3.5 to get rid of some mid junk I didn't need (I'd rather get that range from the overheads). Finally, to give the kick some balls I did a +6db boost near the fundamental--around 55hz--and highpassed it at 30hz to remove the subsonic rumble and keep it from feeling flabby. Now the compression. I always compress AFTER equalizing, unless otherwise noted. The kick was already at a pretty steady level, so instead of trying to flatten it out I used a fairly slow attack time of 20ms to add some punch to it. Because there's so many double-kicks in rapid succession, I used a release time of 100 ms, so that the compressor had time to snap back between all the drum hits. I used a ratio of 3:1 and set the threshold so I was getting 6db of gain reduction; in retrospect I probably could have gotten away with a lower ratio. There was a lot of leak coming through on this track, especially because of my huge high boosts, so I used a gate with an instant attack and a release of 2/3rds of a second and set the threshold so that the gate was kicking in immediately after each kick (unless otherwise noted, this is how all my gates are set).


Snare

With the kick still playing, I turn on the snare track, and toggle the phase back and forth to make sure the mics were in-phase (they were). Another muddy sounding recording, I'm going to treat it much the same way as I did the kick. I give it the same +15 db high shelf @ 8khz as I gave the kick. Just like I boosted to get more beater on the kick, to give the snare more slap I boost 2.5khz by +12db. Then, too add punch, I boost 200hz by +9db. There's nothing important happening in the lowend, so I put a highpass at 60hz. Normally I might cut something out of the midrange like I did for the kick, but I notice that a lot of the hi-hat is coming through the snare track; because there is no solo-hihat track I leave this range alone. Onto the dynamics: this snare is much more all-over-the-place than the kick was level-wise, so I use a 4:1 ratio and set the threashold so I'm getting between 5 and 10 db of gain reduction on the individual hits, which helps even them out. I use a 10ms attack to add some 'snap', and a 100ms release because there's still lots of quick hits happening. I gate the snare lightly with a 1 second release, so that I'm keeping most of the hi-hat spill. I then bring the snare up to a reasonable level; after hearing Deshead's mix, I wish I had made it louder.


Toms

I treat all of the toms the same way, to get them sounding cohesive. I give them roughly the same treatment as the kick and snare: each one got a +15db shelf-boost above 6khz, a 3 to 6 db boost at 3.5khz, a -15db cut at 800hz with a Q of 3.5 to take out the middle junk where the guitars and vocals should be, and 3 to 9 db boost near the fundamental (between 70 and 120 hz, depending on which Tom). I highpass all of them at 50 hz so they don't fight with the kick too much. I don't really like to compress toms very much at all, because I find that most Tom patterns (like builds and breaks and rolls and whatnot) have important dynamics. I use a 2:1 ratio with a fast attack (1ms) and release (100ms) and set the threshold high so I'm only applying at most about 3-5 db of gain reduction. There was way too much spill and ringing for me to gate them safely, so I went into the mix and muted all the parts in between the tom hits. I then brought them way up so they were at least as loud as the kick and snare, and pan them around a bit until I'm happy with the stereo spread. I'd probably pan them a little harder if I was doing a remix, to make those tom rolls sound even cooler.


Overheads

At this point I've got a super-phoney sounding, over-eq'd and over-gated close-mic'd kit sound going on. So, I bring up the overheads, and like magic the kit springs to life. They need a +3db shelf at 8khz and a +3db boost at 2khz (with a wider, more natural sounding Q of 1) to make them fit with the other drum tracks a bit better. Remember how I cut the 800hz range on every other track as much as I could? Well, lets put some of that room sound back by boosting the overheads by +3db at 800hz (Q=1, again). This boost also helps make up for the lack of a hi-hat mic. Now, to control some of these crashes a bit, I use a light touch of a 1.7:1 ratio and a fast (1ms) attack, and I set the threshold low enough that I'm getting about 3db of gain reduction through most of the song, and maybe 6db on the loudest crashes. I do not gate overheads. AFTER the compression, I highpass the overheads at 350 hz to keep them from adding any mud to the lowend. Then I bring them up to taste; personally I like to keep the overheads fairly low in comparison to the kick and snare.


Drum Buss

Oh, you didn't think we were done there, did you? I send all the drums to the same buss, and then slap a compressor on it. The idea is that this will glue the kit elements together so they all sort of move as one. I use a different compressor for this that has a really soft knee, and I set it at a 4:1 compression ratio, with a 10ms attack and a 300ms release. I then bring the threashold down just far enough that the snare and kick drum peaks are tripping the compressor, so that I'm getting about 2-3 db of compression throughout the song. Because I've been using a lot of slow attack compressors on the kick and snare, their peaks are now really over-emphasized, and I know they'll be a huge headache when it comes time to mixdown. Here's a great trick for dealing with that: use a clipping plugin to trim off those quick peaks without affecting the rest of the drum sound. For this particular drum mix I tried the VoxengoTapeBus (for the first time), which did a pretty good job; other options are T-Rack's Clipper, Steinberg's ancient-but-still-really-awesome Magneto, or the very free GClip.


OK, gotta run, but Part 2 will follow.

[Billy's Little Trip]

Damn Puce, great details.
You reminded me, I did gate the kick and snare after I EQ'd them because by the time I got my tones I was looking for, I had bleed over that I didn't want. Then I brought the overheads up until the sound filled back out.
Gclip huh? I'll have to give that a try.

[Adam!]

Part 2!

Bass

This song was screaming for bass, so I quickly laid down a bass part that just followed the guitar. I recorded the bass direct-in, but then I re-amped the bass with some overdrive so that I could have two bass tracks to mix with: one clean and one with more bite. I like to let the DI bass track take care of the lows and the re-amped one take care of the highs, so I boosted the direct bass track by +9db at 50hz and I highpassed re-amped track at 250hz. I also lowpassed both basses at 4khz because there was nothing important happening above that point. I bussed both of them to the same group and compressed them together, to make them gel into a single bass sound. I used a fast (1ms) attack and a 200 ms release and a 4:1 ratio, achieving about 6 - 9 db of gain reduction. I then sent this buss to the Instrument buss.


Guitar

JR's guitar track was weird. It was the only track that suffered noticeably from being mp3'd. The original track was stereo and had lots of phasing problems between the two channels (I'm assuming it was two mics?). I couldn't get the two channels to like eachother, so I discarded the left one and just used the right. The guitar was very hissy and bodiless, so I started with an -18db cut at 3.7khz to get rid of the hiss and boosted by +12db at 900hz to get it sounding more full and natural. At this point I EQ'd to taste, adding +6 db at 2khz and a +3 high shelf at 8khz, to get it sounding bright enough to fit with the drumkit. Lastly, I highpassed at 150 hz, to make space for the bass. The guitar was already flat-as-a-pancake, so I did not compress it. I sent it to the Instrument Buss along with the bass; because the Bass and Guitar were playing the same thing, I used a little compression on the instrument buss to help fuse them together and restore some of their punchiness. Using a soft knee, a 2:1 ratio, a slow 30ms attack and a 300ms release time I applied about 1-2 db of gain reduction.


Parallel Compression

At this point the mix was feeling pretty good, but was noticeably lacking solidity in the low end that the genre requires. I set up a new buss channel in parallel, and sent a copy of the DI-bass and the kick to it. I set their relative levels so that if you solo'd the buss the the kick would sound way louder than the bass. I lowpassed the buss at 250hz and then absolutely crushed it with a limiter. I used a release of 30ms and applied between 12 and 15 db of gain reduction to the buss. What came out the other end was this steady-as-a-rock overdriven-subwoofer sort of sound, and because I had made the kick so much louder than the bass the limiter was effectively ducking the bass everytime there was a kick, helping the two co-exist in the low end. I then slowly brought this buss up underneath the rest of the mix, until it added the solidity I was looking for. Looking back on it, the kick ended up being too loud and compressed; this kind of trick can take some trial and error.


Mastering

Even after all the high shelf boosts on all the drum elements, I felt the song needed some more treble, so I did a +3db high shelf above 7khz on the whole mix. I also boosted 1.3khz by 3db (Q = 1.2), just to make up for a deficiency inherent in my headphones. I then put a highpass at 32 hz and a lowpass at 18khz to take care of any sub-/super- sonic junk that could be eating up my headroom. I then used a single-band compressor with a soft knee, a 10ms attack, the longest release possible (in my case 1.5 seconds) and a 4:1 ratio; I hit this as softly as I could, never applying more than 1db of gain reduction. This is probably a personal taste thing, as I just like how it makes the drums interact with the rest of the mix, so YMMV. I then used a limiter with an aggressive release time of 1ms to apply about 3 db of gain reduction to mix, and then applied 2 db of soft-clipping to gain volume. In retrospect, I should have used a bit less clipping, as there is some audible distortion on the final mixdown.

And that's it.

Is it OK to ask for an explanation of the law?

My apparently eponymous Law is "turn the fucking drums up". That's where the rock is. So many people mixing their own stuff are guitarists who want to make themselves way louder than the percussion, and then they master too hot (which turns the drums down again), and you end up with this whimpy-loud sound that has absolutely no balls. I always try to mix the guitars last, make them the icing on the Drums'n'Bass'n'Vocals cake. If I ever need to know how loud I should make the drums, I fire up some classic Pixies like Where Is My Mind and remember how amazing loud drums sound.

[Paco Del Stinko]

Puce - That's an incredible description of what you did. Very informative and helpful, I'm sure to pluck much of it out to apply to my own (mis)adventures. I find EQ'ing and using compression properly to be the most challenging parts of recording. Thanks for taking the time to write all that up, too. I know I appreciate it! And thanks for the "law" explanation also. Where Is My Mind is a good example of said law: as much as I love that song, how wimpy would it sound w/o those drums standing tall?. Again, all very helpful and well done! A humble bow of respect in your direction, sir.

[Reist]

Oh man ... those are some great descriptions. And of each track too! That is nothing short of incredible work, Puce. One thing though ... what do you use to do all this EQ, compression, etc? Sorry if it might seem obvious to you, but I'm quite new to this whole process. You recommended that clipping program, so thanks ... is that something I would use to do the rest, or do I need some crazy software for that?

[blue]

Jolly,

correct me if i'm wrong, but you mix on your recording unit, correct?

[Reist]

Yes. If I want to mix my tracks down, I have to do it while the song plays ... this makes it a lot more difficult to get a mix I'm happy with.

[Billy's Little Trip]

Yes. If I want to mix my tracks down, I have to do it while the song plays ... this makes it a lot more difficult to get a mix I'm happy with.

How else would you mix it? I guess I didn't understand the Q&A here.

After hearing Puce and Des's mix, it set me back quite a bit. Here I thought I finally have a grasp on things, but now realize I've just scratched the tip of the iceberg.

Roger, as far as plug ins. I've been playing with tons from Ken's Free Plug In thread. The one thing I've learned, and I believe Des told me this, use only one new plug in at a time until you understand everything it has to offer. This turns out to be great advice, because I was getting overwhelmed and not remembering what did what after a while. The only time I have for making music right now is for the fights each week. So I've tried a new plug in each week.

The EQ's and Compressors I've come to really like are the Modern suite and some of the Cubase units. The reason I like the Modern units is because they are more like the older analog units I'm used to. They are very subtle in my opinion. They aren't great to learn on because they don't have very many pre sets if any on some units, so you need to trust your ears. The Cubase units are stuffed full of factory pre sets. I learn from the factory pre sets, but they never seem right for me, so I like the Modern units to really tweak my mix. Plus I learn more doing it the hard way. I guess using factory pre sets will train your ears, but I don't think you'll learn why you're doing it. A good example is how detailed Puce was up yahhh ^^^. He knows every f**king db and shyt. I'd have to write that stuff down as I go to give a list like that.

[blue]

he doesn't have computer DAW software. he mixes on his all-in-one unit.

[Adam!]

what do you use to do all this EQ, compression, etc? Sorry if it might seem obvious to you, but I'm quite new to this whole process.

I stuck with a parametric eq, a compressor/expander, and a limiter for this mix because every DAW application I've used come with those plugins by default. I use non-free plugins, but if I were to recommend free stuff look no further than SmartElectronix. I haven't tried them, but their NyquistEQ and MjCompressor look promising.

[Reist]

So, I made a new song, and just spent 4EVA working on it. It's definitely a bit of a problem doing this on my box, since I either have compression or limiters or gating. Only one on each channel ... so that kind of sucked a lot, but I think this mix sounds a lot better than the last. I'll let it sit on my box for a bit and give it a second listen. Then you guys can listen to it. (by the way, it's really compressed, so you will probably be able to hear some nasty compression ... but hey, it's my first try at this technical stuff!)