Perfection in your mixes.

A good mix is a perfect mix

I’ve been working on a song for a while now, from producing and recording to ultimately mixing. It’s a great song that’s been really fun to work on by a dear friend of mine. But when you’re involved in a project for so long and listen to the same song over and over again, ultimately you need a break from it.

Fatigue and tiredness from mixing is not an unheard concept. The general rule when mixing is that you should never mix when your ears are tired, so if you’re been recording or have been listening to music the whole day your mixing session is not going to go the same way as if you had rested ears.

You also need to try to step away from the mix. Because when you’re so involved in a mix you get way too much into the details, hearing things most listeners will never hear.

Dwelling on the details and trying to perfect every single note is an exercise in futility.

“The problem with perfection is that it has no limits. Normally, once you think you have obtained perfection you realize how it could be better.”

So every once in a while, take a step back. Think to yourself:

“Can I hear the song as a song instead of a collection of frequencies and amplitudes?”

If you are just pushing faders up and down, tweaking eq to and from the original mix you are never actually going to be able to finish a mix. There comes a time when you should just say to yourself:

“Ok, this is done. It sounds consistent to what I want it to”

If you had an idea in your head before starting the mix and now it’s sounding like you want it to, no amount of nit-pick-tweaking is going to make it perfect in your ears anymore.

My teacher told us, a mix is never finished, it’s abandoned. And that’s exactly what you should do. If it sounds good enough to you and amazing to other listeners, it is done.

And that’s exactly what I did. I just left it as is. I could have tweaked those guitars for months but I thought to myself: “This song is exactly as I want it to be”

Because in the end, it’s all about the song.

How to get Phil Collins’s gated reverb.

Gated reverb master

I see many people wander into this site from Google searching for gated reverb. I wrote a post about the difference between gate reverb and gated reverb some time ago but I never really delved into the details of the how-to.

Gated reverb is a staple 80′s snare sound popularized by artists such as Phil Collins. Many other artists and producers have used it over the years although it is always relacioned to Phil Collins, as seen by the google search “gated reverb collins”.

In any DAW, this technique is pretty simple and easy to do and doesn’t involve a lot of steps.

Ingredients are:

• Snare track
• Aux send
• Effects return track
• Gate with a side-chain
• Judicious amount of reverb, preferably a hall.

Now, when you have all the ingredients together you mix the snare track as you like it, eq’ing and compressing as needed. When you have the snare track as you want it it’s time to send it via an aux to a stereo reverb.

I use Logic and use Logic’s Space Designer to dial up a big hall setting. Remember to have the reverb on 100% wet so the channel only has the reverb sound.

Now insert a gate after the the reverb. Put the threshold as far up as you can, essentially killing the reverb. Now via your side-chain on the gate patch the gate to the snare-drum track.

Now go gate it!

When your gated reverb is side-chained to the snare track you can start fiddling with the parameters of the gate. Reduce the threshold so it starts letting the reverb through. The reverb should breathe in time with the snare drum creating a thick snare drum sound without an excessive reverb trail.

Experimenting with the attack and release you can get different results. A fairly fast attack and medium release in time with the snare creates a sound that sounds like the reverb is being sucked into the snare again.

I like having the attack a little slower. That way you hear the snare sound first and it sounds like the snare is breathing out the reverb before promptly sucking it in again.

Experiment with the parameters until you get something you are satisfied with. Gated reverb can not only be used on a snare, you can experiment with other instruments as well.

5 tips on distortion.

Driving your mixes to overload!

For some, distortion is the coolest thing. I have friends that search for the correct guitar amplifier for years, always trying to emulate that sound they have in their head. And other people despise it, think it ruins a perfectly good song.

Of course, there is good and bad distortion. Good valve distortion is warm and cool, digital clip distortion is horrible.

And then you can divide distortion into many other categories;

• crunch,
• overdrive,
• distortion,
• scooped metal distortion,
• warm valve overload
• etc, etc.

But in mixing you can use distortion to your advantage, putting it on things you wouldn’t normally think of. Here are some branstormed suggestions that I have heard have worked well and have used in my projects.

• Putting overdrive or distortion on the snare.

• Need a cooler snare sound? Does the one you have not quite cut it? Try putting some distortion on it to make it stand out. Sometimes it sounds horribly garage-y, but sometimes that’s exactly what you want.

• Routing recorded tracks to outboard distortion effects.

• You can use external effect processors, effect pedals or even just re-record through a broken microphone to get an extra character in your sounds. Try this to lift up DI’d bass for example.

• Distorting a doubled vocal track.

• Make a copy of your vocal track and then insert some kind of distortion. Used subtly it can enhance the nature of your vocal. And especially if the singer has a gravelly voice to begin with it will just sound that much cooler. I have used Logic’s guitar amp to subtly overdrive a doubled track. Mixing it under the normal one I have gotten great results.

• Distort your effect returns.

• Instead of distorting the source sound, try distorting the effect. An overdriven wobbly chorus, or a huge distorted cathedral reverb? Just go wild with it, let me know how it goes.

• Using white noise on sampled hi-hats.

• White noise isn’t exactly distortion, it’s noise, but you can achieve cool things if your drum machines or side-chaining lets you add white noise to the hi-hat.  It will make it more defined and stand out more.

I heard a rumor one time that the album Are you gonna go my way by Lenny Kravitz had at least some distortion on all the elements of the album, from the snare to the vocals. Let me know if you know anything about this.

Lastly, I’d love to hear your comments on what you are using distortion on. Are you inventing new ways to overdrive an instrument that’s not supposed to be overdriven? Let me know in the comments.

Mixing a great guitar

Today’s guitar segment will be divided into four parts. I’m quickly going to run through the basic steps for mixing electric and acoustic guitar, pointing out good starting points in both eq and compression. Let’s start!

1. Electric guitar

• Compression – It depends on the instrument and how it is played if you need compression for electric guitar. Saturated rock guitars usually do not need compression because they are already compressed when distorted. But funky electrics and clean chords may need a bit of compression to even them out a bit and pull them up in the mix.

• Equalization – You can usually filter the electric guitar quite severely if you have a nice bass track in the song. The electric guitar is a mid-frequency instrument and therefore has a lot of it’s energy in the middle of the frequency spectrum.
• For extra oomph and body-thickness try augmenting a few dB’s around 240 Hz and for if your guitar lacks bite I would  scan through the areas around 2 – 3 KHz.

Process well and they will love you for it

1. Acoustic guitar

• Compression – For chord strums I usually fiddle with the threshold at around -10 with a fast to medium attack. I play with the ratio depending on the feel of the song, but it’s usually around 4:1 – 8:1. For me, I never compress the same way, and I don’t really have a method. Especially when it comes to acoustic guitar, it’s a case by case basis, so you’ll have to fiddle the knobs until it feels right.

• Equalization – Looking over a few of my mixed songs I seem to favor the 500 Hz when it comes to equalizing the acoustic. Just a little boost seems to give mine a little more character.
• For a lack in thickness you can sweep around 240 Hz but for more bass you can go all the way down to around 100 Hz. I like giving my acoustics a little air and shelve them a couple of dB’s up from 8 Khz. Maybe even at 12 Khz?
• Just make sure you’re not boosting around 3 Hz if it gets in the way of the vocal. The acoustic has enough frequencies as not to have it fight the territory of the vocal. That said, you can get a little bit of the sounds of the strings and strumming at around 5 Khz.

This was supposed to be a quick post but I got a little sidetracked with researching my mixes and resources. I hope you can use some of these tips for future projects. And as always, every instrument and player is different. These setting may not work, but they are a good starting point.

Making the synth bass tight with triggering.

Trigger your favorite synth in sync

Side-chaining is a powerful tool to use for many things. Compressors and gates have this feature and there are many creative uses for them. Using the noise gate is not only useful for reducing bleed from drums or taking out background noise between phrases of a vocal track. It can be useful in many musical ways as well.

One trick for tighter bass is triggering the bass note to the kick drum, so it only sounds when the kick drum is playing. Of course, this doesn’t work in all styles or for every song, but it can come in useful if you just need the bass note to give the fundamental root note of the chords used.

And you can do it all without a bass-guitar or a keyboard, if you know which notes you want the bass track to play.

Say you have an eight bar verse that you want the chords to change very two bars:

• Write in long whole notes in your piano roll that change every two bars for example.

• Then when listening to the sustained notes you can insert a gate to gate them completely

• Using the side-chain trigger it so it sounds every time the bass-drum hits. You may need to use the filter in the gate if you are using a loop so it doesn’t sound when the snare drum hits as well.

• Fiddling with the parameters you can get a pretty tight, although basic bass track.

Those are just one of the uses for the side-chain. As I said before, not only good for tidying up, but also for tightening up.

The five fundamental frequencies of equalizing a vocal

Making the vocal sit in the mix.

Equalizing a vocal track can be very tricky since sometimes it seems to sound like it was stuck on later, and doesn’t flow with the rest of the track.

Below are the five frequency ranges you can start with when you are in trouble and need to figure out how to equalize it so it sits with the song.

1. The much unneeded low range

Usually vocals can be filtered quite severely in the lowest range. When recording it’s good practice to turn the microphone’s low-cut filter on if it has one. Usually this cuts at 75 Hz, to avoid rumble while recording but during mixing you can filter it out even more.

Obviously this depends on the singer’s voice but I usually go for a little over 100 Hz. Listening is critical here because you don’t want to cut out the singer’s character, especially if he has a good presence there in the lower register. For female singers you can go even higher, just be sure what you want. But be careful of Barry White and Leonard Cohen type singers, they may need that extra rumble in their voice.

2. The thick 150 Hz

For rounding out a vocal and making it more thick and full I would search around the 150 Hz area. Some singers sound thin and nasally and can do with a little meat on their vocal chords. Boosting here can give the vocal more punch.

3. Honky-boxy 4-500 Hz

If your vocal track lacks definition and sounds boxy you can sweep around this area, even going so far as up to 800 Hz. Remember that when cutting you should have your Q pretty narrow because you are trying to repair your recording, and cutting too broadly from the EQ spectrum will severely compromise the natural sound of the vocal.

4. In your face presence of the 5 Khz

If your singer doesn’t seem to be cutting through the mix, he might need to be presented to 5Khz. It will push the track a little more to the front and give the singer a much needed presence.

5. Sibilance around the 7 Khz.

Some people pronounce plosives more extremely than others. The s’ and p’ sounds that have much more energy than other consonants. If your singer has an excess of s’s you can try cutting around 7 Khz. It will make the s’s less pronounced and won’t make them jump out too much. Better yet, inserting a de-esser or a compressor that only compresses the s area can work even better.

Obviously, treating vocals is an art and every case is different. These are only basic suggestions and one should search for the right frequencies on a case to case basis. But having an idea what you need and where to find it makes it all the more easier, and fun.

If you enjoyed and found this article useful, feel free to submit it to stumbleupon and tell all your friends about it. Have a good weekend.

7 ways to make a mix stand out

I get questions sometimes regarding mixes my friends are making. They are feeling it, but something is missing. It sounds good….but not great. It’s been well recorded and the takes are good but there is something lacking in the mix. That’s when some of your most critical listening should take place. When you have everything for a good song, but the mix is just so-so.

Here are a couple of tips to keep your mixes alive.

1. Try to make your mix flow.

• For example, if you have string parts or long sustained notes, try making them flow via automation, whether it’s volume automation or reverb swelling. Think of the sound as waves flowing from one place to another intertwining with each other.

2. Tweak the presets

• For new mixers it may be easy to just slap on a compressor preset and be done with it. It says snare compressor so that’s just what I need. No, tweak the preset and work the parameters according to your song. Maybe it needs less attack or more threshold. Whatever it is, fiddle around with it until it excites you. Otherwise you run the risk of it sounding generic.

3. Go through your reverbs

• Similar as the one before. I think reverb is such an important part of a mix that you should take special care in choosing it. Make sure your reverb fits in the song. It’s the glue that fits everything together and should primarily be used that way. Although later you can go and add reverb for effect on some tracks. But take care in choosing your reverbs and go through your banks one by one before settling one which one to choose. I have loads of convolution reverb pulses in Logic’s Space Designer I go through every time I’m working on a song. Sometimes that plate reverb I used on the last song for great effect sounds horrible on the one I work on later.

4. Don’t clutter

• In the same vein, don’t clutter up your mix with too much reverb or effects. It just clashes with the tracks and makes everything much less defined.

5. Find a point of interest

• Whether it’s the vocal, guitars or whatever, just try to find interesting stuff to lock the listener in your song. If it’s always the same and there’s no dynamics nor interesting production, the listener quickly gets bored.

6. Add simple effects

• If the song is just a basic song with a strong main thing, like the vocal you can always add little stuff to add interest yourself. Ambient sounds underneath, long reverb trails on selected phrases, tap-tempo delays, panning automation. There’s a lot you can do to a simple song to make the production or mix great.

7. Automation

• Automate, automate, automate. This sums up everything I’ve mentioned before. If you do a little bit of all the above tips and then automate them, you’re sure to have a better sounding mix by the end of it. Or at least a more dynamic and alive one.

That’s just a few tips off the top of my head. They’re the ones I try to follow when I mix a song and usually it works out nicely. At least I always end up with a cooler sounding song. Sometimes I forget and put way too much reverb or can’t be bothered to change preset settings, but most of the time, keeping these things in mind helps my work immensely.

What do you guys think? Do you have anything to add that works for you? Share it in the comments. Have a great weekend.

Super flangy rhythm on guitar tip wednesday

I’ve been listening to Alanis Morissette these last few….well years but these couple of weeks a little more because I absolutely adore the production value many of her songs offer. There is always a lot going on and many interesting effects used throughout her first albums.

On the track Forgiven off Jagged Little Pill there is an interesting clean effected guitar. I could never quite figure out what it was until I accidentally stumbled upon it when recording a track for my own song.

In Logic you can emulate this quite well with just the flanger plug-in. Gives a nice shimmer to your strums, but you can’t play fast or it will all sound garbled. For that heavily flanged, but still not detuned or out-of-whack use the following settings:

• Feedback at 43%
• Rate at around 0.233 Hz
• Mix at 50% (Or you can put it as a send and there have the mix at 100%)
• Experiment with the intensity from 50% – 80%. I used around 75 because I had only sustained chords strums.

There, you may not be an Alanis fan, but you can certainly use these settings to experiment with whenever you are in a rut and need a new sound.

An easy way to process overdubbed tracks.

Overdubbing tracks can make a source sound thicker and more present in the mix.

But sometimes you have two or more tracks that are supposedly identical with only minor differences. And mixing multiple tracks with about the same processors can be a bit tiring. Luckily, if you are familiar with how routing in your DAW works, then you can easily apply the same processors on multiple tracks and collectively treat them as one track.

An easy way to mix two overdubs together is to route their outputs to an aux bus and then process them together from there.

This is different than sending them to a bus because you are essentially only making the track sound from the bus but not a combination of a track and bus like you do with reverb or delay sends.

So if you route say, the output of two vocal tracks to a bus you have them sounding in the same track, making it easier to process with insert effects like compressors and EQ.

It’s just one of those things to make mixing simpler. Although you can have loads and loads of tracks, tips like this make mixing all the more easier and intuitive, leaving out the repetitive part     and making room for creativity.

Concentrate on the most important element in a mix.

When faced with too many tracks too count and you feel like you are swimming in audio, keep this in mind when starting to mix a song:

Find the most important element in the song and start from there. Most usually it is the vocals, but sometimes it can be a lead instrument, or even the acoustic guitar. Find the most important thing and build your mix around it.

This way, you at least have a starting point and a general direction in which you can take the rest of your work.