Mix in your surroundings.

On slow days when I get stuck in a slump I sometimes have a hard time figuring out what to write about. I mean, there are hundreds of articles and books on eq, compression and mixing.

But I like talking about it and sharing stuff with you so I constantly try to find an interesting perspective on all these books I’ve read, stuff I’ve learned and tricks I’ve experimented with.

Take reverb for instance, I’ve written a fair amount about reverb(link over here) and I’ve read and experimented with loads of digital reverb processors. But sometimes you get lost in all the digitalness(not a word I think) and you never become aware of your surroundings.

Do you guys live in a weird sounding loft in Manhattan? Do you have a really echo-y(and unsafe) elevator shaft you think could sound cool on a recording?

USE IT!

The old echo chambers of yesteryear were just that. Natural reverb chambers. Sure, they were calibrated and built to reverberated perfection, but that doesn’t mean you can’t stumble upon a cool sounding room somewhere.

I read an article about this producer/engineer in TapeOp #69(Check out the magazine). Christina Files told us in this article that she used the elevator shaft in their loft as an echo chamber. That prompted me to wonder how many of our day to day surroundings we can use to our audio advantage.

A friend of mine recorded a band in a house that had a long stairwell so he decided after listening to how cool the stairwell sounded to use it as an echo chamber as well. So there are definitely possibilities when it comes to using your surroundings.

• Buy some long cables.

• Position your microphone where your preferred room sounds the best.

• Position your monitors in the corners or wherever you think they sound best.

• Do you want weird phasing? Put the monitors in weird positions.

• Put one closer than the other.

• Put another in an adjacent room.

• Experiment.

It’s not only to get great sounding or weird sounding echo-y tracks, it’s also for fun and experimentation. Maybe you can’t use it the way you want to, but maybe it adds to the production.

If I didn’t live in an apartment building where I can’t even grill a steak on a barbecue without people complaining I’d definitely go nuts with my outdoor weird sounding elevator patio. I’m sure, when you think hard you could put some of your rooms, hallways or stairwells to good use.

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.

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.

How to get more punch out of your drums

Drums huh?

Often said to be the most difficult instrument to record. Mostly it’s because they are a combination of multiple instruments and the amount of microphones used(today) to record them can often prove to be problematic. Not enough microphones, bad room sound, phasing problem etc.

But say you have recorded a decent drumkit. A drum-kit that sounds pretty good on it’s own but seems to lack a little bit of punch. You want that punch you hear on the records. Maybe using the New York buss compression trick will add more oomph to your drum-mix.

The classic trick of New York compression is sending the drum tracks via an aux track to a stereo buss, inserting a compressor that crunches the dynamics right out and then positioning the buss right under the normal drums. That way you get a bigger and tighter drum sound, without losing the dynamics.

You can experiment with the parameters and how many tracks you want to send to the buss.

Crushing the room-mics down can give an interesting feel.

Maybe putting different parts of the drum-kit, like only toms to a buss and only overheads seperately. Mixed together, they can give an interesting feel.

There are a lot of ways to use buss compression, and this trick is only meant to spark the idea to experiment. At www.audiotuts.com there is a whole article on buss compression by Mo Volans which you may find interesting. Have a look at it also, it’s a very interesting read.

So next time you’re in a mixing rut, with lifeless drums, try using this tip and see if it helps.