Category: Blog

20 Simple Tricks To Make Your Next Mix FREAKIN SWEET (Part 2) | By Thomas Brett |

As mix engineers, we sometimes get too caught up in our EQ and compression based decisions during a mix. For this reason we can often fail to notice some of the equally important issues we should be dealing with through alternate means, and in return end up trying to fix these problems by using the wrong tools.

Here are 10 ideas/techniques that you might not have tried before, which you might want to consider trying while working on your next mix:

NOTE – I haven’t gone in to much detail on how to set up the following techniques in this blog post, as this is meant to be a list of ideas and not an indepth tutorial on each of these subjects. I might write individual guides for the following in the future, but for the moment, I’d recommend just googling anything in particular which you don’t quite understand.

1) Optimise Your Plugin Orders:

If you’ve been in the audio world for a while then you’ve surely seen this question asked and debated TOO MANY times…

The Definitive Answer? IT’S SITUATIONAL! There is no set rule as to which approach is better overall, and I have seen engineers get phenomenal results using either way. There are however certain benefits to using one or the other depending on what you’re trying to achieve…

Here are a few examples:

EQ>COMP: Boosting the high end on a vocal before compression will cause the compressor to react more on the sibilant words, effectively causing the compressor to act as another stage of de-essing/de-harshing.

COMP/DIST>EQ: If you’re processing a signal in parallel then it can sometimes make more sense to place an EQ after the compressor. This is because all of the tiny details and problems that weren’t apparent in the unprocessed signal will be brought up in level massively and begin to really stick out when heavily compressed or distorted. In a situation like this, it might make more sense to fix these issues after the fact with some reductive EQ.

EQ>COMP: Filtering the low-end or reducing some of the muddy lower-mid range before compressing a strummed acoustic guitar will cause the compressor to pump and distort less, allowing you to compress it harder without introducing unpleasant artefacts. The concept of experimenting with the order of plugins can also be applied to other kinds of processing. Here are some examples:

EQ>REVERB/DELAY: Try EQ’ing and filtering your effect sends instead of EQ’ing the effect returns (ex.place an EQ before your reverb on it’s own channel). This can lead to more natural sounding effects as you are not messing with the reverberated/delayed return signal but rather tweaking the exact signal you’re sending to be reverberated/delayed in the first place.

LIMITER>COMPRESSOR: A lot of engineers like to finish off a signal chain by placing a limiter at the end. I often use the same technique, but I personally also like to add an extra limiter at the beginning of my chain in order to lop-off the some of the extreme peaks and ease the load for my compressors down the line

2) Listen Like A Listener:

Think of your song as a whole. Your listeners will…

Sometimes we can end up skipping back and forth through sections of the song we are working on so many times that we begin to lose focus of the overall vision. Other times we can end up looking at the project purely from a technical aspect, and develop a sort of “tunnel vision” that renders us completely blind to some of the more important non-mix related problems within our track.

As mix engineers we are always striving to impress our peers (other engineers and people we look up to) with all of the minuscule tricks and tweaks we apply to our mixes. But the reality is that 99.9% of the people who listen to music won’t even notice any of those things, and will usually just go-off whether they like the song or not…

It’s important to be able to differentiate technical issues from issues with the quality of the song itself. You can have a technically perfect mix which sounds amazing, but if the song is no good then what’s the point?

No matter how far we progress in the art of production and mixing, it’s crucial remember that the mix isn’t what makes a successful song, it simply gives it a better fighting chance!

Try and answer a few of these questions to get a better understanding of what your listeners might care about when they listen to music:

• Why is it you love certain songs by a band but hate others?
• What does it take for a song to make you want to smash the replay button repetitively?
• How much of an impact do you think the mix has on whether you like a particular song or not?
• Would you still like your favorite songs if they weren’t mixed well?

Here’s an exercise to try out on a current mix you’re working on:

Once you’ve got your mix to a point where you think it’s pretty much done, take a break and let your ears recover, possibly even leave it and come back to it the next day.

After taking your break, sit back in your seat try and listen to the entire song from start to finish without pausing or tweaking ANYTHING. During this time, try and listen through the average listeners ears and make note of anything that sticks out to you. This isn’t meant to be a mixing-based exercise, try and determine if there is anything which might simply require a different approach, or if anything is particularly boring/uninspiring. What will the average Joe notice about the song?

Take Action:

Take note of these things as they become apparent, and try to determine whether these problems are mix related, production related, or simply song related. The next time you’re involved in the creation of a track, keep these things in mind and try to apply what you’ve learnt from your past mistakes.

In Conclusion:

Mixing is an amazingly complex and time-consuming skill to master, and I really do hope that you’re taking the time to learn all there is to learn about this wonderful profession. However, it’s important not to RELY on the mix to carry a song.

3) Time Your Effects to the Track:

(Effect length calculation for 120BPM.)

Make your effects breath with your track.

If your reverb and delay tails are too long (for example: your snare reverb tail is still decaying through into the next snare hit, or your vocal delays are repeating unnecessarily for too long) then you are needlessly adding extra clutter, and sacrificing some of the punch of your mix.

The solution to this problem is to time your time-based effects to the tempo of your track so that they are only repeating and decaying as long as is necessary.

Using this technique won’t make a HUGE difference, but it will help open up an extra little bit of free space and in return, aid the clarity of your mix.

How can I start doing this?

– Use an FX length calculator! You can find these types of calculators online. My go-to is usually the Delay Calculator on nickfever.com, it’s extremely simple to use, and will save you from having to do the math yourself (however there is still a lot of value in learning how to do this manually).

– If you want to do this manually, you can follow this simple formula:

60,000ms (1 minute) ÷ Song BPM (beats per minute) = Time between 1/4 note beats (ms)

E.g = 60,000ms ÷ 120 BPM = 500ms

In this example, we have calculated the time between each quarter note of a song at 120 BPM.

After determining the time between each beat of a song we can then multiply or divide this number as many times as necessary in order to determine a suitable decay time and pre-delay time for our reverb.

4) Deadlines are Important:

 

Make Yourself Accountable!

Accountability is a great motivator when it comes to working hard and getting things done quickly. The fear of being embarrassed or getting humiliated by having to fess up to something is truly one of the hardest things to do as a human being, especially when it comes to getting down from our high-horses as “all-knowing sound engineers” who always know better than our clients, and admitting that WE made a mistake.

Why Are Deadlines Important?

Through some recent experiences, I’ve discovered that I tend to achieve MUCH more in a short space of time when I’m aware that there are certain consequences if I fail to deliver on a promise. For this reason, I always try and set strict deadlines on when a certain job needs to be finished by, and make sure to inform people of these deadlines in order to keep my self accountable.

This way of working has an added bonus, which is that if you manage to deliver earlier than your deadline, then you’ll probably end up impressing your clients further, and giving them the impression that your on-the ball when it comes to their project.

However, be very careful to set realistic goals and not drastically over-sell yourself, as this can lead to even worse complications.

5) Filters Are Your Friend!

If you don’t need it, get rid of it!

Most instruments (par the kick,toms and bass) don’t have much useful to offer below 70-100Hz on the low-end, and not many instruments have anything useful above 12-13kHz on the high-end either.

Filtering out the unnecessary low-end and high-end from instruments which don’t particularly need this information is an incredible way to carve out some much needed extra space within a mix.

NOTE –  It’s important to make these type of processing decisions in context of the whole mix, as it’s very difficult to judge the amount of low or high frequencies a specific element needs while out of context and you may end up removing too much.

A few benefits of filtering include the following:

Using High-Pass Filters

• More space for the low-end of the kick and snare to punch through.
• Increased headroom for the mastering stage.
• Tight, punchy low-end in your mixes instead of boomy and undefined low-end.

Using Low Pass Filters

• Less processed/more natural sounding mixes.
• Bright mixes that don’t make your eyes hurt (yes, I did say eyes…)
• More space for the instruments that really need this space, such as the vocals.

Some Other Cool Filtering Tricks to Try Out:

The Mix Buss Filtering Trick: Highly acclaimed Mix Engineer Serban Ghenea (Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, The Weeknd etc.) is known to use filters on his master buss in order to control the impact which the song has on the listener for each section of the track.

He achieves this by filtering out some of the low-end and high-end during the verses and then bypassing the filters when the chorus hits for a sense of added impact and size.

Why does this trick work?

This is a very similar concept to the fan-favorite “radio effect” which is used frequently in metal these days: When you have a section/instrument with a reduced frequency bandwidth within a song (ex: A vocal rolled off at 600hz and 2-5kHz) then your ears get used to the lack of lows and highs and start to think of that sound as the norm. Because of this phenomenon, when the lows and highs are then reintroduced abruptly, it instantly causes the same sound to seem much more impressive and impactful than it did before

Try Filtering with a Mid-Side EQ:

A really cool trick to try out on synths and other stereo sources is mid-side filtering. A mid-side EQ is a tool which can affect the side information of a stereo track without touching any of the mono information in the center. I’ve personally found that this method works really well when you have a stereo bass synth with too much low end mud on the sides. In a situation like this I would use a high-pass filter in “side” mode to filter out the low-end anywhere up to 400-600Hz, while leaving the original low-end in the middle of the stereo field intact.

6) EQ is Primarily a Tool for Improving, not for Fixing

                                                                    (A Fitting Quote from Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood”)

The less fixing you have to do during the mix, the more natural your end result is going to sound.

“Fix it in the mix” is a saying you hear a lot in the mixing world. This approach can work out in certain situations (as long as you’re experienced enough to know how to fix the problem), although it’s still a rather counterproductive way of doing things, as it just leads to more work and frustration later on in the process…

If you’re given the luxury of having a say on how the raw material for a project is going to sound, make sure that it’s recorded well and taken as far as it can possibly go before it ever hits the mixing stage.

Sometimes something as simple as changing the guitar tone, using a different mic or switching out a drum sample can save you from hours of future tweaking and trying to “make things fit”. It’s important to remember that the EQ’ing you do during the mixing stage shouldn’t be about trying to make things work together, it should be about making things work better together.

7) Comping in Context

                                                                                      (Comping a vocal in Pro-Tools)

Comping: It’s one of the most tedious, yet also one of the most rewarding processes that we usually end up having to do on a daily basis.

It’s quite a difficult feat to be able to transform a sloppy and pitchy performance into a masterpiece, and it takes a hell of a lot of practice to get to that level of editing and correction skill.

Here are a few things that will hopefully help speed up your progression the next time you choose to take the comping plunge:

My #1 Comping Tip:

• COMP IN CONTEXT – It’s very important to have a point of pitch reference whenever you’re selecting which words or notes to use during editing. The more perfect the point of reference the better (synths or keys work well for this). The main reason for this, is that if you comp a vocal without playing it alongside a melodic element, you might end up choosing words that feel right, but aren’t necessarily perfectly in pitch. This can lead to more pitch correction required further down the line.

A Few Extra Comping/Editing Tips:

• Manual over Automatic Timing Correction – I personally prefer using a good ole’ fashioned mouse and keyboard to align my tracks to the grid. I really like the idea of having complete control over the feel and swing of each particular note or word, and think that it produces more natural sounding results than those built-in to plugins like Melodyne.
• Different Doubles –  If you tune your vocal doubles to the point that they’re too similar to your lead vocals, then you are basically defeating the purpose of having doubles in the first place, and might as well just use a widener plugin… The reason the concept of doubling and tripling vocals works, is because the unique variations and interactions between each take creates an awesome effect which a straight up doubler plugin can’t recreate in the same way. By auto-tuning your doubles into pitchperfect condition you are getting rid of these variations between tracks, and making this effect disappear.

TIP: It’s still a good idea to go ahead and tune your vocal harmonies as they are made up of separate notes. With harmonies, the more they are in tune, the better.

8) Question the Reasons Behind Your Decisions (aka: DON’T COPY):

                                                                               (My old setup at Brett Brothers Studio.)

Every action demands a valid reason.

Don’t just do something because you’ve always done it, or because you’ve heard that {insert famous engineer here} “always” does it…

One of the annoying things about music production, which is also one of the most important lessons to teach, is that it’s almost IMPOSSIBLE to get the exact same results twice (although this is also one of the things that makes music so special IMO).

There are simply too many variables in place for you to justify copying the same settings that you’ve seen somebody else use, or justify applying the same preset on different source material…

Some of these variables include:

• The Microphones being used: Two different microphones will require completely different processing.
• The Instruments being used: No two instruments sound exactly the same! (Just because certain processing sounds good on my Strat doesn’t mean it will sound good on your Les Paul…)
• Microphone Placement: A single inch of difference in mic placement can make a night and day difference to your recorded source material.
• The Singer’s Voice: Every singer has a UNIQUE voice with UNIQUE characteristics and tonality which will require UNIQUE treatment!
• The Equipment being Recorded through: Pickups, Pedals, Amps, Poweramps, Preamps, Converters…THERE ARE TOO MANY VARIABLES, THEY ALL SOUND DIFFERENT!
• The Room being used for Recording: The effect that the room has on how a mic will pick up a sound is HUGE!
• The Room being used for Mixing: The mixing decisions that somebody else makes are strongly influenced by their listening environment and listening gear. Unless you’re %100 sure that they’re mixing through a perfectly treated setup then it makes absolutely no sense to even consider copying any of their EQ settings. (TBH, don’t copy other people’s settings anyway, it’s lame!)
• The key of the song: This has a huge effect on the kind of processing a particular instrument will require. (Ex: A seriously down-tuned Djent track will need drastically different treatment to more standard Indie-Rock track.)
• The genre of music: I hope this goes without saying, but a smooth Jazz vocal processing chain simply won’t work on an aggressive death metal vocal…

Conclusion:

Given all the evidence I’ve presented above, I hope I’ve gotten the point across…

No matter what you’ve heard or read about how a certain engineer “always” uses a certain method, make sure that every decision you make is necessary. Make sure you aren’t blindly following a formula which you’ve memorized, and that you are always bypassing and comparing in a before/after manner to make sure whatever you’re doing is heading in the right direction.

My advice would be that you’re better off trying to figure out why the engineers who you look up to make the mixing decisions they make, and trying to apply the concepts they use rather than trying to copy them exactly. Thinking like this is the best way for you to begin crafting YOUR OWN UNIQUE SOUND.

9) Share the Load:

Too much of a good thing…

Sometimes relying on a single process to fix a problem can lead to unnatural sounding results. Try using a few different stages of “fixing” to resolve a problem so that each processor isn’t having to work too hard.

Here are some examples of “sharing the load”:

• Instead of pumelling a single compressor, try using a combination of pre-fx volume-automation, limiting, compression and post-fx volume automation in order to get a vocal to sound consistent and in your face.

TIP: A simple limiter at the start of your plugin chain to chop off the errant peaks can really ease the load on your compressors and stop them from bouncing all over the place.

• Try a combination of pre-fx “manual sibilance volume automation” and regular deessing to get your vocal sibilance under control.

TIP: Check out the blog post I wrote on de-essing for URM, “Death to Sibilance” for insight into a ton of great methods.

• Instead of trying to filter or EQ out all of the harsh frequencies from your guitars, synths or overheads, try using some tape saturation to bleed-off some of the highend and warm them up.

TIP: Do some research on the characteristics of different tape types and tape speeds. Depending on which tape settings you use you can really help shape the tonal balance of your raw tracks from the get-go. This will also help give you a lot of insight into why classic recordings from the analog/tape era sound the way they do.

• Instead of trying to suck out a bunch of low-mid flub on your palm-muted guitars with an EQ, set up a multi-band compressor to focus in on that specific frequency range and control the low-mids dynamically. This will lead to thicker sounding guitars, as the low-mids will remain intact when palm-mutes aren’t being played.

TIP: Google the Andy Sneap Waves C4 Settings for a great preset to get you started.

10) Live and Learn (AKA: YOUR BEST TEACHER IS YOUR LAST MISTAKE)

Make your mistakes early on, you can’t skip from %0 to %100.

This is an issue I’ve really struggled with throughout my career as a sound engineer…

Early on in my mixing life I spent WAY too much time worrying about trying to make my mix perfect, and let this pursuit of perfection get in the way of my growth as an engineer. In return, I ended up never finishing anything because I was always too afraid to fail.

The cold-hard-simple truth is that you’re going to make mistakes in this business, it’s inevitable! You’re better off making your mistakes early on while there’s a minimal number of people around to realise them!

I learnt this lesson the hard way, and am still paying the price for the perfectionistic mindset I had early on to this day…

How can I get around this?

The greatest piece of advice I can give you in order to avoid this problem, is to make sure that your level of knowledge and experience are continuously increasing handin-hand. Don’t let your technical/theoretical knowledge build-up without ever being put into practice, DON’T BE AFRAID TO IMPROVE.

All the technical prowess in the world won’t add up to a good mix when it comes doing the actual work. You NEED to build upon past experiences.

Conclusion:

Making mistakes, learning from your mistakes, and learning from other’s mistakes is the best way to improve not only as a mixer, but at pretty much anything in life. Always strive to make your next mix better than your last, and in due time, you’ll have ironed out most of the flaws.

FINAL WORDS:

I hope that this article has given you some new ideas to try out during your next project. Be sure to let me know in the comment section below if any of this information has helped you out, or if you have any further questions regarding anything I’ve talked about here.

Stay tuned for more articles in the not-so-distant future!

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Thomas Brett is a producer, mixing engineer and songwriter at Brett Brothers recording studio in the UK. Check out the Brett Brothers studio website for more information and articles on all things mixing www.brettbrothersstudio.com

Want more mix tips from Thomas Brett? Read part 1 here!

Nail The Mix is our online mixing school that gives you REAL multi-tracks from REAL bands, plus a mixing class from the producer who recorded it. Past guests include Periphery, Chelsea Grin, Machine Head and State Champs. Join now for instant access!

Inspiration As The Picture Gets Clearer | By Jesse Cannon |

Demos are like fuzzy out of focus pictures; you can hear the broad strokes and main ideas, but details of what a performer is doing are often clouded in the lack of clarity, tightness and refinement of a demo. After all, that’s what makes it a demo and not a final recording. As we begin to see this picture clearer, it becomes more and more obvious what we should be doing to make it great. It’s inevitable as the picture becomes clearer, you’ll begin to see mistakes, timing inconsistencies, clashing notes and other flaws in your song.

One of the hardest parts of creating music is it doesn’t sound like a final mixed and mastered record when we’re making it. Garageband demos can sound unbearably harsh making it difficult to know if you need to work harder on the melody to get that feeling you get from your favorite records. Even in an expensive studio with a great producer/engineer the rough mix doesn’t quite sound like a finished record. For an inexperienced ear it can be hard to figure out if they should harshly judge what they’re hearing or that it’ll sound better as the process goes on.

To make matters worse, our brains have a tendency to see new flaws once we’re able to concentrate on other details. I often find singers get tunnel vision in their consideration of a song until their vocal is done. All of a sudden they can see parts of a song they never noticed before their tight focus on the vocal is completed.

When you’ve been working on a record for weeks on end, it can be a tense moment where someone points out a flaw that should have been caught two weeks ago. Just as despised is when someone realizes during the mix another melody or harmony is needed to make the song “perfect.” While we can wish this epiphany came weeks earlier, until we hear songs in their near completed or mixed form it’s often hard for musicians to know how they should sound during the development of a song. The reaction of those paying for the session or trying to get home at a reasonable hour can be harsh when a drum track recorded a month ago all of a sudden has a new found flaw.

Experimentation­

One of the biggest fights in the studio is when someone decides to start “experimenting” when another member of the team is concerned there’s not enough time to get everything they want to do done. When this experimenting is now being done “on the clock” it can start to become detrimental to the recording coming out optimally. While this doesn’t need to be a fight, the anger is not without justification in many cases. The fact is if studio time is limited so that you can record the ideas you had before entering, taking precious time to experiment can be costly to the overall project.

It should be known before entering the studio that even the least inspired musicians are probably going to get more inspired in the studio and tinker as they hear what’s possible. So if studio time isn’t allocated for this, you’re not going to be able to bring your songs to fruition as you see where new parts should be added. This means if you want this song to come out great, you need to be sure that you’ve drafted this song enough there won’t be knots to tie up or that you’ll have time to do this when there are. 

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Jesse Cannon is a Brooklyn based record producer, mixer and mastering engineer. He is co-founder of Noise Creators a service that connects musicians to the best producers in music today. He is the author of Get More Fans: The DIY Guide To The New Music Business and the upcoming Processing Creativity.

Click here and listen to Jesse Cannon’s guest URM Podcast episode where we discuss strategies upcoming audio engineers can use to promote themselves, and lots of juicy mastering tips.

Click here to read Jesse Cannon’s previous URM blog entry, “Band Practice Is Toxic To Your Creativity.”

Nail The Mix is our online mixing school that gives you REAL multi-tracks from REAL bands, plus a mixing class from the producer who recorded it. Past guests include Periphery, Chelsea Grin, Machine Head and State Champs. Join now for instant access!

Taking a Mix from Good to Great with Spatial Imaging | By Joey Sturgis

Spatial imaging is a part of mixing that rarely gets talked about directly, and it’s easy to understand why. Who listens to a mix and immediately follows up with “Wow, the spatial imaging in that was insane”? If we could only be so lucky…

Instead, we focus on the elements that make up that space. We talk about things like width, depth, and size – all of which are elements of spatial imaging. Here are just a few of the ways that spatial imaging can elevate your mix:

Larger Than Life Sounds

Your sound doesn’t have to be loud to be huge. When something isn’t standing out in a mix, a lot of engineers dive for the volume or gain. Doing this again and again throughout a mix does nothing but push you further into the red and risks clipping your output.

Instead, mess around with stereo imaging. There are tons of approaches to transform a wimpy sounding mono source into a killer stereo sound. Rather than reaching for a compressor the next time a guitar part is falling flat, maybe grab a time-based plugin (reverb, delay, chorus, etc).

Everybody’s got a different approach to stereo imaging depending on what they’re trying to accomplish. We recently had Dan Korneff (Paramore, The Devil Wears Prada, Papa Roach) on the URM Podcast, where he shared his unique approach to using a stereo widener on guitars. Instead of the traditional approach of adding the widener on his guitar bus, Dan runs the widener in parallel, allowing him to tweak the EQ on his widened tracks while retaining the original sonic imprint of the guitars.

My approach is always slightly different depending on the track I’m working with, but I share a ton of my most-used methods in my latest course.

Finding the Third Dimension

Don’t let staring at your flat computer screen dictate your mixes. Use your ears to decide what needs more depth.

One of the greatest things about mixing in stereo is our ability to create 3D sound. Early on (we’re talking the Recording Stone Age), engineers would require giant rooms to move musicians around a single microphone to create depth. Now we have reverbs to create space around each instrument. We can pan the instrument around in digital space until it sits just right. What used to take hours of painstaking trial and error is now available at a few clicks of a button.

Perhaps the coolest tweak we can make to widen a sound – we can use delay to create width. All you need to do is duplicate a track, pan each on opposite sides, and then nudge it forward.

Not to the point of creating an echo, but enough to create a simulated reflection. We’re talking about nudging it by milliseconds. A change so small, it’s nearly impossible for untrained ears to hear. Try starting around the 10-30 ms range; too much and it’ll start sounding more like an echo. You’ll love how effective this can be at helping something like a guitar solo punch through a dense mix.

Tricks & Treats

I’m a huge fan of moving elements around a mix. Being able to take an element you hear on the left and having it whizz past you to the right? It’s awesome. But what if I told you that nothing moved at all?

With spatial imaging, things like automating a pan or reverb are tricking you into hearing motion. All that’s really going on is the volume decreasing in one speaker while it increases in another. I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be some big secret, but it’s tricking your ears into hearing movement.

To the end listener, these moving elements are usually a treat, keeping them interested in a way that a static mix just can’t.

Spatial Imaging Comes in Clutch as Your Last Resort

Spatial imaging can be a frustrated engineer’s best friend. Maybe you’ve gone through your toolbox, throwing every EQ, compressor, saturation & gain plugin you’ve got at a problem sound that won’t budge. You just need something to push it through the mix without sticking out like a sore thumb.

Small tweaks like applying a stereo widener to other elements can make room for that sound to breathe. Adding a bit of delay can replicate early reflections; once again tricking a listener’s ear into thinking something is closer to them than the original sound would have been.

The possibilities of spatial imaging are unique in that you’re already using them in your mix (even if you’re not taking advantage of them). Every track in your DAW has a pan knob on it, right? Are you able to duplicate those tracks? Route them mono-to-stereo and vice-versa?

Start messing around with the basic elements, and it won’t be long before you start to realize how much more powerful your stock DAW is than just something you capture audio in. If you’ve already played with panning til you’re blue in the face, experiment with time-based effects and how they interact with these concepts.

Want to see how I’m using Spatial Imaging to hack my mixes?

I go into much more detail about this subject in my Spatial Imaging Fast Track course, where I not only cover spatial imaging, but some of the ways I’m using it on every element of my mixes. I’ll show you my favorite tricks and give you the reasons behind them, available exclusively to our URM community. Check it out!

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For more awesome tips on becoming a better producer, head on over to the URM Academy blog , subscribe to our podcast , and  [clickfunnels_clickpop exit=”true” id=”5j5usoiqwzl4doja” subdomain=”unstoppablerecordingmachine”]join our mailing list[/clickfunnels_clickpop].

Nail The Mix is our online mixing school that gives you REAL multi-tracks from REAL bands, plus a mixing class from the producer who recorded it. Past guests include Periphery, Chelsea Grin, Machine Head and State Champs. Join now for instant access!

Become A Better Audio Engineer By Turning Off  Your Phone | By Joel Wanasek

Why I turn off my phone on the weekends:

It’s Saturday afternoon.

You’re supposed to be relaxing.

You’re sitting outside, doing something you enjoy with family, friends, or individually, and then something happens… Your phone vibrates.

You look at it, knowing you shouldn’t. It starts burning a hole in your mind. You NEED to know why someone called or texted you… Maybe it’s an emergency right?

You pick up the phone. Unlock it. There it is… a punishing text from a client with some sort of problem. In your mind you’re thinking, “it can wait until Monday (it really can).”

You go back to doing what you are doing. But, your mind keeps thinking about the situation. It’s distracting you. Others observe you as having “changed” or notice that you’re “zoning out” a lot.

You make excuses like “I’m just relaxing.” In reality you’re working on everything but relaxing. Thinking about solutions to the problem, outcomes, brainstorming, etc….

A few hours go by. You keep thinking about it. It’s eating you alive.

You text the person back eventually and exchange some thoughts.

You decide to sneak into work for an hour and fix the problem. This of course happens on Sunday. Monday rolls along and you still feel burnt out from last week, but you’re wondering why. I mean, you had the weekend off, right?

Ever have this problem?

It happens to me every weekend that I leave my phone on. Probably hundreds of times by now in my career. You’d think I would learn by now!

If you do not detach yourself physically via the phone’s power button and place it in an inconvenient location, that little piece of evil plastic doom will haunt you.

Mentally you NEED to relax at least 1 day a week if you want to stay super sharp and keep peak performance.

Being a workaholic myself who has put in more 80+ hour weeks that I’d ever want to admit to anyone, I will say that if you don’t pick at least 1 day a week to totally relax without distraction, you will burn out. Stress is cumulative and your can never restore your nervous system.

My recommendation is for you to choose 1 day a week and stay as far away as possible from the recording studio and music. Do something completely unrelated. When you return to work you will feel refreshed and excited about work instead of drained and punished by it.

Now let us extrapolate this on a yearly scale.

Not only am I a strong advocate of taking a day off each week, but I think you should take 1 month off a year and enjoy yourself. I’ve even spent as much as 2 ½ months off on vacation abroad in a year!

Why? Because the cumulative stress of work grinds down on you over time. It can kill your passion, your productivity, it can make you short tempered with your clients, and it can make you a miserable person.

A single day off a week should be viewed like maintenance. However, nothing relaxes you deeply and brings back your passion for work like a vacation of a minimum of 3 weeks. These 3 weeks need to be 100% totally interrupted with no email or phone. Trust me on this. I’ve made this mistake before! One phone call or email can set your mind back into stress. Having a few weeks with absolutely no distraction is amazing for the mind and body.

I suggest that If you really want to maximize this and if you have the money, then get on a plane and go to a different country with a unique culture.

The further you separate yourself from things that are familiar to you, the more you relax and enjoy yourself.

1. What bad habits do you have when it comes to interruptions of relaxation time?
2. What are you going to do to change those?
3. Pick a day of the week and mark it on your calendar as your own personal time. Guard this time aggressively and use it wisely.

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20 Simple Tricks To Make Your Next Mix FREAKIN SWEET (Part 1) | By Thomas Brett

As mix engineers, we sometimes get too caught up in our EQ and compression based decisions during a mix. For this reason we can often fail to notice some of the equally important issues we should be dealing with through alternate means, and in return end up trying to fix these problems by using the wrong tools.

Here are 10 ideas/techniques that you might not have tried before, which you might want to consider trying while working on your next mix:

NOTE – I haven’t gone in to much detail on how to set up the following techniques in this blog post, as this is meant to be a list of ideas and not an in-depth tutorial on each of these subjects. I might write individual guides for the following in the future, but for the moment, I’d recommend just googling anything in particular which you don’t quite understand.

1) Check for phase issues:

The waveforms of the snare in the direct mic and overheads

Drums sound weak and thin? Might be a phase problem…

Phase related issues only really appear between tracks which are playing the same thing at the same time as each other. E.G –  A drum direct mic and the same drum in the overheads, a bass DI track and a bass Amp track, layered guitar parts, etc.

The main reason behind this issue is that when these sounds don’t align perfectly they can start to cancel out each other at certain frequencies. This effect is usually more apparent in the low end of the combined sounds and tends to result in them sounding thin when played in unison.

How can I resolve phase issues?

The simplest way to resolve this problem (although not a %100 fix…) is to solo the two tracks you want to check the phase relationship of and flip the polarity switch on one of them. Whichever combination has more low end is the one which is more in phase. This method will usually do the trick if you’re looking for a quick fix, but will realistically only fix the problem by a certain percentage most of the time.

A more accurate way of fixing this problem is to align the transients of the tracks manually. You can do this by zooming in on the waveforms of the two tracks and sliding one of the tracks forwards or backwards so that the peaks and troughs align with each other as accurately as possible. This is a guaranteed way of making sure the tracks are perfectly aligned and delivering maximum punch and clarity.

Whichever of these routes you choose to go down, this process is something you should be going through way before you reach for your go-to EQ and start boosting up the low-end.

Here are a few other things to consider regarding phase interactions:

– The phase relationship between the drum shells and the overheads.

– The phase relationships between layered samples and the drum shells.

– The phase relationship between your bass guitar DI track and Grit tracks.

– The phase relationship between your dry tracks and any parallel processing tracks you might have sent them to. (This can can cause phase related issues if your DAW is not applying automatic delay compensation correctly)

– The phase relationships between lead vocals and doubles. (This only really applies if these tracks have been heavily tuned)

 

2) Side-Chaining is your friend:

Wavesfactory Trackspacer – Sidechain Multiband Compression

Who should dominate the low end? the kick, or the bass? WHY NOT BOTH!?!

You’ll often see certain engineers talking about the issue of the kick and the bass not playing well together, and how it’s important to pick which one you’d like to dominate the low-end.

I don’t really agree with this idea personally… Sure, it’s important to try and get the kick and bass to work well together naturally, but there are multiple ways of combatting this problem with excellent results:

– Try side-chaining the kick drum to the bass guitar/synth: This is a tried and true method of carving out space in the bass guitar for your kick to live every time it hits. The goal here is to get these instruments to interweave between each other without the side-chain effect being too obvious to the listener’s ears. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll notice how these elements seem to get along with each other much more easily without stepping into each other’s space.

– Try side-chaining a Multi-Band compressor to your bass channel: This is similar to the regular side-chain compression method explained above, but instead of affecting the whole bass level, only the user-specified frequencies within the bass will be affected. This technique is a more transparent way of dealing with the same issue, as it means your bass won’t totally disappear every time your kick drum hits.

Other uses for side-chain compression:

– Try side-chaining your snare to your overheads: This is a technique which I regularly  reach for when I’m going for a primarily sample based snare sound. By doing this you can effectively duck the original snare sound out of the overheads every time your sample is triggered.

– Try side-chaining your vocal FX to your vocal: This will help to keep your vocal upfront in the mix and basically automate your reverb and delay tails to become more prominent during the gaps in between words and at the ends of sections.

 

3) Give your effects a diet plan:

Filtering an FX send at 600HZ and 5KHZ

Free up some valuable frequency real-estate in your projects.

Rolling off excess highs and lows on your effect sends is a great way to gain some extra space and clarity in an already dense mix.

A lot of the time these frequencies aren’t really all that necessary when it comes to adding a sense of depth to an instrument or vocal, and only really contribute to introducing extra mud and clutter to your overall sound.

How to combat this issue?

– Try applying a high-pass (low-cut) filter at anywhere between 250-600Hz to get rid of unnecessary low-end rumble and a low-pass (high-cut) filter at anywhere between 8-3kHz to get rid of the high-end splatter effect on your FX sends.

– Experiment with reducing some of mid-range boxiness between 500-800Hz on your drum reverbs in order to help the reverbs sink into the mix in a more natural way.

– Another thing you can try is to dip out some of the presence range between 2-4kHz on your vocal FX. This can give your vocals more space to cut through your mix and prevent them from fighting your effect tails for dominance.

Note – Make sure you’re not using these techniques just for the sake of it, as within a sparse mix you can get away with keeping more of these frequencies intact to fill out the extra space.

4) Mix through your master chain:

An example of some typical mix bus processing

Start your mix with the end result in mind.

If you’re planning to add a bunch of saturation and compression onto your entire mix then it’s probably a better idea to mix through this processing from the beginning instead of leaving it to the end. The main reason for this is because this kind of processing can change the tonal balance and dynamics of your mix, as well as undoing some of the work you’ve done on your individual channels.

Why work this way?

Slapping on a bunch of extra processing after you’ve already spent ages trying to get everything nicely balanced doesn’t make much sense, and pretty much defeats the purpose of balancing instruments in the first place! Try setting up your master buss processing at the beginning of the mix so that this processing is aiding your progression by getting you to the end-result faster.

Here are a few examples of the added benefits to mixing through your master-buss processing from the start:

NOTE – You don’t want to be hitting any of this processing TOO hard during the mixing stage. You can always make this processing more drastic at the end to enhance the overall effect.

Tape + Console Emulation:

– Smooth, natural sounding high frequency roll-0f and extra fatness in the low-end depending on type of console, tape type and tape speed used.

– Pleasant harmonic enhancement which makes your individual tracks sound thicker + more alive from the beginning.

– Rounded and less “peaky” sounding transients which are less fatigue-inducing to listen to.

Buss compression: (2-4 dB reduction MAX)

– Extra mix glue which will make your individual tracks sound more cohesive with each other.

– Enhanced transient punch from the get-go.

– Added harmonic saturation which will fatten and smooth out the mix. (if the compressor is analog hardware modeled)

Limiter +/or Clipping: (Minimal gain reduction during mixing, only on errant peaks)

– Will give you a better idea of what your mix is going to sound like when it’s mastered, helping you to pass better judgement on things such as drum levels.

– Will prevent your mix from continuously triggering your peak indicator.

Conclusion:

If you haven’t tried this workflow before then I’d highly recommend you give it a go. You’ll find that your mixes come together quicker and sound closer to a finished product earlier on in the process.

5) Saturation/distortion can slice through a mix:

Soundtoys Decapitator – An excellent distortion plugin

Having trouble getting your vocals to cut through that wall of distorted guitars?

Try adding/blending in some tasteful saturation (or heavy distortion!) to get certain instruments nice and in your face. You can use pretty much anything to get this distortion as long as it sounds good. Guitar amps, FX pedals, saturation units, you name it!

A great method of using this trick is to blend the saturation/distortion in under your dry tracks by using a the mix knob on the plugin or by using the distortion as an FX send in parallel. By doing this you can process the distorted signal separately from your dry tracks, and also preserve more of the transient detail and intelligibility of the dry tracks.

Here are a few places to try adding saturation and distortion:

– Your lead vocals: Try blending in some fairly heavy distortion underneath your dry vocal channel in parallel to give it that extra bit of bite and presence.

– Your drum shell mics: Saturation/distortion does a magical thing to the sustain and thickness when applied to a snare track, or any drum track for that matter!

– Your bass DI track: Try duplicating your bass channel so that you have one clean “low-end” channel and one heavily distorted “grit” channel. Filter these channels differently so that the clean channel consists of only the low-end information and the grit channel consists of only the high-mid/treble information. This is a great way of maintaining clarity in your low-end while also helping your bass to cut through a dense mix.

Note – Remember, all things in moderation!

6) Add and Juggle extra elements to maintain interest:

EZDrummer 2 includes great sounding, easy to use percussion loops

Do you have any percussion in your track? Why not give it a go?

I bet you’d be surprised if I told you that by adding a simple tambourine or shaker into certain sections of a track you can really accentuate the groove and pulse while also enhancing the sense of progression throughout the duration of the song.

Note – When I say percussion I’m not necessarily just talking about tambourines or shakers. I’m mainly talking about anything that can give a bit of extra movement and excitement to the feel of the track.

After reading what I’ve just written you’re probably thinking something along the lines of: “Yeah, I get it… but this definitely doesn’t apply for heavy metal and hard rock…” or “Percussion is lame, no way it’s making it’s way on to my records…“

Well… tell that to these guys:

Killswitch Engage – My Last Serenade + Hate by Design: 16th note Tambourines throughout the choruses.

Metallica – Sad But True + Wherever I May Roam: 16th note Shakers going for almost the entire duration of each song.

Alice in Chains – Man in The Box: Tambourine accenting the downbeat on the snare during the chorus.

Avatar – Torn Apart: 16th Note Tambourine in the Instrumental sections after each chorus. (Check out this band if you haven’t heard of them before, this song has one of the coolest music videos I’ve ever seen).

Nickelback – Dark Horse: Shakers and Tambourines throughout almost every song on the album.

Note – Think what you want about Nickelback, but there’s no denying that the production quality and mixing on their material is absolutely top-notch, which I’m willing to bet plays a huge role in the success of their albums.

ALSO: Producer Mutt Lange REALLY knows what he’s doing when it comes to arrangement, instrumentation and making a hit record (just check out his discography and you’ll know what I mean).

Conclusion:

Now don’t get me wrong… I’m not saying that you should go and add percussion to EVERY song you record, or even have it that loud in the mix when you do for that matter. I’m simply letting you know that it can be exactly what your track needs to gain a bit of a necessary lift in certain sections.

Just give it a go!

7) Listen to your mix through the public’s ears:

Your average listener’s monitoring rig

Your listeners don’t have $1000+ monitoring systems…

Lets face it, probably around %90 of the people who are going to listen to your mixes are going to be listening through less-than-stellar monitoring in less-than-optimal listening environments.

Some of these Include:

-Mobile phones.

-Terrible car hi-fi systems.

-Overhyped “fashion statement” headphones (hint, hint).

-Cheap earbuds.

-Shops and malls, usually through tiny speaker systems.

Realistically it’s near-impossible to mix a song which is going to translate well when played back on ALL systems without doing multiple mix versions to accommodate them. BUT… there is still definite value in testing your music out on different speakers in order to try and get it to a happy medium of balance and consistency  for every listener, no matter how they choose to listen.

Application:

Try listening to your mix through some laptop speakers and a car stereo system. The biggest issues that will usually stick out when you try this are your mid-range and your low-end (or lack thereof…).

Here are some things to look out for/try out on your next mix:

– If your low-end isn’t audible through a pair of regular laptop speakers then maybe it’s time to try out some harmonic enhancement plugins like Waves MaxBass or R-Bass. These types of plugins can help the bass content in your mixes to become audible through smaller speakers which don’t go as low as a full range speaker system.

– Home stereo systems can sometimes have a rather scooped sounding mid-range. You might want to combat this by being careful with how much mid-range you’re removing while mixing.

8) Difference is the key to width:

Double tracked rhythm guitars

If your left and right signals are too similar, it’s not REALLY in stereo…

I had to learn this lesson the hard way… When I first started mixing I used to edit my double tracked rhythm guitars to the point that they were basically identical to each other. I thought that by doing this, I could achieve a super-tight and punchy guitar section. The truth is I’d pretty much missed the mark completely…

How come?

One of the main reasons for double tracking guitar parts in the first place is to get them out of the centre of the stereo field. By making your left and right too similar via editing you are basically making them more mono.

How to maintain stereo width?

– Your best bet to achieve tight, punchy and wide double-tracked guitars is to record the takes really well in the first place.

Instead of having a “comp and edit hundreds of mediocre takes into a perfect take” mentality, try and get the guitarist to track the doubles as tightly as possible (although sometimes you simply don’t have any other option but to polish the living life out of a turd in order to get anywhere close to the guitar tracks you need). If done right, this will result in tight, punchy and natural sounding doubles with just enough difference to maintain a good level of left-right separation and overall width.

– Another way to increase the stereo separation between the two sides is to use a slightly different recording setup for each double. Try using a different amp/cab combination for each guitar track in order to introduce further separation between the two sides (the classic “dual rectifier + 5150” combo comes to mind).

Note – Make sure that the individual tones compliment each other in a pleasing way, otherwise you’re just gonna make it sound weird.

9) Automation before compression:

Pre-FX volume automation on a vocal track

Ease the load on your compressors!

There’s a reason top dogs in the mixing game like CLA and Andy Wallace are always talking about the importance of volume automation. It’s because it’s one of the most effective ways to craft yourself a loud and punchy sounding mix without having to use stupid amounts of compression to get everything upfront and in your face.

Sure, compression is pretty much a necessary evil at this point when it comes to getting something extremely dynamic like a vocal pinned on top of the music at all times… but by using some good old-fashioned volume automation beforehand, you can reduce the amount of work the compressor is having to do, and in return introduce less compression-caused issues such as pumping and distortion.

How to apply this concept?

This approach can be applied to pretty much any instrument with a fairly dynamic nature. Here are a few of tips on using volume automation before you reach for a compressor:

– Try automating your pre-fx vocal level section-by-section (or word-by-word in some cases) so that it’s more consistent throughout the song before it hits your first compressor. This will ease the load on the compressor and prevent it from jumping all over the place, resulting in fewer noticeable artifacts.

– Make sure you’re not ruining the flow and realism of the vocals by over-flattening the performance. Hopefully this goes without saying, but don’t go and start automating all of the transients at the start of each word and try to make them the same level as the decays, as this is a sure-fire way of making your vocal sound like garbage.

– You can also use pre-fx volume automation to reduce the sibilance in vocal tracks by reducing the level of the harsh “s,t,ch,th” sounds. These sounds will usually appear like dense blobs within your waveform and are quite easy to spot and automate.

10) Have you been EQ’ing in solo?

Tunnel Vision – Eqing in solo/out of context

WARNING: EXTREMELY FAR FETCHED METAPHOR INCOMING!

EQ’ing individual instruments in solo, to later on just throw them all together at the last minute and hope for the best, is like cooking each individual ingredient of a cake separately and then blending all of the ingredients together and hoping for it to form a solid result.

Terrible metaphors aside though: How any single element of your mix sounds while it’s being listened to in solo is unimportant! (unless it’s the only thing playing)

The only people who are ever going to hear those instruments on their own are yourself and the band you’re recording with. According to that statement, surely the measure of how good any particular instrument in the mix sounds should be based on how it sounds in the context of the mix, when it’s fighting against dozens of other elements for the same space.

Now you might be thinking: “{Insert famous engineer name here} spends a lot of time EQ’ing in solo in their demo videos…“

That’s a pretty accurate observation, but it’s important to remember that those guys have completed hundreds, if not thousands of mixes, and trained their ears to the point that they know exactly what a solo’d instrument should sound like in order to compete within a full mix.

This doesn’t mean soloing is wrong, as it’s still an amazing tool for focusing in on issues within the individual tracks without getting distracted by all of the other sounds in your mix.

Conclusion:

It’s important to remember that we call this process “mixing” for a reason… I can personally vouch for the fact that your mixing ability and final products will improve drastically if you stop focusing on the individual and start focusing on the whole.

Final Words:

I hope that this article has given you some new ideas to try out during your next project.

Be sure to let me know in the comment section below if any of this information has helped you out, or if you have any further questions regarding anything I’ve talked about here.

Stay tuned for part 2 in the not-so-distant future!

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Thomas Brett is a producer, mixing engineer and songwriter at Brett Brothers recording studio in the UK. Check out the Brett Brothers studio website for more information and articles on all things mixing www.brettbrothersstudio.com

Having trouble understanding De-essers? Check out Thomas Brett’s URM Blog, Death To Sibilance!

Nail The Mix is our online mixing school that gives you REAL multi-tracks from REAL bands, plus a mixing class from the producer who recorded it. Past guests include Periphery, Chelsea Grin, Machine Head and State Champs. Join now for instant access!