Music production is a fun thing right! You’re literally a creator, you create a sound that no one in history have ever heard before. Doesn’t matter if it’s in the best quality ever or the worst. It’s still never heard before, and you own it. YOU SHOULD BE PROUD.
But to make it official you should release it to the public, either on streaming like Spotify, Apple Music. Sell it to a publishing label, or play it on a party, restaurant, pools etc… And that’s where things gets tough. Will people enjoy your release! will they play it again or only once and forget about it! Will they become fans or just strangers that probably won’t listen to your future projects!
The engineering that happens in the background is a crucial player in the formula of a song ready for the public, and being the producer of that song everything depends on you and your abilities. Mixing is your joker, if you do it right you’ve done pretty much everything. In this article we’ll talk about Audio mixing and things that comes with it, and also I’ll give 3 secret tips to use for a better mixing.
Let’s get on with it!
1- EQ
Every sound on this planet is a bunch of frequencies playing in a frequency spectrum. The audio Spectrum is split into bands.
The normal human hearing ranges from 20 Hz into 20k Hz (the unit of audio frequencies is Hertz — Hz).
We have:
- Sub frequencies: {20 Hz — 40 Hz}.
- Bass frequencies: {40 Hz — 100 Hz}.
- Upper-Bass frequencies: {100 Hz — 200 Hz}.
- Mid frequencies: {200 Hz — 2k Hz}.
- Upper frequencies: {2k Hz — 6k Hz}.
- Mid-High frequencies: {6k Hz — 10k Hz}.
- Treble: {10k Hz — 20k Hz}.
- Ultrasonic frequencies: {20k Hz — Unknown} (Human hearing can’t hear sounds beyond this range).
Names of the bands (frequency groups) can be called various names depends on the software or the hardware used.
Now anything that you hear, create or play is definitely sitting somewhere in these frequencies. And if you are a music maker, you don’t want these ranges to be crashing together, you want them to be clean, everything is in its proper place and playing in the band where it should be. And that’s what we call EQing. You should use an Equalizer to identify frequencies and limit them to the bands you want them to be in.
Normally, The sub freqs is kept exclusively for the sub bass. Like 808, a pure sine wav. Because that’s a frequency that’s mainly felt in festival speakers and clubs. You don’t want to have freqq fighting in this range. Always cut sub freqs from your instruments like piano, guitar, drums, Synths, etc and keep it SOLELY for your sub bass. But don’t take this as a rule of thumb, you know what you’re going for more than everyone. But just keep other instruments and sounds away from the sub. Uh! and never add reverb on your sub bass. It’s just not right. And always make it MONO, when you add your sub bass instrument software choose Mono or make it Mono through a utility plugin (if you’re a Logic Pro user you can go to your effects chain > Utility > Gain and turn on Mono button).
Mid freqs are your playground, you can play as you wish in this range, freqs can crash with each other here but always cut freqs that are useless. For example:
In the upper screenshot I have 2 EQs. One dedicated to the bass group which includes a sub bass which is a pure sine wav and a saturated bass with sub frqs cut, and a Chords EQ. As you can see my Chords freqs band is more focused on the mid freqs and leaving the sub for the sub bass. This way the sound is way more clean giving space for freqs to breath and to preform at maximum without weakening other freqs which means weakening other instruments.
2- Stereo Imaging
Now close your eyes and imagine yourself wearing a 180° glasses (from your right ear to exactly your left ear). And imagine someone holding a radio and playing an 80s song. You can know in which position he is without the need to open your eyes, right! That space the guy walks in and which is half-around your head is called “Stereo field”. And the effect the sound coming from the radio makes which is going from right to left is called “Stereo imaging”.
You can use that stereo field to play with instruments, you can i.e make the rythmic guitar play only in your left ear and the saturated guitar to play in your left. Pan things, play with stuff. But always make the main sounds in the middle. Like Your Kick, main Hihat, Main snare, Main bass and Vocal in the middle (Mono). So it doesn’t matter which speaker the song is played in the main sounds will always be audible.
In this chart you will see the elements that should be in the mono and the others that you can play with.
Keep in mind that when you hard pan something to the right of left, they gain a few dbs in volume. So make sure to decrease them down or if you are a Logic Pro X enable the Pan Law option found in File > Project Settings > Audio > Check Apply Pan Law Compensation to Stereo Balancers and don’t forget to choose 0db.
3- Parallel Mixing
I’m sure at some point in your music production career you’ve heard of Parallel compression, Parallel reverb, Parallel saturation.
What is Parallel mixing.
Parallel mixing can basically made in 2 methods. either bus or duplicate. Let’s understand together.
Let’s say you have a vocal of yourself, you can of course add compression as an insert in your effects chain. But to use parallel compression, you need to assign the vocal to a bus. Make the compression settings in your bus to the maximum. And now increase the level of sound that will go from your vocal through the compressed bus and into the stereo Output. That’ what parallel compression via bus means.
Now let’s say you have another vocal and you wanna do parallel compression via duplicate. You will have to duplicate that vocal into separate audio track and turn the volume all the way. in the duplicate audio track use compression and make the settings to the maximum, now slowly increase the volume of the duplicate compressed version of your vocal until you start hear the difference. The wet version of your vocal is affecting the dry version and making it sounds harder and tighter. Now that’s what parallel compression via duplicate means.
If you are interested, that’s my gig on Fiverr which is about mastering your song with analog equipment and/or Digital depends on your requests.
Thank you and I hope you’ve learned something from this Medium. Many more to come!
KOKA.