This document is a rough guide on how to go about mixing a pop record from scratch. Many people don’t seem to know where to start, so hopefully this article will give some guidance.

by Jezar

Introduction

I am writing this article because it appears to me that there are an awful lot of enthusiastic people out there, who’ve bought all the right toys, but yet can’t get hold of enough RELEVANT information as to how to use them properly. There’s a lot of information out there for sure, but it can get very confusing with all the contradictory opinions out there.

The landscape is certainly colourful. On the one hand, you’ve got the out-and-out experimental lunatics who claim they’ve found the holy grail: “I’ve put my Stratocaster through my grandmothers radiogram and I now know that this is the ONLY way to achieve that authentic ‘valve’ sound!”. And on the other hand you’ve got the purists: “I never use EQ, never, never, never. I previously used to use mic positioning but I’ve even given up on that too. Now I prefer to avoid any analog equipment and I’ve had my guitarist surgically fit an S/P-DIF digital interface into his brain, and I now plug directly into that. He simply *thinks* what the solos should be, and they come through into my PC with direct-digital clarity. The sound has an amazing natural ambience due to the space between his ears.”

Of course this is all jolly good fun, but it can be very confusing to someone who simply wants to know the basics that are used on 99% of chart recordings today, and will probably remain largely unchanged for may years to come.

There are other confusing statements too. People sometimes say “Roger Nichols doesn’t use EQ”.

Take a comprehensive look through the equipment reviews on Roger Nichols web site and it becomes abundantly clear that he very definately DOES use EQ, compression, the whole lot in fact – and quite frequently too. But like most engineers, he’s just basically saying that whenever possible, he tries to get away without it, and use good recording practice instead – all-in-all an extremely reasonable and practical stance to take.

But if you are learning, don’t stay away from reverb, eq, compression etc., in the mistaken belief that these tools are intrinsically “bad”. They most certainly are not (why would studios spend thousands of dollars equipping their facilities with every processor imaginable if that was the case?). These are all ESSENTIAL TOOLS – all of which you will be required to use at some point. Sure you can screw things up if you use them innaproppriately, but if you are too frightened to ever use them, then you will never learn how to use them properly when you need them.

That’s why recording studios have traditionally employed very young enthusiastic people to train as Sound Engineers. Young people don’t have fixed beliefs, and are much less frightened of making a fool of themselves than older people are. It *is* a bit of a dangerous balance, but one of the reasons why (for example) children are great at learning complex systems like computers is because they are not tainted by a personal history of mistakes. Fear of making mistakes impedes learning, and you have to accept the fact that you will make many, many mistakes on the way to being a good Sound Engineer – and hopefully learn a great deal in the process. I’d be very concerned if I was asked to work with an engineer who claimed they’d never made a mistake – everyone does! Most seasoned professional engineers have a seemingly endless list of after-dinner horror stories from their own past. Even Roger Nichols admits that Steely Dan once had to fork out $60,000 to re-record a song because they’d failed to back up the master of a digital recording – and as anyone involved with computers and audio know, backups are one of the most fundamental, easy and essential things to do.

So let’s talk about the common mixing basics, that all normal engineers do – everyday.

Here, I present to you, some simple instructions on how to mix a pop record. I’ve used it successfully on albums, singles, TV commercials and movie soundtracks. There’s nothing radical here, just straightforward everyday stuff. If you think anything here is strange, then complain to the music industry at large – not to me – because this is pretty much how all mainstream sound engineers go about the process.

There is absolutely no assertion here that this is the “right” way to mix a track – there is no such thing. But what follows is a description of how many (most?) people go about it, and although this won’t guarantee that you will definately get great results, it may help you avoid some of the pitfalls, and if you do perform the following procedure to high standards, there’s no reason why you can’t achieve world-beating results. Many hit records have been produced in peoples bedrooms and backrooms, and you don’t need millions of dollars to do it – just a little knowledge, common-sense, and a good set of ears.

I hope – as always – that people find this interesting and informative.

Step 0 – The Starting Point

This article is written with the assumption that this isn’t just a mix you’ll throw together, but something you are going to spend serious time over – i.e. several hours – and the intention is to get a world-class result by intention, rather than by accident.

I’m assuming here, that you have in your possession the multitrack, and that this multitrack contains the standard compliment of about 8 tracks of drums, one or more tracks of bass, some keyboards and/or guitars or other instruments, a lead vocal, maybe some backing vocals, maybe also some percussion tracks, and perhaps even a few odd sound effects that sounded good at the time.

Additionally, I’m assuming that you have a mixing environment, like n-Track (which is excellent), or at least a traditional multichannel mixer coupled to a multitrack machine, and a reasonably complete set of outboard effects such as reverbs, compressors, equalisers, de-essors and the like. You won’t need them all, but you will almost certainly need some of them.

Step 1 – Familiarisation

Connect a short reverb onto an aux send, and a long reverb onto another. That’s all you need for now.

Play back the song. Loop it, preferably, so you don’t keep having to rewind and press play each time.

Now throw up all the faders to around the middle position. Yep! Every single one of them! Don’t try and “mix” them just yet, simply push the whole darn lot up. If the main stereo level is too loud, move all the faders down a bit. Don’t bother messing with the Aux sends or EQ or any of that stuff for now. Just make sure everything is turned up.

If you hear a sound like an oscillator at the bottom of a wishing-well, then you’ve probably got a “timecode” track in there somewhere. It’s usually on track 23 or 24 or at least on a track at the edges of the mixer. Wherever it is, mute it. It isn’t normally designed to be listened to (although timecode tracks with some effects have – bizzarely enough – featured on some remixes). If the timecode track is being fed to an external piece of equipment like a drum machine, or another mutlitrack machine, make sure that you have muted it in such a way as to not interfere with this.

Now, while the track is playing, push up the faders of things you can’t hear, and pull down anything that’s way too loud. Use panpots fairly randomly (at this point) to move things off center. Keep “Bass Drum”, “Snare Drum”, “Bass” and “Vocal” dead center for now.

Still DO NOT touch that EQ or Aux sends yet!

Listen to the track a few times. Figure out what each part is and label it. If you’re using a PC or digital mixer then the software normally lets you do this. If you’re using an analog mixer then either jot it down on paper, or better still write the parts underneath the faders themselves, making sure this won’t damage the desk. If the desk is made of metal or plastic then you can normally write on the desk surface itself using a chinagraph pencil (do NOT use felt-tip pens!!). If the desk has a fake-leather surround (or you’re not sure how “permanent your marker pens/pencils are), then maybe stick some white sticky tape across the length of the console and use that. Some people prefer to use sticky tape always, as when the session is over, you can stick the tape to the wall of the studio (or somewhere else), and stick it back on the desk if you need to remix. IN ALL CASES make sure that marking the console in this way won’t cause any permanent damage!

When you’ve done this, make a rough mental note of where the faders are, or store them in software. You are not trying to create a “mix” here, just familiarise yourself with the exact contents of each track. On a computer system like n-Track, this is greatly aided by the fact that you can physically SEE if there is sound on a particular track at a given point by looking at the “timeline”. On older, traditional, recording systems – well – you just have to listen. If any tracks seem blank, leave them turned up quite high (and perhaps panned right over to one side) so you will definately hear sound from the track if anything crops up. You may find that – if the number of tracks was limited – different instruments are on a particular track at different points in the song.

It may surprise you to know that you are STILL not ready to mix, so still DO NOT touch that EQ or Aux sends yet!

Even once you are intimately familliar with the contents of EVERY SINGLE TRACK AT EVERY SINGLE POINT OF THE SONG, you are STILL not ready to mix.

You have some very important playing around to do now – and this is the fun part!

AND IT TAKES TIME!

Listen carefully to what each part of the recording contributes to the song. Are there some parts that are obviously meant to “work” together? What do I mean by this? Well, you may find one percussion part – say a “Tambourine”. When you listen to the percussion tracks you may then find another part – say a “Cabasa” that is having a “conversation” with the Tambourine. These things often work well in stereo – with the Tambourine over to the left (for example), and the Cabasa across to the opposite sides. See what stereo placement and level works well for those kind of parts.

Other parts “converse” as well. Guitar parts can be having “conversations”. Try the same thing, with one part over to the left and the other over to the right. Maybe it sounds too “cheesy” like that? Try more subtle placement. All the time you are refining your knowledge of the song and familiarising yourself with the artist and producers intentions when the wrote the musical arrangements.

Don’t be scared to REALLY throw the faders around whilst trying this – you are NOT “mixing” yet. It is extremely important that you hear the song from different perspectives – from the guitars “point of view”, from the drums “point of view” etc. It is often helpful to mute all the parts apart from (e.g.) all the guitars or just the drums, so you can figure out the subtle interplay between them. Also make notes of things that “clash”. Sometimes when “tracking” (recording original parts) a poor monitor mix disguised the fact that certain parts don’t really work so well together. You need to be aware of these things if you are going to mix the track.

Make sure you read any notes accompanying the song. I use pen and paper to make notes, but some people use the “Notes” pages in PC software to store information. Make sure you look for any notes that people made during recording. It can be very embarrassing to spend a long time sorting out sound for a particular track, only to discover in the tape box at the last moment a little hand-written note saying “Don’t use track 14 – it’s to be erased!”. Similarly, remember that in many cases you might not be *required* to use every part on the tape – the band are looking for your creativity after all. Sometimes if you “thicken up” one part of the song, certain other parts may not be required at all.

Another thing to watch out for, are “old” parts that people simply forgot were on the recording and aren’t meant to be used. Sometimes these aren’t even labelled. If you hear something decidedly strange and are in doubt, phone up the artist or producer and ask if the track was really intended to be used. Often they are not! Sometimes (especially if multiple record producers have worked on a project) people are worried about erasing parts from a previous version and leave many of them behind “just in case”. Hugh Padgam (well known UK record producer) one mixed a song by “The Human League” that spanned a total of SIX TWENTY-FOUR TRACK TAPES! (a total of 144 tracks!) simply because every producer that worked previously on the song had been too frightened to erase their predecessors work. Naturally, his first job was to spend many hours, “sorting out” the multitracks, to get it down to a more manageable 24 track recording. This sort of thing is naturally very unfair on the final remix engineer/producer – and wastes a lot of expensive time – but you need to be aware that it happens, and be aware that you are not necessarilly expected to include everything that is on the tape. But to make these decisions you need to spend a fair while making yourself very familliar with the contents of the recording.

A console with real faders (i.e. hardware ones you slide with your hands, not with a mouse) DRAMATICALLY speeds up this process. You can chuck faders about all over the place very quickly and really get a “hands-on-feel” for the song. If your track is MIDI based, then you might like to consider buying one of those relatively cheap MIDI controllers with 16 real faders on, so you can flick them up and down and do this process quickly. There are other controllers that can help too. My Yamaha sampler has four knobs on the front that can be configured to act as MIDI controllers in exactly this way, which can be useful. With some PC software these controllers can be used to control audio levels instead of – or as well as – MIDI tracks.

If – on a MIDI-based track – you find that there is some MIDI automation that seems to be overiding your hardware MIDI controlling device, then see if your software lets you turn such automation off. If it doesn’t, you can try and reconfigure your MIDI controller to adjust “Expression” instead of “Volume” (almost no-one automates “Expression”) and that will let you control the volumes whilst keeping the previously automated MIDI data intact.

At this point, you should have some pretty good idea of how the song is designed to fit together, and you’ve probably made some notes – either on paper or in your head – for things you plan to do when you actually “mix” the track. If you really DON’T have any ideas at all, then – to be honest – I think you need to play with the track some more before mixing, because you obviously don’t understand it enough to do the “fine tweaks” that mixing is really all about.

I have actually STOPPED a mix at this point before, and said to the artist – “I’m sorry, I don’t really understand how this song fits together properly. Can you sit with me and explain how the bits are intended to fit together? – I just can’t see it myself yet”. People normally jump at this opportunity and are eager to help.

Also, make sure that you listen to – and understand – the words of the song and their emotional and sonic content.

When you feel comfortable that you “have a map” in your head of the song, and “know the territory”, then you are NEARLY ready to get down to process of actually mixing the song.

So how do you do that?

I’ll go through the basic principles in a moment, but – to be honest – after you’ve done it a few times, you just “know” what needs to be done, and – apart from a few unexpected tricky bits – you don’t really think about it technically at all – you just sort of go into autopilot for periods of about 30 minutes, then sit back and listen to what you’ve done objectively, and repeat this process until the mix is done.

It can often be useful at the end of a mix – when everything is finished and everyone has gone home – to examine closely what you ACTUALLY did, because most of the time you don’t really know – you just used your ears. It’s useful to do this bit of study at the end of a mix so that if you are in a similar position in future – and for some reason your ears aren’t guiding you – then you know what settings to use as a standby.

Does that sound bad? Is that “mixing by numbers”? Of course it is bad – but sometimes you have no choice. Often there is a great big studio session booked, and you wake up that morning with a stinking cold and you can’t hear a goddamn thing. Naturally the best course of action would be to come clean and find a replacement engineer but this is not always possible. You can’t cancel the session (LOADS of money down the drain, paying for all those session musicians and studio time!), so you have to do the entire session on autopilot, using settings you remember as being “good”, and hope that no-one notices that you’re ill. You can both amaze and depress yourself with how remarkably well you can engineer a session whilst really being quite deaf. My old boss used to say to me “Jez – as long as you have two legs I want you in here every morning! – AND NO EXCEPTIONS!”

Anyway – I’m getting off-track…

Step 2 – Calibrating Your Ears With a Rough Mix

After all that playing around and “familliarising” yourself with the mix, then you should have an idea of where to put the faders for an acceptable “rough” mix, so put the faders where everything sounds loosely “OK”, and pan instruments to rough, acceptable positions (we will tweak them later), and add varying degrees of long and short reverb to each sound where appropriate. Short reverb “pushes back” a sound into the mix. Long reverb just makes a sound “float”. Don’t spend too much time on this.

Now, make yourself a cup of coffee and have a rest for a few minutes. (Unless you don’t want to, or perhaps you prefer tea?)

Now get out your CD collection and listen to some of your favourite records that sound good. Listen to some things that sound similar to the kind of thing you are trying to achieve, but also listen to some things that are quite different. It’s best not to do this if any of the band is present. They tend to get offended. “Why are you comparing us to *that* terrible group?” they’ll say. If you tell them that you are merely “adjusting your ears”, they will get concerned that either you are trying to create a sound like the other band, or that you have simply gone mad. Neither is true. You’re just using the other records to put “stakes in the ground” so you can say, “ah – this is where we are on the map” – “this is where we stand compared to everyone else”. It doesn’t mean you’re after the sound of the records you’re listening too – on the contrary, you might be trying to get very far away from it!

You really are just aligning your ears. Making sure you know what the monitor speakers sound like in that particular studio, in your particular frame of mind, and in your particular state of health. I’m being dead serious here, honest! – the way you perceive sound depends very much on your mental and physical condition. Some days, even though your hearing “seems” OK, your brain seems to be in a mood where it can’t fit sounds together – or mentally seperate them – as well as it has on other occasions. You need to be aware of the subjective “quality” of your hearing today, and listening to known records helps let you know where you stand. They don’t even have to be other peoples records – previous mixes of your own are just as useful.

Once your ears are centered, switch of the CD, and listen to the track you are about to mix, once more.

By the end of the track, you will either be very excited or extremely depressed.

You’ll be excited if mixing possibilities “leap out” at you in your brain. You’ll be depressed if the track sounds “pants” and you realise that there’s a LOT of work to be done to bring it to acceptable standard.

Step 3 – Starting The “Real” Mix

Now we start the actual process of mixing. Some people will have enthusiastically jumped straight to this point, thinking this is the real starting point. They are likely to be in big trouble if that’s the case…

Why? Here are some reasons (there are others):

a) If you leap in at this point without doing all that “familliarising” with the song, you can end up spending a couple of hours getting the worlds most powerful drum sound, and then find – when you add in the other instruments – that the sound of this song is (for example) a “soft” ballad, not a “power” ballad, and even if you squeeze the right sound out of everything else, the final result will just be plain WRONG.

b) Similarly, you can mix almost the entire track, and then when you add in the vocals and listen to the lyrics, discover you’ve done entirely the wrong treatment for the lyrical nature of the song.

c) Worse still, you can get 80 or 90 percent of the mix polished off – with just a few instruments to go (maybe even just the vocal left) – and realise that there is no way to get the rest of the instruments to conform to the sound you created for the backing track mixed so far. This is very painful and awkward; you have to decide whether to really twist the remaining elements of the mix into place (feeling guilty all the way), or instead to throw away the last few hours work and start again.

(and – in case you were wondering – I’ve made all three mistakes in my past with disasterous results)

So: You know the song, you know where it’s heading – but how do you take it there?

It’s relatively simple to explain. You simply work your way through every instrument in the mix, carefully refining its sound, and checking it against everything else in the mix. You normally have to return to each instrument at least two or three times (and often much more) as the mix takes shape.

By the time you’re finished, everything should sound like it is part of the “same” song. That is harder than it sounds. Normally there are at least one or two things that sound like they are not “fitting in” with the rest of the song.

What order do you do them in?

It’s up to you, but as drums and bass are normally the backbone of every song, with the vocal sitting “on top” of everything else, it makes sense to build a mix up in terms of the musical layering of the song. When working on each sound, you tend to listen to it in isolation, and then “validate” your changes by listening to the track againast everything else in the mix so far. The order of working is usually something ROUGHLY like this:

• Drums
• Bass
• Main “pad” sounds (keyboards or rhythm guitar)
• Other lead parts (pick guitars / other keyboards etc)
• Incidental parts (brass stabs / fx etc)
• Percussion
• Vocals
• Backing vocals

as I say, you’d normally rotate around the above list a few times, then:

• Program any mutes on the above tracks
• Possibly compress overall mix (go easy!…)
• Fine tweaking of fader levels
• Mix down to stereo
• Go to bed leaving everything undisturbed
• Check everything next morning

- sometimes you might EQ the overall mix, but you should be real careful about doing this whilst you mix. It’s not a good idea. You can always EQ the overall mix another day once you’ve “lived with it” for a while, and if you screw it up, it doesn’t matter because you’ve always got the original. If you “miss-EQ” the stereo mix as you lay it down, it can be hard to fix it later. This kind of stuff is best left to a mastering engineer, but there’s nothing wrong with some GENTLE compression (go real easy) as you lay down the mix. Gentle compression also affects the balance of the mix slightly, so people like to do it before the final, very fine tweaking of the fader levels.

Let’s now look at the process in more detail:

Drums

Some important “feel” things to bear in mind when working on the drum sound:

• The drum sound must suit the nature of the song
• The sounds should “gel” and sound like ONE kit – in particular, the bass drum and snare drum should sound like they naturally fit together as a pair.
• On a pop track, the drums should sound “solid” and “robust”, and have real impact.
• Drum timing can be “loose” but never “sloppy” (yes, the sound DOES effect your perception of timing)
• The drums need to sound powerful enough for you to FEEL the rhythm, without overpowering the rest of the song.
• The drums should have dynamics during the song, and not be monotonous (you can do this with subtle fader movements)

Stereo drum tips:

• Stereo placement of drums CAN be from the drummers point of view OR from the audience point of view. Doing it from the drummers point of view (with wide stereo) does seem a bit “gimmicky” and unrealistic these days.
• Bass Drum and Snare Drum are usually dead center unless you’re doing Jazz stuff with brushes, and the hi-hat is usually about 50 percent off to one side.
• The two top Toms are usually equally spaced either side of the centre, and the floor toms much further to one side.
• Toms fills which are too “wide” in stereo can be distracting
• It is good to have at least two different cymbals in use, at
  different stereo positions
• Cymbals (like toms) should also not be too wide. 50-75 percent off-center is enough
• If “ambience” tracks have been recorded, make sure they don’t disappear when listening to the mix in mono. If they do, then don’t have them set so wide in stereo.
• Reverb either on Bass Drum or Snare Drum sometimes sounds good if ONE of them is in mono (gives an interesting alternating “close” / “open” effect on the stereo image). Listen to many different pop songs to hear how often people experiment with this.
• If you want to use things like noise gates on toms, make sure
  it doesn’t upset the stereo imaging of the kit overall as the
  gates open and close.
• Depending on how they were engineered, a stereo “cymbal”
  track is sometimes intended to act as a stereo “ambience”
  track as well. If this is the case, simply use low-frequency EQ
  to control the cymbals/ambience balance.

Drum sound tips:

Bass drums (especially real ones) are frequently problematic and don’t have enough impact. First thing to try, is to use EQ to cut a little of the bottom end off, and push the level up. This will make the bass drum “breathe” more easilly. Then try boosting EQ at around 3-4Khz – quite a narrow EQ setting tends to work best. If the bass drum is inconsistent then use a compressor to even the levels out, but try using EXTREME compression with a slow attack time. This can put one hell of a *thwack!* into the bass drum. Watch your master levels though if you so this, and be prepared to put a limiter across the whole mix later if required. This kind of compression on a bass drum often works best BEFORE the EQ (which is unusual for compression). If using a sampled or ananlog drum machine bass drum (i.e. not a real kit played by a real drummer), adding a degree of VERY SHORT reverb helps add “air” to the bass drum, without compromising power. On a pop track, the bass drum should feel like it is physically hitting you somewhere between your feet and your chest, depending on the style of music. In “drum ‘n’ bass” music, the bass drum will feel like it is hitting you between your groin and your feet, whereas on rock tracks it is more in the stomach and chest area.

Another bass drum trick worth playing with, is to mix the sound of a bass drum with a short delay. And I mean REAL short here – we’re not talking about 20-30ms here, no way… We’re talking about getting down to the 5,4,3,2,1 millisecond range. What this does is to produce a comb-filter effect on the bass drum that filters out some of the low end, whilst re-inforcing the top end. Maybe try a *weeny* bit of feedback (try both positive and negative feedback if your delay allows it). To emphasise: We’re not talking about a traditional “delay” effect here. We’re using the delay as a kind of “weird EQ” on the bass drum sound. This technique is kind of unpredictable. It depends on what you feed in. Try it anyway from time to time to see what you get.

Snare drums are renowned for being troublesome. Most of the tips that apply to the bass drum work for snare as well, although with snares you often find you need to ADD low-frequency EQ, rather than cutting it back. Adding bass and adding top to a snare drum gives a more “aggressive” sound than trying the more “theoretically correct” method of just sucking out the middle. Sucking out the middle on a snare tends to make it sound too smooth, too sweet, and too restrained. Snares frequently suit a mixture of copious amounts of short reverb, and a medium amount of long reverb. Snare drums on pop tracks should sound like they hit you in the face, working down to your chest. On drum ‘n’ bass tracks the snare should sound physically “higher” in three-dimensions than on a rock track.

Toms usually need the bottom end thinning out a little, to give them more air and impact from the top range. If your dealing with a recording of a real drumkit, avoid adding too much top to toms, as it can badly screw up the cymbals and hi-hats. Cutting back on bass is the best approach, coupled with some upper midrange boost. Reverb for toms tends to be similar to the snare, but with the emphasis more on the long reverb.

Hi-hats and cymbals, unlike the drums, usually work best with “subtractive” EQ rather than additive. In other words, to get a nice “shiny” cymbal sound, do NOT boost the top end. Instead, roll off some bass, and suck out lots of middle. Adding top end – even on loud rock tracks, often makes cymbals sound far too agressive, too small, over-emphasises cymbal dynamics and often seems to introduce an unmusical distortion which is distracting to the rest of the mix. If cymbals sound too “short”, you can use long reverb to extend them, although this doesn’t work well with real drum kits as it blurs the rest of the kit due to natural leakage.
Drum soundcheck:

You’ll know when the drums are right – or at least getting there. It should be possible to listen to just the drums from start to finish, and the whole performance should sound solid, sonically excellent, and emotionally powerful (even on a quiet song). All the drums should sound like they are working together as a single performance, and each drum should sound detailed enough for you to pick it out of the mix and point to where it is in the stereo image. Each drum or cymbal should sound razor sharp in its detail and positioning (that doesn’t necessarilly mean “bright” either).

What you are trying to AVOID, is the drums “spreading” into an ill-defined, stereo, lump of goo. This happens a lot with real drums, due to leakage between microphones, but with skilful EQ of the drum mics, it *is* possible to get a detailed and highly controlled sound, without compromising the sonic integrity of the kit overall. The challenge with drum machines, and drum samples, is to get the kit to sound like it is an “integrated” kit where all instruments have been matched to work together well. Drum craftsmen spend years learning their trade so that the kits they make work well together, so bear in mind that it can take skill and practice to create an “integrated” sound from a bunch of drum samples.

Bass

On a pop track, the bass parts and drum parts should work so well together that they sound almost as if they were performed by one person at the same time. In particular, the bass and bass *drum* should “lock” together to form the pounding of the track. Poor bass guitarists who play over-the-top melodic bass lines often lose this synchronisation with the bass drum resulting in a less powerful impact.

Stereo bass tips

On most pop tracks, the bass is best in mono and smack bang dead center. A bit of short reverb can help, but it can smear the imaging of the bass, making its stereo image seem “unstable”, when you really NEED it to be “locked” tightly to the bass drum.

On rock ballads, stereo CHORUS can give bass a wonderfully wide swirly sound, whose imprecise stereo imaging actually *helps* the dreamy nature of love songs etc., and can make a picked bass sound more like a fretless one.

Too much stereo on bass can make your mix hard to cut onto vinyl (important for loud club tracks), and used to risk serious damage to expensive disc cutting heads. Mastering engineers used to use an “eliptical filter” to effectively “mono” the bass to prevent such damage, which still allowed upper harmonics to give the impression of a “wide” bass, and although it is true that modern disc cutting lathes don’t suffer from this so much, it is still the case that too much stereo bass can cause a vinyl record to jump on playback – especially with loud 12″ cuts.

Too much low-frequency bass too loud in the mix, can eat into valuable mix headroom, severely limiting how “loud” your track can be mastered. This can be fine on sparse tracks (like drums ‘n’ bass and reggae), but on a pop song can “weaken” literally *everything* else in the mix, including the lead vocals, and additionally can make mix compression difficult, requiring the use of sophisticated multi-band compressors (or at least side-chain equalisation) in order to avoid “modulation effects” (pumping of the overall mix, caused by an overbalanced bass).

Bass sound tips:

Like bass drum, many – if not most – bass parts can be helped by CUTTING low-frequency EQ, and NOT by boosting it as one might expect. In the context of a mix overall, the overbalancing of upper harmonics caused by cutting back on low frequency, can make the bass sound more powerful, not less powerful as you might expect.
Basses (guitar AND keyboards) are sometimes quite noisy. You can usually roll off quite a lot of top-end to get rid of the hiss without it affecting the sound too much.

Some songs have two bass parts – perhaps synth and bass guitar. Be aware that it can be troublesome to get them to work together, and one of them should probably have to get the “lions share” of low-frequency compared to the other. It’s difficult to generalise about this situation, because it is ambitious and a little unusual – except to say that it is rarely easy to get the two to work together well, and much experimenting may be required.

Bass guitar parts very often (almost always) need some compression to keep the energy equal and sustained throughout the song, otherwise, minor imperfections in the bass playing seem to leave “holes” in the track.

Like bass drums, bass parts can frequently be made more “punchy” by the addition of some fierce compression with a slow attack and fast release.

If compressing bass, don’t make the release time too fast, or weird wobbly stuff will happen as the compressor tries to follow the waveforms of the bass itself instead of the overall amplitude. If the bass is particularly sloppy compared to the bass drum, there is a bizzare trick that is often used: Try putting the bass through a noise gate (of all things) and gating it using the BASS DRUM in the noise gate side-chain, so that the bass drum “pumps” the bass part. You should use the “gain reduction” control of the noise gate to control how much “pumping” takes place, or – if this control is not present – simply mix the gated bass part with the original bass part. This is kind of nasty and extreme, but it has saved many a mix, and is a fairly well-known trick.

Bass soundcheck:

The bass sound is right when it feels strong and solid and seems to underpin the rest of the track. It should emphasise the drums whilst at the same time adding a whole bunch more to the track. It should sound distinct from the bass drum, but not so much that the two cease to work together as a pair. Like the bass drum, it is more about how the sound “feels” rather than sounds, so you’ll never get a good bass sound working with headphones (except by accident), as the bass needs to be felt from the chest downards to the knees (and sometimes even the feet!).

After working on the bass and drums, they should be performing “as one”.

Summary So Far

We’ve examined the basics of starting a “serious” mix (i.e. one that will take several hours), we stressed the importance of thoroughly familiarising yourself with the track before even thinking about starting the mix properly, and then discussed the basics of getting the drum sound and bass parts up and running smoothly. No doubt at this point you are itching to get on with the rest of the mix. But before we do so, I want to briefly cover an important subject that pertains to live drums in particular, and that subject is “noise gates” Although it is true that you can “gate” the drums later on in the mix, doing so will “unbalance” the work you’ve done so far – so if you want to use gates on the drums, you’d better start doing so at the beginning, before you start adding in much else.

Using Noise Gates

A “Noise Gate” – as many of you will know already – is a device that only lets sound through if it is louder than a set amount. So in some ways it is a bit like a dodgy connection lead! – except that:

• You can precisely calibrate when it cuts in
• It doesn’t crackle when it cuts out – the sound fades gently
  away at a predetermined rate

Gates are used to cut out unwanted background sound when an instrument isn’t playing. Naturally when the instrument does play then you will hear the background sound switch in as well as the instrument. This doesn’t usually matter, because the playing of the instrument normally masks the background noise. You could use a gate – for example – to cut out all that amplifier hum and hiss in-between parts of a guitar solo – it would certainly be objectionable to have it going on throughout the whole song when the guitar isn’t playing.

Of course there is normally some sound quality loss when going through an analog noise-gate, but this is not usually significant and it shouldn’t concern you. Also, if you are using a compressor on something already, then any built-in noise gate on that compressor will use the same gain-control circuitry anyway and so there is no further loss in signal quality – the gate effectively comes “for free”.

If you are using a mastering compressor, then its built-in noise gate is useful as it can act as a quick-and-easy way of trimming off all that background noise before the first downbeat of a song. It certainly saves a lot of time by eliminating the need to edit by hand in a sound editor later!

However, in many individual instrument cases within a multitrack recording, you can do a better job by hand instead of using a noise gate. Either by erasing the parts of tracks where the instruments are not meant to be playing (be careful though!), or simply by automating the mix to mute channels when people aren’t supposed to be playing.

Where noise gates come into their own is when gating a signal that comes and goes rapidly – and drums are a prime example of this. It would obviously take an impossible amount of time to try and accurately “erase” the gap between every signal snare drum beat, and this is especially the kind of situation where the automatic nature of a noise gate is at its best.

Specifically, there are five uses of noise gates that I can think of (at this moment) that relate directly to drums:

• Gating sampled drums to shorten their length
• Creating “gated” reverb
• Helping to eliminate “spill”
• Helping to eliminate “resonance”
• Creating a “clinically clean” drum sound
• Lets look at each of these in detail.

In each case when gating drums, the “Attack” should normally be set to its fastest, unless you are using a very, very fast gate which might introduce an audible “click” when the gates cuts in.

Gating sampled drums to shorten their length

There’s little (or no) benefit in gating sampled sounds from a drum machine simply to remove noise, as the noise is not normally significant (an obvious exception to this is if you have taken samples from another recording which is noisy). However, if you are mixing a pre-recorded tape, you can use a noise gate to shorten the length of (for example) the snare drum. This is something that you would otherwise not be able to do without access to the original sampler or drum machine. The “hold” and – particularly – the “release” controls are the ones that affect this.

Creating “gated” reverb

These days, most digital reverbs have a “gated” reverb preset, so the need to gate reverb by hand has almost completely disappeared. Previously, you would have to feed the stereo reverb return through a pair of “linked” noise gates, and feed the “side chain” of the gate – the signal path that triggers it to open – from the direct snare sound. You would need to use a noise gate with a precise “hold” control – which keeps the gate open after it has triggered – in order to specify how long the “gated” sound lasts. An abrupt “release” setting after a fairly long “hold” setting usually gives the most dramatic effect. Normally, exactly one beat or half-beat sounds about right. “Drawmer” noise gates became famous as the best tool to achieve this in the analog world.

Compressing ambient microphones (if present on the multitrack recording) can lead to a spectacularly loud sounding drum kit, and gating such a stereo signal in the same way as gating reverb can heighten the dramatic effect even more.

Helping to eliminate “spill”

With a real drum kit, most microphones will pick up a significant amount of sound from the other drums. This can severely restrict your ability to EQ one drum without it affecting the rest of the drum balance. By gating each drum separately, this gives you more flexibility. But there are a couple of problems.

Firstly, when you EQ the drums, this can easily make the spill from other drums so loud that the gate “misfires” and opens up when it shouldn’t. If you raise the “threshold” control to compensate, you risk not triggering on important drum beats. The classic problem case for this, is a loud hi-hat causing a snare drum gate which has had a lot of high EQ added (for a brighter snare sound) to open on a hi-hat beat instead of a snare beat. This sounds particularly loud and objectionable, and really sounds like a mistake when it happens. One solution to this is to gate the snare before the equaliser. Some gates also have separate, simple EQ controls on the trigger signal so you can roll off (for example) the high-frequency troublesome hi-hat spill which is causing the gate to misfire. However the problem with doing this, is that it can make the gate open a little bit too late, losing some of the impact of the snare drum. Sometimes the only way to solve this, is to duplicate the snare drum track, move the copied track back a few milliseconds, and use that as the basis for the signal feeding the gates “sidechain”. This will make the gate open up before the snare beat has even happened which is pretty cool. Some software controlled gates (even hardware-based digital ones) have a delay available for the direct signal path in order to achieve much the same result. Naturally in this case, it means that you will have to move the master track back a few seconds in order to compensate, but on digital multitracks this is relatively easy, and it avoids the inconvenience of having to prepare a separate snare track just to trigger the gate. If you do this, remember to jot this down in the notes that accompany the multitrack, as people using the multitrack later will simply think that the snare is out of time with everything else.

Helping to eliminate “resonance”

Related to the problem of “spill” is the problem of “resonance”. A real drum kit has drum skins that resonate in sympathy with each other. For example, every time that the drummer uses the bass drum, tom-toms will often emit a faint “boo” sound. Similarly, when the bass drum is used, the snare drum often has an irritating sympathetic “rattle”, which sounds in the final mix like a rattly bass drum. Gating the drums can help eliminate these types of unwanted noises. If gating makes the kit sound too clean, it is possible on many gates, to let a little of the signal through at all times, so that you are not plunged into total silence when the gates kick in. This is sometimes called “soft gating”.

The techniques for gating resonance out of drums are similar to gating “spill”. The main difference is that when equalising the trigger signal (the “sidechain”), you sometimes have to do the opposite of what you do for spill. For example, to remove resonance on toms, you often have to use a trigger signal that has had the top AND the bottom rolled off – otherwise the “boo” sound of the resonance as well as hi-hat spill might cause the gate to misfire.

By using a combination of high-frequency and low-frequency rolloff (which are often provided on the gates themselves), it is usually possible to “narrow” the side chain signal to something that makes the gate trigger at the appropriate time, without cutting off the front of the beat.

Cautions on gating a “noisy” drum kit

Gating is not the “holy grail” of a getting a clean drum sound. A clean-sounding drum kit is the best solution. When recording, it is far better to try and persuade the drummer to investigate and eliminate any resonance in their kit rather than thinking that it can all be gated “in the mix”. Sometimes, all this takes is careful tuning of the drum kit to avoid resonance and rattles. Other times, “gaffer” tape has to be stuck on the skins of the drums in carefully-chosen places to dampen the resonant frequencies and make the kit sound “tighter”. In other cases, you may be regrettably short of time and have to (unfortunately) fix the sound later.

When resonance and spill are severe, gating can ironically draw attention to them (in the form of “breathing”, which is the name given to the audible effect of gates and compressors that can obviously be heard working). When resonance and spill are very severe, it can be beyond the ability of gates to fix the problem, and you may have to be more imaginative in looking for a solution.

The most common problem caused by severe spill affecting gating, is when toms that sounded too dull need to be brightened on mixing (just to make the sound acceptable). If there is a lot of spill from the cymbals onto the drum tracks, you can find that if you gate the toms, a rather unpleasant effect occurs when a drum fill follows a loud cymbal crash. What happens is that the cymbals appear to “pulsate” in a thrashy way every time a tom is hit. This is the sound of the Cymbal “spill” breaking through, and is very unpleasant. Perhaps you might decide to take an alternative approach to fixing the problem, such as actually making the toms sound even duller than they did before, by rolling off the top end, and then using something like an Aphex Aural Exciter to re-synthesize the missing top end. That will give you a new top end, without the same level of cymbal breakthrough.

Often when mixing, I prefer not to gate the toms at all, and if gating would otherwise be required – I simply automate the mutes on the tom channels so that they are only switched on when a genuine tom fill occurs. If this makes the drum kit sound too artificial, I use soft fader movements instead to simply lower the level of the toms when they are not being played. I prefer to do this rather than using gates, because otherwise you can find that the whole stereo image of the drum kit changes and moves when the fills are played. Another solution would be to gate the toms as a pair rather than individually. Sometimes this works, but by no means always.

Creating a “clinically clean” drum sound

Finally, even if spill and resonance are not a significant problem in themselves, you can use gates to eliminate even the merest hint of them, and gate every single drum down to its bare essential sound. This will give you a “clinically clean” drum sound, but bear in mind that it will also strip a lot of “life” out of the sound, and you’ll probably need a good deal of very high-quality short reverb to put some life back in. The result will probably still sound artificial.

Summary of gating drums

As you can see, gates can be a lot of hard work. If all you are trying to do is to clean up the drum sound a bit, consider simply muting the toms in-between fills using mixer automation (mute and un-mute on (e.g.) snare beats to cover the change in sound). That is frequently all that is required to tidy up the drum sound. Pan-global gating is not usually required and can sound contrived and unnatural.

If you can get away without gating or muting any drum tracks at all, then so much the better.

In any case – as I mentioned at the beginning of this section, make these decisions about the drum sound at this early stage of the mix and not later. If you gate drums towards the end of a mix, the whole atmosphere of the mix can change in a disconcerting way.

Pads

Not all songs have a “pad” sound. Some songs work by placing all the responsibility on the lead instruments. However, a good “pad” sound adds body to the track and can also hide a multitude of sins in the playing of the other musical parts – it’s a simple and convenient way of making a track sound “full”.

A “pad” is a simple musical part playing a straight (often ersimplified) chord sequence in a middle to low register throughout the entire track. Usually performed on a guitar or keyboard, the choice of sound is normally warm and subtle. Pads are usually recorded in stereo – either as a result of the sound itself (e.g. keyboards), or by the use of effects during recording (stereo chorus on guitar), or – particularly in the case of guitars, by double-tracking in stereo with each of two takes panned left and right.

If present, the pad is absolutely key to the sound and feel of the song because normally every other instrument part was designed and played with the pad already in place. It really forms the “foundation stone” on which the rest of the track is built. From time to time as you mix, try muting it and see what happens. It feels like someone has literally pulled the rug from under your feet! (interestingly, a friend of mine labels pads as “carpet” on the track sheet). What remains of the song without the pad in place will sound “suspended” in space without visible (audible?) means of support, and probably will sound very strange.

The challenge in getting a good pad sound is making it warm, wide and full, but yet somehow transparent at the same time. You’ll need that transparency because it leaves space in the mix in which to place the other instruments. If the pad sounds in any way “stodgy”, it will get in the way of the other instruments that you intend to add to the mix later, so you need to get that “transparency” correct NOW before you add the other parts in.

The “pad” should feel like a warm blanket wrapped around the song. I don’t think that is a particularly over-the-top analogy – it is certainly how all “pad” parts sound to me. So thinking “warm blanket” may help you. The pad, in particular, should fill the sound stage without having a particularly defined character. If you give the pad too much character then it will distract from all the other goodies you are going to put into the mix later. Also, because pads generally play from the start of the song to the end, they can get boring if they stand out too much. They are there primarily for structural support for the song.

Stereo Pad Tips:

Check the pad on headphones. Many keyboard pads are often too wide for headphones and feel unpleasant and disorienting, so reduce the extremity of the stereo width, so that you feel there is at least something in the middle when listening on headphones.

Some tracks use a double-tracked part for stereo. This often happens on guitar-based tracks where you get two dependent strummy-type parts which are designed to be placed left and right. Such parts can sound really nice, but they usually work best if they are NOT panned fully left/right, as the sound will be too wide, and you won’t get the full chorusy sound of the two guitars interacting together.

If you really want the two independent guitar parts to be panned hard left and hard right, then you can thicken them up with a simple technique. For the left hand guitar, add a totally wet, but simple chorus effect return panned 50% off centre to the right. Similarly, for the right hand guitar, add another totally wet, simple chorus effect return panned 50% off centre to the left. This often works, but is sometimes over-the-top. Swap the panpot positioning of the chorused counterparts with their direct-sound partners, and reduce the level of the chorused parts for a more subtle effect. If you have just a single pad track in mono, it is usually worth spending some time with a high-quality chorus unit converting the mono sound to a wide all-embracing stereo one.

Specifically for pad parts, if you have two separate instruments playing “pad” type parts simultaneously, it is often more effective to leave them panned to the centre to act as one, and use high-quality chorus to create stereo wideness, rather than simply panning the two parts to different positions.

The pad should be stimulating both of your ears independently, but not so much as to leave a gaping whole in the middle. Reduce the stereo width if in doubt, and – as mentioned above – check on headphones.

Pad Sound Tips:

As you can tell, chorus is important to pad parts, but such chorus should most definitely not be a stereo swirly mess. Really take the time to experiment with the settings on your chorus unit to see how subtle you can get it. Keep delay times short, and modulation speeds low and you can get a chorus that really enhances the high frequency end of a track without it getting too, ..well.., “chorussy”!

Some instruments don’t suit chorus at all. Piano is a classic. Put chorus on a piano and it sounds out-of-tune at best, and plain old cheap honky-tonk at worst. Let your ears be the ruling judge of whether chorus is even required at all.

Sucking out a fair bit of 700-800 Hz (or thereabouts), and cutting back a bit of the low end, on pad-like sounds, with a fairly wide bandwidth EQ, softens them and gives them the transparent “hi-fi” sound which serves as a nice backdrop to the rest of the mix. It “restrains” the sound, dampening any aggression, and the fact that the high frequencies are allowed to rise up again, can add a silky sheen to both keyboards and guitars alike. Make sure it doesn’t swamp the bottom end of the mix if you do this.

Pad Sound Check:

You’ve now got drums, bass and pad in place. At this point, the song should sound amazing. Yup! even with just those three elements, it should really feel special. The backing track should sound “complete”. You should feel like simply adding the vocal would be enough. This should really be true of any instrument as you add it into the mix, so I won’t say it any more. Don’t forget to double-check the sound with all the remaining elements (from the rough mix) in place too, or you might have difficulty getting them to “conform” to the mix later.

Personally this is my favourite point in the mix, as it is pure and unsullied by the rest of the twiddly bits coming up later, and you shouldn’t feel particularly tired at this point. You should make a note of this mix – either by storing it in software or by simply making chinagraph marks to the side of real faders to mark their positions.

Why? Because later on, if the mix doesn’t seem to be working, then this simple mix is a great reference point to compare each individual instrument to, in order to diagnose where the problems are.

Also, if you are doing an “extended mix”, then this simple drums/bass/pad mix is a great thing to suddenly drop down to during a breakdown section of such a remix – perhaps with some dramatic percussion bashing about over the top? (just a suggestion).

When you have these three (or so) elements in place, then you should be very careful not to go changing the sound of any of them in future unless absolutely necessary. The mix of bass, drums, and pad, is really a “signing off” point in the mixing the song.

Time for you to have some more coffee now…

This is also a good time – if you are using a PC-Based system (such as n-Track) – To “render” the drums, bass and “pad” sound to a single stereo track. This should free up some CPU power for you to use on the lead parts. You should obviously file away the original parts away for safe keeping – perhaps the easiest way being to save the project as it currently is now to a safe place, then re-save it to the current working directory before removing the original separate parts from the current project.

Download this tutorial as a PDF file

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2003 at 8:57 am and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.