Post by Michael Lawrence on Jun 11, 2018 3:45:36 GMT
Howdy, y'all.
When I first starting mixing on digital audio workstations back in high school, I would quickly get overwhelmed by all the busing and routing, or mess up my gain structure, or just end up with a terrible overcompressed mix. In this post, I will be demonstrating a procedural workflow for DAW projects that will help you stay organized, avoid missing steps, and build the mix in a constructive fashion. I will provide a link to the source files, and show you what I'm doing every step of the way, so you can mix along with me in your own DAW of choice!
Since we're on Ethan's forums, I'll also bust a myth:
You do not need fancy, special, expensive plugins to make a good mix. Sure, I have my favorite "go-to" plugins that I am willing to pay money for: my desert island two would be Slate Trigger (for drum replacement) and the Waves C6 (for problematic EQ situations). However, even the most basic DAWs have EQ, compressors, and reverb, and I'm going to demonstrate how to develop the sound of a mix using only these basic tools.
Also, good mixes do not need to take dozens of hours. If you're spending that long on a mix, you're likely doing something wrong. I created the mix in this thread, plus all the associated materials for the purpose of this post (audio examples and screenshots) in less than an hour. Now, it's not a full song, and I've also been mixing for my entire life, but the point remains:
I'm taking source tracks and mixing them quickly with only basic plugins on budget monitors and we'll get a listenable result.
So here's how this will work:
The website www.cambridge-mt.com/ms-mtk.htm has a huge library of downloadable multitracks for mixing practice.
For this example, I have chosen It Was My Fault for Waiting by Atlantis Bound. Specifically, I'll be mixing the song's first chorus.
To download the .wav files, click either "Edited Excerpt" under the Atlantis Blound entry on the above-linked page or right here if you're too lazy to go find it. Of course, you could download and mix the full song, instead, if you really want to!
Getting Started
Open your DAW and add 25 new audio tracks. Then import the downloaded wav files onto those tracks. I'll be using Logic Pro X, but you can use whatever DAW you are most comfortable with. As mentioned above, I'll only be using basic plugins that are available in virtually all DAWs.
Right now, we just have a bunch of tracks sitting in a project. Let's hit "play" and take stock of the situation. (Turn your monitors down, because it's probably going to be uncomfortably loud.)
1 - Raw Tracks [MP3] (You can ctrl-click or cmd-click these links to open them in new tabs)
Yikes. Okay. So let's get our session organized. The first thing I'm going to do is name all the tracks. We want the editing process to be as streamlined as possible, so it's important that we are never confused about what we're looking at on screen. I named the tracks with descriptive names that make sense to me:
The other key part of my organizational process is color-coding all the tracks. I learned this from one of my professors at Berklee - By using the same colors for the same instruments every time you mix, you will eventually build a mental association between colors and instrument types that will help you zip around the project.
For me, drums are blue (although they ended up sort of purple in this project), bass is purple, guitars are green, acoustic guitars are light blue, keyboards are pink, and vocals are yellow. (I use these colors on my live sound consoles as well. The reason I used yellow for vocals is that it uses all LEDs in an RGB panel and so is a little brighter than some other colors, which increases visibility when you're running a mixing console in direct sunlight. In case you're curious.)
Next we're going to set up buses for each instrument group so as we get deeper into the mix we can keep it balanced without making too much trouble for ourselves. I set up four buses: DRUMS, BASS, GTRS, and VOX. The tracks feed the buses, and the buses feed the main mix. Note that the buses are in ALL CAPS to differentiate them from the regular tracks. Note also that the colors match the source instrument. Again, building associations.
This is not a live concert, so we don't need to observe unity gain structure. If we start our mix with all the faders up to 0dB and we need to turn something up, we have nowhere to go. Unlike in a live situation, the working level doesn't matter as long as we're not overloading the main mix bus at the end of the project. So to give us some wiggle room, let's bring all the track faders down to about -20dB and all the instrument group faders down -3dB. Then crank the monitors up and let's start mixing!
Drum Tracks
Being a live audio engineer, I start my studio mixes where I start my line checks: Input 1.
In this session, we have two kick mics: inside and outside. Generally the inside gives you the snap of the beater hitting the head, and the outer mic gives you a fuller sub-bass resonance of the drum itself. Whenever we have two mics on the same source, we need to check both phase and polarity. It's a housekeeping task but it's important. By zooming way in on the waveforms, we can see we have a bit of a problem with our two kick channels.
The inner mic has a positive-going initial transient, while the outer mic has a negative-going. We need to flip one. It doesn't necessarily matter which one, because under most circumstances, absolute polarity is inaudible. But I'm going with the AES standard that says positive-going transients. So let's Invert the audio in the Kick Out file. Usually I would do this with a plugin (the Gain plugin in Logic Pro X) but I did a destructive edit on the file itself in this case so I could show the waveform to y'all.
I also scooted the kick out file over a few samples so the transients happen at the same time. All better. By the way, if you solo both kick channels together and play them back while flipping the polarity on one channel, you can hear the "correct" setting because the drum regains its low frequency resonance.
Checking the snare top and bottom reveals both phase and polarity issues as well.
Invert one, and line the files up. Like so:
All better!
Now let's start with equalization.
For the inside kick mic, I want to emphasize the snap of the beater attack, so add a gentle boost at around 3k. Yes, there's a high-pass filter. Every channel in my mix will have a high-pass filter, it's just a question of the frequency. This is another habit I've acquired from live sound, where super-powerful subwoofer arrays mean you have to be very conscious about what you send to your subs. It's never a bad idea to remove 15 Hz content that consumer systems aren't reproducing anyway. So expect to see HPF as my "default" EQ. Here, this is the snap mic, not the boom mic, so I high pass at 40 Hz.
By the way, the thin white descending trace in that screenshot is the EQ's built-in spectrum analyzer.
For Kik Out, I want all the thump I can get.
You can see how my High Pass filter mirrors the natural rolloff of the LF energy picked up by the mic. Up above 2 kHz or so is all distortion, so that can go, as can the midrange boxiness.
Onto the snare drum EQ.
Soloing the top mic reveals some very nasty resonance. This is not a very well-recorded snare sound.
I notch them out with some hi-Q cuts. If you're having trouble placing those filters, boost the filter first and sweep it until it really takes off, then cut there. As you'll learn if you read Ethan's book, higher Q filters prolong resonances.
We can high-pass higher because the snare doesn't have much going on below 200 Hz, and because that reduces bleed from the kick drum.
The snare bottom doesn't need much, just a simple highpass filter and a single resonance removal should do the trick.
I suspect that the recording engineer replaced the tom with a sample because it has a very bizarre envelope. I just added a little shelf boost to slightly accentuate the resonance of the drum.
I want to reiterate that the built-in spectrum analyzer is a great training tool here for learning how to associate what you see and what you hear. We can see where the energy is and where it is not.
Here's the overheads:
The sound of the low frequencies from a kick drum reverberating through a room are a really good way to muddy up your mix. Highpass!
Now here's a little trick to make the drums hit harder: in general, when you mix both compressed and uncompressed versions of the same signal, it's called parallel compression. A variant of that technique, which we're about to employ, is called New York style compression.
Create a new mono bus and send both the Kik drum and Snare Top to it. Then add a compressor to that bus and crank the heck out of it. Use a really high ratio and a really low threshold so the compressor just crushes the audio into severe distortion.
Now mix the output from this compressor back into the drum bus at a low level. Start at maybe -20 and bring it up until it adds a sense of tightness, but don't dirty things up too much.
Bringing up the Room and Overhead channels gives us the cymbal sounds. I used the Stereo room mic with just a little bit of the Mono track, as I don't want to clutter up the center of the stereo field.
Finally let's add a little (gentle) compression to the DRUM bus as a whole:
There's so little compression happening here that I didn't even have to add any makeup gain. It's a slow attack time so as not to dull the transients too much, and a gentle 2:1 ratio, coupled with a relatively high threshold so we're not getting a ton of action from the compressor.
If you've been mirroring my mix so far, your drums should sound more or less like this:
2 - Drums Only [MP3]
Bass Track
Now let's look at the bass. This bass, again, is not very great-sounding so we'll do the best we can.
There's not a whole lot going on in the upper octaves other than noise and hiss so let's get rid of it.
You can actually see the harmonic series in the spectrum analyzer. Pretty cool
Next we're going to add two instances of a compressor plugin to this track. The first one is going to "duck" the bass very slightly every time the kick hits. To do that, we'll use the compressor's sidechain, which tells the compressor to act on the bass signal, but trigger from another signal, in this case the kick drum.
Don't go overboard with this if you don't want your mix to sound like EDM. Just a touch. Note extremely gentle ratio and high threshold. Notice also the sidechain setting in the upper right. "Audio 2" is Kik Out mic.
Then let's actually compress the bass itself to even its response over time.
Note that although these compressors all look different, they're all just the built-in Logic compressor set to different settings.
Let's look at our mix so far, with the drums and the bass:
Notice how there's very very little boosting going on across the EQs. This is another live sound habit: subtractive EQ doesn't reduce the headroom of your sound system.
Dirty Guitars
Looking at the distorted guitars first, we see our recording engineer was responsible in that he or she put several mics on each guitar amp. This makes our job much easier during the mix. Starting with the first guitar, we've got two mics and a DI. Take a listen to appreciate the differences in the sound, and let's just sand the edges down with some gentle EQ for tonal shaping:
Mic 1:
Mic 2:
Mic 3:
Now, what to do with all these tracks? We could just pan the two mics left and right to create a nice sensation of width, but that's a little boring and can sound thin. Like so:
Guitars - No Haas panning [MP3]
We can up the ante a bit by slightly delaying one side, which adds a little more depth because it fools your brain's localization mechanism into thinking the guitar originates from one side or the other, even though we still have information in both channels. It's called the Haas effect.
Pan the two mic tracks hard left and right, and add a slight delay to the right channel. I used the Sample Delay plugin to add about 20 ms of delay. You can also just drag the track in your timeline after zooming waaaay in.
Now it sounds much wider and cooler:
Guitar - Haas Panning [MP3]
Here's how the pair of tracks looks in the mixer. I call it a Haas Pair.
Now we're going to the same thing with Gtr2, only in reverse: hard-pan them both, and add the delay to the left side instead. Like so:
Note that if you mono-sum your mix, the delay will cause a bit of a comb filter. Just something to be aware of.
I like the lo-mid sound of the DI tracks, so I added some of them in as well, panned only slightly to each side. Here's all our distortion guitar tracks now:
Clean Guitars
We probably don't need all three of each clean guitar part, so I muted the middle mic of each trio. That left me with four tracks. I panned three to the left in lessening degrees, and panned the fourth to the right with another instance of sample delay, so it's still localized to the left but has a wider feel to it. Like so:
Okay, let's take a listen. If you're following me, you have a mix that sounds something like this:
3 - Drums, Bass, Guitars [MP3]
Vocals
Having fun yet? Time to mix the vocals.
The lead vocal has a bit too much tube distortion for my taste, but in terms of frequency response, it sounds pretty good. I just added a single cut to thing it out and add a bit more "focus" to the sound. These cuts here and there are the secret to fitting all the mix components together happily.
It's stylistically appropriate to use some pretty heavy compression on this vocal.
This time it's a higher ratio (5:1) and a lower threshold, so the vocal spends a good deal of its time in gain reduction. Logic's Graph view makes it very intuitive to see what the compressor is up to. I would stay stop just short of sounding "compressed." The transients start to bite and smoosh a little (technical terms) and I don't like how that sounds. Too much compression also impacts the high frequencies in a way that makes the sound lose presence.
Here's the double vocal:
which I also panned off to the left a bit, as you'll see in a second. Don't worry, we've got plans for the right side. The male vocal (not too much going on, but hey) and the female harmony are both going over there.
Now we've got a decent vocal sound going:
4 - Vocals [MP3]
Checking In
Okay, let's check in and make sure we're all on the same page. Here's the current mixer, in two parts because it's too wide for one.
Effects
All the close-miking leads to a dry-sounding mix, devoid of room reflections. Let's put our mix back in the room by creating two buses for reverb sends: a Room reverb and a Hall reverb.
To avoid making a mess, let's only send snare, clean guitars and vocals to our reverbs. Also, slap some EQs after the reverb plugins and high-pass them, getting rid of the boomy room sound. I don't need to show you the reverb plugins, but I'll show the busing:
Buses 9 and 10 are the room and the hall, respectively (because those are the same numbers I'd use on a live mixing console having 16 buses). Consistency is king!
Notice the lead vocal has far less reverb than the backgrounds. This makes her sound like she's in front. Which she should be!
The reverbs sound like this:
Room Verb [MP3]
Hall Verb [MP3]
One more bit of secret sauce: a bit of tape delay on the lead vocal. Set up a new bus.
Notice in the Character section I highpassed and lowpassed, which helps it sit in the mix better without distracting from the main vocal. I also panned it off to the right a bit.
Let's have a listen:
Vocal with Tape Delay [MP3]
Putting It All Together
Once we "open it all up" and let it rip, we're going to have to rebalance some of the mix elements since they're no longer playing by themselves. Sometimes you have to share the sandbox.
Here's what I ended up with:
Last step is to make any tonal adjustments to the mix as a whole by using the EQ on the master stereo bus. Note that if you're boosting or cutting more than a dB or so at this point, you need to go back and focus on the source channels. Thanks to our bus layout structure, it's easy to identify which instruments or group of instruments is contributing to the issue. Don't EQ the whole mix when you could fix the problem by tweaking the vocal, for example. On the low-budget monitors I used, I felt that the two gentle filters shown here were an improvement. That could change once I listen to the mix on another system!
Check out the spectrum analyzer, though. That gently sloping line down to the right is usually an indicator that we're headed in the right direction, as well-balanced music mixed tend to look like that on an analyzer. Now you know why we need so many subs!
Finally, let's hear the end result:
7 - Final Mix [MP3]
By the way, my loudness meter comes in at about -17 LUFS, which is right in the ballpark for modern streaming services.
So there you have it: A decent, listenable mix with nothing but stock plugins and a little organization. Hope y'all enjoyed this. If anyone wants to post their own mix as a follow-up, feel free.
ML
EDIT 6/12/18 If you choose to break the "no complex mixing" rules, and use guitar amp sims, drum replacement, and effects automation, here's what you might get:
Mix w/ Replaced Drums [MP3]
Thanks to Tommy Fleming for breaking all the rules of this post.
This just goes to show that a good mix starts with a good recording. This has to start from the source. Putting a mic on a good-sounding drum is the first step toward success, and no amount of tweaking and processing afterwards can make up for not capturing a good sound to begin with.
When I first starting mixing on digital audio workstations back in high school, I would quickly get overwhelmed by all the busing and routing, or mess up my gain structure, or just end up with a terrible overcompressed mix. In this post, I will be demonstrating a procedural workflow for DAW projects that will help you stay organized, avoid missing steps, and build the mix in a constructive fashion. I will provide a link to the source files, and show you what I'm doing every step of the way, so you can mix along with me in your own DAW of choice!
Since we're on Ethan's forums, I'll also bust a myth:
You do not need fancy, special, expensive plugins to make a good mix. Sure, I have my favorite "go-to" plugins that I am willing to pay money for: my desert island two would be Slate Trigger (for drum replacement) and the Waves C6 (for problematic EQ situations). However, even the most basic DAWs have EQ, compressors, and reverb, and I'm going to demonstrate how to develop the sound of a mix using only these basic tools.
Also, good mixes do not need to take dozens of hours. If you're spending that long on a mix, you're likely doing something wrong. I created the mix in this thread, plus all the associated materials for the purpose of this post (audio examples and screenshots) in less than an hour. Now, it's not a full song, and I've also been mixing for my entire life, but the point remains:
I'm taking source tracks and mixing them quickly with only basic plugins on budget monitors and we'll get a listenable result.
So here's how this will work:
The website www.cambridge-mt.com/ms-mtk.htm has a huge library of downloadable multitracks for mixing practice.
For this example, I have chosen It Was My Fault for Waiting by Atlantis Bound. Specifically, I'll be mixing the song's first chorus.
To download the .wav files, click either "Edited Excerpt" under the Atlantis Blound entry on the above-linked page or right here if you're too lazy to go find it. Of course, you could download and mix the full song, instead, if you really want to!
Getting Started
Open your DAW and add 25 new audio tracks. Then import the downloaded wav files onto those tracks. I'll be using Logic Pro X, but you can use whatever DAW you are most comfortable with. As mentioned above, I'll only be using basic plugins that are available in virtually all DAWs.
Right now, we just have a bunch of tracks sitting in a project. Let's hit "play" and take stock of the situation. (Turn your monitors down, because it's probably going to be uncomfortably loud.)
1 - Raw Tracks [MP3] (You can ctrl-click or cmd-click these links to open them in new tabs)
Yikes. Okay. So let's get our session organized. The first thing I'm going to do is name all the tracks. We want the editing process to be as streamlined as possible, so it's important that we are never confused about what we're looking at on screen. I named the tracks with descriptive names that make sense to me:
The other key part of my organizational process is color-coding all the tracks. I learned this from one of my professors at Berklee - By using the same colors for the same instruments every time you mix, you will eventually build a mental association between colors and instrument types that will help you zip around the project.
For me, drums are blue (although they ended up sort of purple in this project), bass is purple, guitars are green, acoustic guitars are light blue, keyboards are pink, and vocals are yellow. (I use these colors on my live sound consoles as well. The reason I used yellow for vocals is that it uses all LEDs in an RGB panel and so is a little brighter than some other colors, which increases visibility when you're running a mixing console in direct sunlight. In case you're curious.)
Next we're going to set up buses for each instrument group so as we get deeper into the mix we can keep it balanced without making too much trouble for ourselves. I set up four buses: DRUMS, BASS, GTRS, and VOX. The tracks feed the buses, and the buses feed the main mix. Note that the buses are in ALL CAPS to differentiate them from the regular tracks. Note also that the colors match the source instrument. Again, building associations.
This is not a live concert, so we don't need to observe unity gain structure. If we start our mix with all the faders up to 0dB and we need to turn something up, we have nowhere to go. Unlike in a live situation, the working level doesn't matter as long as we're not overloading the main mix bus at the end of the project. So to give us some wiggle room, let's bring all the track faders down to about -20dB and all the instrument group faders down -3dB. Then crank the monitors up and let's start mixing!
Drum Tracks
Being a live audio engineer, I start my studio mixes where I start my line checks: Input 1.
In this session, we have two kick mics: inside and outside. Generally the inside gives you the snap of the beater hitting the head, and the outer mic gives you a fuller sub-bass resonance of the drum itself. Whenever we have two mics on the same source, we need to check both phase and polarity. It's a housekeeping task but it's important. By zooming way in on the waveforms, we can see we have a bit of a problem with our two kick channels.
The inner mic has a positive-going initial transient, while the outer mic has a negative-going. We need to flip one. It doesn't necessarily matter which one, because under most circumstances, absolute polarity is inaudible. But I'm going with the AES standard that says positive-going transients. So let's Invert the audio in the Kick Out file. Usually I would do this with a plugin (the Gain plugin in Logic Pro X) but I did a destructive edit on the file itself in this case so I could show the waveform to y'all.
I also scooted the kick out file over a few samples so the transients happen at the same time. All better. By the way, if you solo both kick channels together and play them back while flipping the polarity on one channel, you can hear the "correct" setting because the drum regains its low frequency resonance.
Checking the snare top and bottom reveals both phase and polarity issues as well.
Invert one, and line the files up. Like so:
All better!
Now let's start with equalization.
For the inside kick mic, I want to emphasize the snap of the beater attack, so add a gentle boost at around 3k. Yes, there's a high-pass filter. Every channel in my mix will have a high-pass filter, it's just a question of the frequency. This is another habit I've acquired from live sound, where super-powerful subwoofer arrays mean you have to be very conscious about what you send to your subs. It's never a bad idea to remove 15 Hz content that consumer systems aren't reproducing anyway. So expect to see HPF as my "default" EQ. Here, this is the snap mic, not the boom mic, so I high pass at 40 Hz.
By the way, the thin white descending trace in that screenshot is the EQ's built-in spectrum analyzer.
For Kik Out, I want all the thump I can get.
You can see how my High Pass filter mirrors the natural rolloff of the LF energy picked up by the mic. Up above 2 kHz or so is all distortion, so that can go, as can the midrange boxiness.
Onto the snare drum EQ.
Soloing the top mic reveals some very nasty resonance. This is not a very well-recorded snare sound.
I notch them out with some hi-Q cuts. If you're having trouble placing those filters, boost the filter first and sweep it until it really takes off, then cut there. As you'll learn if you read Ethan's book, higher Q filters prolong resonances.
We can high-pass higher because the snare doesn't have much going on below 200 Hz, and because that reduces bleed from the kick drum.
The snare bottom doesn't need much, just a simple highpass filter and a single resonance removal should do the trick.
I suspect that the recording engineer replaced the tom with a sample because it has a very bizarre envelope. I just added a little shelf boost to slightly accentuate the resonance of the drum.
I want to reiterate that the built-in spectrum analyzer is a great training tool here for learning how to associate what you see and what you hear. We can see where the energy is and where it is not.
Here's the overheads:
The sound of the low frequencies from a kick drum reverberating through a room are a really good way to muddy up your mix. Highpass!
Now here's a little trick to make the drums hit harder: in general, when you mix both compressed and uncompressed versions of the same signal, it's called parallel compression. A variant of that technique, which we're about to employ, is called New York style compression.
Create a new mono bus and send both the Kik drum and Snare Top to it. Then add a compressor to that bus and crank the heck out of it. Use a really high ratio and a really low threshold so the compressor just crushes the audio into severe distortion.
Now mix the output from this compressor back into the drum bus at a low level. Start at maybe -20 and bring it up until it adds a sense of tightness, but don't dirty things up too much.
Bringing up the Room and Overhead channels gives us the cymbal sounds. I used the Stereo room mic with just a little bit of the Mono track, as I don't want to clutter up the center of the stereo field.
Finally let's add a little (gentle) compression to the DRUM bus as a whole:
There's so little compression happening here that I didn't even have to add any makeup gain. It's a slow attack time so as not to dull the transients too much, and a gentle 2:1 ratio, coupled with a relatively high threshold so we're not getting a ton of action from the compressor.
If you've been mirroring my mix so far, your drums should sound more or less like this:
2 - Drums Only [MP3]
Bass Track
Now let's look at the bass. This bass, again, is not very great-sounding so we'll do the best we can.
There's not a whole lot going on in the upper octaves other than noise and hiss so let's get rid of it.
You can actually see the harmonic series in the spectrum analyzer. Pretty cool
Next we're going to add two instances of a compressor plugin to this track. The first one is going to "duck" the bass very slightly every time the kick hits. To do that, we'll use the compressor's sidechain, which tells the compressor to act on the bass signal, but trigger from another signal, in this case the kick drum.
Don't go overboard with this if you don't want your mix to sound like EDM. Just a touch. Note extremely gentle ratio and high threshold. Notice also the sidechain setting in the upper right. "Audio 2" is Kik Out mic.
Then let's actually compress the bass itself to even its response over time.
Note that although these compressors all look different, they're all just the built-in Logic compressor set to different settings.
Let's look at our mix so far, with the drums and the bass:
Notice how there's very very little boosting going on across the EQs. This is another live sound habit: subtractive EQ doesn't reduce the headroom of your sound system.
Dirty Guitars
Looking at the distorted guitars first, we see our recording engineer was responsible in that he or she put several mics on each guitar amp. This makes our job much easier during the mix. Starting with the first guitar, we've got two mics and a DI. Take a listen to appreciate the differences in the sound, and let's just sand the edges down with some gentle EQ for tonal shaping:
Mic 1:
Mic 2:
Mic 3:
Now, what to do with all these tracks? We could just pan the two mics left and right to create a nice sensation of width, but that's a little boring and can sound thin. Like so:
Guitars - No Haas panning [MP3]
We can up the ante a bit by slightly delaying one side, which adds a little more depth because it fools your brain's localization mechanism into thinking the guitar originates from one side or the other, even though we still have information in both channels. It's called the Haas effect.
Pan the two mic tracks hard left and right, and add a slight delay to the right channel. I used the Sample Delay plugin to add about 20 ms of delay. You can also just drag the track in your timeline after zooming waaaay in.
Now it sounds much wider and cooler:
Guitar - Haas Panning [MP3]
Here's how the pair of tracks looks in the mixer. I call it a Haas Pair.
Now we're going to the same thing with Gtr2, only in reverse: hard-pan them both, and add the delay to the left side instead. Like so:
Note that if you mono-sum your mix, the delay will cause a bit of a comb filter. Just something to be aware of.
I like the lo-mid sound of the DI tracks, so I added some of them in as well, panned only slightly to each side. Here's all our distortion guitar tracks now:
Clean Guitars
We probably don't need all three of each clean guitar part, so I muted the middle mic of each trio. That left me with four tracks. I panned three to the left in lessening degrees, and panned the fourth to the right with another instance of sample delay, so it's still localized to the left but has a wider feel to it. Like so:
Okay, let's take a listen. If you're following me, you have a mix that sounds something like this:
3 - Drums, Bass, Guitars [MP3]
Vocals
Having fun yet? Time to mix the vocals.
The lead vocal has a bit too much tube distortion for my taste, but in terms of frequency response, it sounds pretty good. I just added a single cut to thing it out and add a bit more "focus" to the sound. These cuts here and there are the secret to fitting all the mix components together happily.
It's stylistically appropriate to use some pretty heavy compression on this vocal.
This time it's a higher ratio (5:1) and a lower threshold, so the vocal spends a good deal of its time in gain reduction. Logic's Graph view makes it very intuitive to see what the compressor is up to. I would stay stop just short of sounding "compressed." The transients start to bite and smoosh a little (technical terms) and I don't like how that sounds. Too much compression also impacts the high frequencies in a way that makes the sound lose presence.
Here's the double vocal:
which I also panned off to the left a bit, as you'll see in a second. Don't worry, we've got plans for the right side. The male vocal (not too much going on, but hey) and the female harmony are both going over there.
Now we've got a decent vocal sound going:
4 - Vocals [MP3]
Checking In
Okay, let's check in and make sure we're all on the same page. Here's the current mixer, in two parts because it's too wide for one.
Effects
All the close-miking leads to a dry-sounding mix, devoid of room reflections. Let's put our mix back in the room by creating two buses for reverb sends: a Room reverb and a Hall reverb.
To avoid making a mess, let's only send snare, clean guitars and vocals to our reverbs. Also, slap some EQs after the reverb plugins and high-pass them, getting rid of the boomy room sound. I don't need to show you the reverb plugins, but I'll show the busing:
Buses 9 and 10 are the room and the hall, respectively (because those are the same numbers I'd use on a live mixing console having 16 buses). Consistency is king!
Notice the lead vocal has far less reverb than the backgrounds. This makes her sound like she's in front. Which she should be!
The reverbs sound like this:
Room Verb [MP3]
Hall Verb [MP3]
One more bit of secret sauce: a bit of tape delay on the lead vocal. Set up a new bus.
Notice in the Character section I highpassed and lowpassed, which helps it sit in the mix better without distracting from the main vocal. I also panned it off to the right a bit.
Let's have a listen:
Vocal with Tape Delay [MP3]
Putting It All Together
Once we "open it all up" and let it rip, we're going to have to rebalance some of the mix elements since they're no longer playing by themselves. Sometimes you have to share the sandbox.
Here's what I ended up with:
Last step is to make any tonal adjustments to the mix as a whole by using the EQ on the master stereo bus. Note that if you're boosting or cutting more than a dB or so at this point, you need to go back and focus on the source channels. Thanks to our bus layout structure, it's easy to identify which instruments or group of instruments is contributing to the issue. Don't EQ the whole mix when you could fix the problem by tweaking the vocal, for example. On the low-budget monitors I used, I felt that the two gentle filters shown here were an improvement. That could change once I listen to the mix on another system!
Check out the spectrum analyzer, though. That gently sloping line down to the right is usually an indicator that we're headed in the right direction, as well-balanced music mixed tend to look like that on an analyzer. Now you know why we need so many subs!
Finally, let's hear the end result:
7 - Final Mix [MP3]
By the way, my loudness meter comes in at about -17 LUFS, which is right in the ballpark for modern streaming services.
So there you have it: A decent, listenable mix with nothing but stock plugins and a little organization. Hope y'all enjoyed this. If anyone wants to post their own mix as a follow-up, feel free.
ML
EDIT 6/12/18 If you choose to break the "no complex mixing" rules, and use guitar amp sims, drum replacement, and effects automation, here's what you might get:
Mix w/ Replaced Drums [MP3]
Thanks to Tommy Fleming for breaking all the rules of this post.
This just goes to show that a good mix starts with a good recording. This has to start from the source. Putting a mic on a good-sounding drum is the first step toward success, and no amount of tweaking and processing afterwards can make up for not capturing a good sound to begin with.
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