#1 MR. I HAVE IT ALL BUT I STILL SUCK

Start small, don’t invest in expensive equipment unless you can see yourself using it, all the time or atleast most of the time. Research gear well before you commit to buying it. Top of the list of the worst mistakes ever made.

#2 MR. RUSTY STRINGS

Use new strings on guitars, new cables for instruments. Warm up your voice if you’re doing a vocal take. However, this guy is only a measly second to MR. IAMTOOLAZYTOTUNEMYINSTRUMENTSLOLZ. Those belonging to that category have lost all hope, and deserve to be jailed next to the city litter dump.

#3 MR. NOISY

Eliminate noise, buzz from instruments and surroundings. Do it one step at a time. Optimizing your source signal beats post-processing, anyday.

#4 MR. CLIPPER

Don’t clip when recording tracks – watch the gain knob on your inputs. But sometimes, clipping can have interesting effects if you need them. You feel like killing me already don’t you?

#5 MR. MUDDY MOE

Don’t ignore the low-mids (250-500Hz)! Good control over the low-mids is required to add warmth, and remove mud from beefy/muffled recordings.

#6 MR. TURN UP THE BASS

Hold your horses. keep the bass under control. Learn more advanced techniques like sidechaining if you still want to use tons of BASS in your recordings, since MOAR BASS = SECKS anyway. Right? Yeah.

#7 MR. TINNY TANNY

In same fashion, don’t overdo the treble. While good high-end in a song screams quality recording, overdoing it can easily kill the mix, making it sound small, trashy, and sterile.

#8 MR. VOCALS TOO LOUD

Seriously, what are you yelling for? Realize that a good mix is about finding the right balance. Right balance will give out the right vibe, and convey the message of the song. There is no formula though. If there was one – you wouldn’t be reading this would you? You’d be rolling in your silk sofa in your bay area mansion.

#9 MR. DROWN IN REVERB BCOZ IT IS KOOL

As the old saying goes ‘Don’t let your cat drown in your cappucino’.

No one cares if you’re not heard. Unless you want that?

#10 MR. I DONT PAN MY INSTRUMENTS

Think of your song as a plate you’re holding out to someone serving you food. Would you like it if they stacked tomatoes, curry, icecream, yogurt, and tartar sauce on top of each other? Pan wisely, use the stereo spectrum to your advantage. Surprise your listener with intricate pans.

MOAR TIPS:

1) Hang out on interest forums and ask questions. Learn, contribute and share and you will benefit immensely. www.freq20.com is one such forum.
2) Listen to music, more music, and even more music. Even if you can’t hear things consciously, your subconscious picks up minute details like spacing between sonic regions that will help you make better mix decisions when you’re recording. No music is bad music, unless it’s Coldplay of course.
3) Use a Spectral Analyzer – while you must understand that your ears are the ultimate judge, they’re also tricked easily. Use a Spectrum Analyzer (like this free one) to guide you visually. Be careful not to base entire mix decisions on the spectral analyzer though.
4) Use EQ wisely – Too many people have said this already. Just google ‘EQ tips’ to see results. Cut more often than boost.
5) Compression – Mastery or atleast a good understanding of compression will take your recordings and make it sound as monstrous a horny elephant on hormone shots. You could start by reading this.

And now, brave new recordist – you’ve come thus far. Why not ‘like’ this post to share and help other brave new recordists?

Compression is a necessary aspect in a good mix. In subtle amounts, it adds punch, depth, and even ‘feel’ to a mix. When overused, you can end up with a stale, lifeless, squashy mix. Here I’m going to run through the basics of compression, using a lovely Tama snare track as our waveform. Compression has four main parameters.

So, what’s Attack/Release/Threshold/Ratio? I had talked about this in my previous post on Mixing drums.

But now, let’s look at it visually.

Here’s the original waveform. A beautiful transient at the start, and fades out nice and clean. Ahhhh. Click to enlarge.

Uncompressed Tama Snare Waveform

Now, let’s compress it. Here’s how it looks after using the following settings, with a threshold low enough to trigger the compressor right at the start. The white line shows the moment when the compressor starts (estimated attack), and the red line shows when the compressor ‘releases’, which means it stops acting on the waveform.

Attack: 100ms (white line) Release: 500ms (red line), Ratio 2:1

Now, let’s try different settings.

Attack: 50ms (white line) Release: 1ms (red line), Ratio 2:1

Notice how the red lines kick in almost immediately after the white lines ‘attack’ the waveform. This is because the release is set at a very low setting of 1ms. What does this mean to the audio? It means that the compression takes place almost throughout the whole waveform after the first attack since as soon as the compressor ‘releases’, the audio is ‘attacked’ immediately. Of course, threshold will determine when the compressor will stop attacking, based on the shape of the waveform.

Next example.

Attack: 1ms (white line) Release: 500ms (red line), Ratio 2:1

Makes sense now? Compare this to the original waveform and notice how the shapes are different.

Attack: 1ms (white line) Release: 1ms (red line), Ratio 2:1

Straightforward again?

Ok, now you have a better grasp of how compressors work. But, how does it affect the sound of the waveform? Let’s take the snare drum as the example.

As is obvious, the snare waveform consists of two major parts – The initial hit of the snare, and then the decay of the snare. When you have a very small attack setting, of about 1ms, the compressor acts on the initial ‘hit’ of the snare, and affects the dB based on your ratio.

What does it do to the sound again? You get a ‘crack’ sound. Yet, it sounds tiny. Why? This is because the initial transient or hit of the snare is important in giving the snare some beef as well as snap. Now, slowly increase the attack to 5ms and gradually to 15ms. You will notice more and more of the snare’s initial transient goes through uncompressed, which inturn makes the snare more present in the mix. I leave it to you to experiment with the release settings and figure out how that affects the sound.

Happy compressing!

- Sridhar

Got Punch?

As you would have guessed, the drums are pretty much the single most important thing laying down the ‘punch‘ in the track. Sure, a lot of other factors contribute too, but with a weak drum sound, everything’s sitting on thin ice. So how do you get that monster drum sound? Let’s take it one step at a time. I personally use Superior Drummer 2.0 for my songs since it’s just easy (i’m lazy, I told you that), though I have mixed plenty of live drum sounds as well. Most of this post will definitely be biased towards sampled drums however, as they are what’s used in the bedroom context.

There are a few core components that are important across the drum bus and they are:

1) Gating

2) Compression

• Individual Compression
• Whole Bus Compression
• Sidechain Compression

3) Stereo Imaging and Room

——–——–——–——–——–——–——–——–——–——–——–——–——–——–——–——–——–

With Superior Drummer, or any good drum machine for that matter, options and FX are so easy to implement and fool around with. Controlling the bleed is just a matter of riding a knob, but in the live drums scenario things are a lot more complicated than that. However, drum machines provide a great platform to learn and tweak some concepts. Other good drum machines are – Steven Slate Drums, Addictive Drums, and the gazillion expansions to Superior Drummer 2.0, etc.

I’m assuming that you guys know how to program in a basic drum beat using either the Piano Roll in Cubase, or any MIDI editor of your choice. If not I highly recommend you go to youtube and learn it – it’s not that hard, really

1) Gating

What is gating? Just like the real meaning of the word, a gate is something that opens and closes according to specific instructions that are provided by you. What is the use of gating in drum sounds, you ask? It is simply to reduce the bleed noise picked up by the microphones and to add ‘crispness’ to your sound. Bear in mind, bleed is not a bad thing at all – in fact, you want to become a good drum engineer? Start loving bleed and use it smartly.

Back to gating – for example, the microphones on the toms might have captured the snare and you need to get rid of those background snare noises from the mics. How do you remove it without affecting the sound of the toms? Gate it. One can go on endlessly about gating, right from introductory to advanced concepts, but I’ll leave that to you. There are good tutorials here, here and here.

For starters, try loading up a gate (most DAWs come with inbuilt vsts) on guitar tracks/drum tracks/vocal tracks – and fool around with the parameters and observe the results. The most important parameters on the gate are – Threshold, Attack, and Hold time. Threshold will affect how often the gate is called to action, attack determines how fast the gate affects the signal. Hold time is generally to prevent non-musical results from coming up from excessive gating – gates can behave like bitcrushers if overdone. Try changing it up.

Good gating and a clean signal is crucial before going to the next step, or else it will end up sounding like chaos after processing. However, gating is far less important when you’re dealing with sampled/programmed drums. Okay, now you have the MIDI drums programmed in and all good to go, and everything sounds good individually but the whole kit still sounds weak?! What is that magical component that gives the drums that WHOOPAH punch?

Answer – Compression.

2) Compression

If you asked me what was the single most concept that is crucial to getting mixes to sound good (assuming good tracking), I would say its compression. Although they are straightforward audio-processing units, they are the hardest to master. Even the pros handle compressors with care, although using it generously on their mixes. The holy grail of compression is to compress it as much as you can without audible differences in the signal, unless you have other reasons to do so.

What does a compressor do? As the name implies, it compresses the signal, based on a set of instructions you give it. Most important parameters – Threshold, Attack Time, Release Time, Ratio.The drums are very impulse-oriented instruments, in the sense that it is almost completely transient based. A compressor, on it’s best day will do so much as to tame those rapid transient peaks, while still maintaining the natural timbre of the instrument. That is what you should be aiming for.

Threshold – This determines how much of the original signal will be affected by the compressor. The lower the threshold, the more the compressor will be in action.
Attack – The time it takes for the compressor to kick in. For example, if you have a high attack time like 200ms on a kick drum say, then, most of the kick transient will go through uncompressed, but the tail of the kick will be compressed. If you have a very low attack time like 1ms, the whole transient will be compressed.
Release – The time it takes for the compressor to stop working after it started. If you have a fast release, compressor will release the signal back quickly, a slow release generally means the compressor is on for a longer time.
Ratio - Almost like the ‘Strength’ of a compressor, a high ratio like 10:1 means that the compressor compresses 10dB to 1dB. Pretty straightforward.

It’s harder to understand these concepts from just text, again, I’d suggest you fire up your DAW and a kick/snare track, and see how the different settings affect the drum sound. Now, on to the real deal !

Individual Compression - Try to keep the holy grail of compression rule here – “compress it as much as you can without audible differences in the signal, unless you have other reasons to do so.” Sure, kick and snare will need a lot more compression than the others, since you’re searching for that elusive punch. A good ratio for them would be 4:1 or 6:1, with an attack time of about 10ms and release of 70-100ms. Tweak the attack times until you get the right amount of punch, bite, thickness with the natural timbre of the instrument shining through (Don’t forget the holy grail of compression!)

Group Compression - This is very useful to tame the overheads and ambient mics from getting too loud and overpowering the mix. Recommended settings, Ratio 5:1, Attack 1ms, Release 100ms. Threshold to taste. A subtle compressor, maybe 2:1 applied across the whole drum bus has made it sit better in the mix for me, in previous sessions. This is completely one’s preference and not necessary sometimes. Remember, that if you have a compressor across the drum bus – it will work to fight against your faders, which means, if you boost your snare in the mixer, the compressor will act to bring the level of the snare down in relation to the others. Just be aware of this and you’ll be good to go.

SideChain Compression - Sidechain your kick to the bass guitar to give it a nice ‘pumping’ effect, and also to duck away the bass when the kick is dominant and vice versa. It lets you increase the bass guitar a bit more without getting the mix to become woofy and bassy. This is again a lengthy subject and I will not get into the details, there is a lot of good reading material on Sidechain compression here, here and here.

The key to master compression, as with all things mixing is – EXPERIMENT! Also, you would definitely want to EQ different parts of the kit to taste, try experimenting with the compressor before the EQ, or vice versa and observe the results. There are a lot of other plugins that do ‘Transient Shaping’ etc. but these are all pretty much derivatives of the compressor.

3) Stereo Imaging and Room

Stereo imaging – Pretty straightforward, make sure your drums are spread across the stereo spectrum to suit your song. You could either go with Hats on the left, Ride on the right, or the opposite setup based on what you like. Toms are a lot more tricky, make sure you pan it just nicely – too much panning could prove distracting and confusing for the listener. Try to picture a real drummer playing in front of you, how would you hear it? Try to recreate as much of that setup in your mix.

Drum Room
This is something that is a lot more personal, and harder to give ‘rules’, simply because there aren’t any. Do not confuse this with snare-room, that would be part of the stereo imaging process. Room is something that makes the drum track really come to life, and/or sit well in a mix.

Generally, I’m quite generous with reverb on the drum bus, on a slower track. For a mid-tempo yet hard hitting metal track, I like to have a pretty long reverb tail on the snare to give it that SMASH sound – the breakdown on Pantera’s Domination – now didn’t that just blow your head away when you heard it. On faster thrashy songs, I go easy on the snare reverb, but still add a suitable reverb across the entire drum track to make it sit better in the mix. Be careful not to wash out your drum sound – too much reverb, and bye bye punch!

Tip: When you add drum reverb, the overheads are rather accentuated since most reverbs amplify the highs. Make sure you cut the highs with an EQ on the reverb FX channel.

Other tips on Drum Mixing

1) I use a high-pass filter on my overheads and ambient mics around 500Hz, just to get rid of all the mud in that low region
2) If possible, try to use both Snare top and snare bottom tracks – you will have a lot more control on your snare sound
3) Kick – Another sneaky tip – Double the kick track – one carrying the super low end (40-60Hz), and the other carrying the mids and highs (HPF it around 500Hz) – This gives you control over both the punch of the low end, and the attack. – You can compress the hell out of the low end kick, but when you mix it in it wont be too audible – Result? Awesome punch.
4) By splitting your kick into two tracks, you also open options for side chaining – Try and sidechain the low end of the kick to the bass guitar.
5) Find that your ride cymbal is barely heard? Don’t increase overheads as it could kill the delicate balance of the cymbals, increase Ambient mics instead.
6) Compressing your overheads is not a bad idea to tame down the rapid transients that could potentially kill your mix if left unattended.

PHEW! That was long, and I barely even covered everything.

Please post feedback/questions/ideas if any in the comments section, and I’ll try my best to answer everything! Coming up soon – Mixing Electric and Bass Geetars!

- Sridhar

Melakartha by sridharsmusic

It is no dark art, but it did take me quite a while to get there. I’m going to share some simple ideas and concepts that can make your mix (and thereby song) a lot more appealing, and complete. When was the last time you wrote a great song in your head, but which turned out to sound like nails on a blackboard by the time you had finished recording it?

Bear in mind, this is a complete bedroom guide – If you’re the kind who came here looking for suggestions on tweaking that SSL hardware rack, or trying to reduce the noise floor on your mammoth 32-channel tube pre-amp powered mixer that sits on your desk, let me shoo you away before you get disgusted with our primal, budget mixing methods

Bedroom Tracking

A) What you’ll need -

• An interface between your instrument/mic and your computer – I’m not going to get into the details on this, there are tons of guides and comparisons on which interface to use. I personally use the Line6 GuitarPort which is an older version of the Pod X3 in the market right now and is discontinued. I’ve had good results with line6 and their products are highly recommended.(OR)
• A soundcard

• Software DAW – Cubase/ProTools/Logic/Adobe Audition/Ableton Live/Sonar, the list is endless. This is completely dependant on your preference. I really like Adobe Audition 3 for tracking so I will base the rest of this post on that, though the concepts are applicable across all the DAWs.

• Headphones/Speakers for monitoring – Highly recommended are the Sennheiser HD650 or, the cheaper Audio Technica ATH-M50

B) Setting up your DAW

• Metal has always been about precision, and heaviness. Tightly timed tracks = HEAVY! So I’m assuming that we want to be recording to a click track.
• For a bigger sound to your guitars, you MUST double track and pan your guitars. If you’re a tight player, you are most certain to enjoy the sonic results from quad-tracking your guitars as well.
• Set your DAW to record at 24 bit audio, at 48 khZ. Warning: Ensure that your interface can do this before you buy it. Refer to this guide here for detailed comparisons of audio interfaces
• Set your signal levels on your interface (using the gain feature), or using the ‘Volume’ feature on the POD – to make sure that youre getting a moderately hot signal, but this would vary if you are using different preamps. For starters, record a couple sample waveforms to check this, and see that there is not more than 5-10dB between the top (clip) areas and your highest signal level.
• Make sure your DAW inputs are set to the interface, and get tracking !
• Tip : If you’re using an amp modeller for your guitar like the line6 pod, make sure you go easy on the treble and presence knobs – somehow line6 has this tendency to add a horrific amount of those which end up making your tracks sound sterile. Bass is another tricky issue to deal with, but bass is generally more controllable during the mixing stage.

The next article coming up in a couple of days – Bedroom Mixing!

Stay tuned, and leave a comment if you have any feedback, or any questions to be answered. Cheers!

Sridhar