Recording Forum

[samal50]

I've just been reading something from a book about mixing. I read something about a trick to mixing is that some instruments don't have to sound as good as some. So how do you make an instrument sound not as good? Obviously performance has to be there. I'm just not sure what is meant by not making some instruments sound good. Do I use bad sounding effects while tracking or making an instrument sound "bad" can be done during mixdown? I just ordered the book that I'm talking about and have read a few teasers from it.

[WRGKMC]

Rcording is a long chain of events.
You want crappy sound its simple.
Use a crappy mic or dial up a crappy sound tracking and you'll get the results you want.

If things have gotten to the mixing stage its a matter of dealing with your lowest common denominator.
I find drums recorded live are the biggest challange getting them to sound as good as the rest of the instruments.
I often have to remove frequency responce from the other instruments - dumb them down so to say to match the quality
of the drums to get a balance. A bass guitar recorded direct for example is going to have to match the kick drum. If the kick
was recorded with a vocal mic, and lacks frequencies below 100hz, then I'll likely have to remove some low frequency on the
bass to make the two push together.

Guitars are another item that may need frequency limiting. If the snare is lacking some 3~5K because it wasnt tuned, miced or
played properly, it may not cut through well so I may need to notch my guitars mid frequencies to allow some space in the
overall frequency responce of the mix for the snare to cut through.

This is mainly an issue with masking. You cant have two instruments reside in the same frequency bands and expect them to
be heard clearly in a mono field. You can have them stereo panned and hear them but its better to have them separated in a mono field
Through frequency banding first so theres little or no clashing/masking at all.

You can of course use tools to degrade the tracks purposly as an effect. Oe simple one is to remove the highs and lows off
the vocals and leave the midrange frequencies for a megaphone/telephone sound to the voice. Add some extra drive and even
an echo/reverb or chorus and you've mase the voice sound small.

Good examples of this can be found on TV. An old Sci Fi movie comes to mind, the Shrinking Man, where the guy keeps shrinking in size.
As he does, the audio engineers remove bass from the guys voice and adds more reverb to make the man sound smaller and smaller.
You are the viewer and the mic position (your ears) remains the same distance, bit the chest cavity of the little man gets smaller and smaller so
less bass is projected. The guys voice winds up being a telephone frequency responce and the reverb of that basement he gets trapped in
sounds like the grans canyon.

There are other ways of degrading tracks too. Drive on guitar works just the opposite of what guitarists think it does.
as you add more drive where all the notes are clipped, the sound is compressed and ceases to have dynamics.
This loss of dynamics sucks the emotion out of the track and gives you a monotone voice that can't compete with
a drummers dynamics. A drummer can hit a drum harder and the guitarist is already hitting the ceiling.

You want big sounding guitars, back off on the drive and leave more dynamics available to the player.

My rule of thumb which works best when I dial up my guitars is, when I pick notes or strum the guitar lightly,
the sound is completely clean, when I strum or pick the strings as hard as I can, they peak at maximum drive.
When I pick or strum some place in between I have varying amounts of drive.

This allows both dynamics and tonal harmonics to be present. I have maximum control over the drive added to notes
through my playing abilities, and if I want notes to come through I simply dig in harder when I play. When I back off the
notes get cleaner and bigger. Later when I mix and add limiters to the master mix the softer notes which are clean cut
through the mix cleanly, when I dig in, they drop back and add to the backwash.

Reverb is another key item. It too can be EQed for effect. The depth is for pushing the part back in the mix as a 3D
thing. Most get the height and width of a mix down fairly quickly, the height being the frequency responce between 20~20Khz.
They may also get the width reasonable with stereo panning.

Height and width alone = a two dimensional flat image. Thats where they get stumped and wonder why their mixes sound so flat.
They havent used their minds eye to mimick depth to the music.

If you go out to to see a live band, and stand about 25' from the stage, the loudesnt and clearest itm will usually be
the vocvals coming from the PA cabs. The drums will likely be the furthest away so their sound will be more reflected and
smaller sounding. Guitar aned bass speakers project a long distance but bass should sound clear and guitars a bit of a wash
depending on how much drive they're using. Move farther from the satge and theres more room reflection hitting your ears,
the bass tones will diminish, and mostly reflected midrange tones will remain.

Move closer to the stage, and you feel more direct tones hitting your chest. You hear and feel the drums being hit and your chest
vibrates more from the bassm and you feel the kick of the guitar chords. The vocals also diminish to some extent. You hear more
bass/muffeled vocals from the sides of the PA cabs and you hear the reflected vocals off the back wall coming back at you with
most of the bass removed as well as a larger delay.

This is the three dimensionality of live music I'm describing that needs to be mixed into the music to make it sound real and electrifying.
A stage musician is not going to be the best one to make decisions on a mix. What they hear on a stage is not what the audiance hears.
He will naturally want to make the drums sound too big in a mix because he stands on a stage right next to them when he plays out.
Vocals will not be loud enough, his own amp which he focuses on listening to will have too much kick and not enough direct sound.
A stage musician hears the mix very differently from an audiance and even if he has good monitors happening, its not going to make for
a good recording mixing what he hears. His conditioning and his depth perception wont be very good for mixing.

It takes a long time to retrain yourself to mix well. Best advice I can give someone is when you're mixing a part, imagine yourself playing
that instrument, and if some other part is destracting you from concentrating on that instrument as a player, then you have to balance
what you're hearing to prevent masking. If you imagine yourself playing the drums and you cant hear the kick because the bass is booming
over it, then you either have to boost the kick or cut the bass volume or frequencies till they are equal. If you're a guitarist, you have to be
second fiddle to the vocals, allow the snare to crack through, and stay out of the bass players turf.

Its all a matter of perspective in the minds eye. You will have to battle with your own bias of wanting to make your own parts sound good but
the overall mix comes first. By degrading a part that would/should normally sound good in a mix, you draw attention to that flaw and draw the
listeners attention away from listening to the entire mix which may sound clean in comparison. Its just one trick to skinning the cat, but the real
trick is contrast. The degraded part isnt going to sound very good if there arent other clean parts to support it. Its the contrast between the two
that makes it interesting.

One little phrase I have on my studio wall as a reminder that sums it up goes like this.

As the Sun Ra once Said
"Space is the Place"
The Less Music You Play
The More Weight Each Note Carries
This Creates More Spaciousness
In the Overall Sound

Its the contrast between maximum silence and noise that makes a good mix.
If theres no silence between the notes you have no spaciousness to the music.

Good music has good rythm, and good rythum is not only whats played but what is not played.
Rests - are silent notes - The notes the listeners hear that dont really exist. The Buddahists call it
the one hand clapping. When the imaginary meets the actual in a musical score the listener is
allowed to see into the music and it becomes just as much theirs as it is yours. having streategic
rests on beats they would normally expect as being there makes them wonder why it wasnt there
and they listen more intensely to see if it was a mistake or intentional. If their internal clock is
as accurate as yours, that silence is louder than the music.

Again, silence can be just as potent and deafining as mximum note velocity levels
Keep that in mind when you mix. Without silence there is no dynamics and therefore no emotion.

[jnorman]

this has to do with applying EQ to certain instruments so they dont conflict with other instruments in the mix. for example, electric guitar - your first instinct is probably to solo the guitar and make it sound huge and full, and that is often a mistake. by eq'ing out some of the low end (making it sound thinner) provides some room for the bass in the mix, which willl make the whole mix sound tighter and cleaner - less boomy and more controlled.

[gubu]

Send it to me. I can make it sound 'not as good'.

No problem

[samal50]

so don't rely on preset guitar effects then? lol.

Originally Posted by jnorman

this has to do with applying EQ to certain instruments so they dont conflict with other instruments in the mix. for example, electric guitar - your first instinct is probably to solo the guitar and make it sound huge and full, and that is often a mistake. by eq'ing out some of the low end (making it sound thinner) provides some room for the bass in the mix, which willl make the whole mix sound tighter and cleaner - less boomy and more controlled.

[samal50]

the thing is when I track I try to make everything sound "good", but now I'm reading that this is a bad idea. very confusing. in pop music I observed that the vocals are the main thing and the music seem to be just "background".

Originally Posted by gubu

Send it to me. I can make it sound 'not as good'.

No problem

[WRGKMC]

^^^ Instruments proper mixed then soloed dont usually sound as good as instruments
mixed to sound good solo. Its because each instrument in a mix is only a section of the
entire hearing frequency bandwidth.

Think of the frequency bands as colors.
The low frequencs as being the reds, and the high frequencies as violet.
Infared are your subsonics and the untraviolet is above your hearing ranges only dogs can hear.

Reds to orange would be your low bass and kick.
Orange to yellow will be your guitars lowest notes, drum toms.
Green upper guitars, mid vocals and snare
Blue will be your upper vocal presence, High hat, ride
Violet your crash cymbals, strings etc.

All the colors together give you white light
In a recording it gives you a balanced mix.

If you remove one instrument from the mix and solo it, you may only have one color of the rainbow
and maybe a litte bleedover of the two colors along side it. If guitars are yellow that means you have
a little orange and a little green to either side. If the guitar is only yellow with no orange or green it
means theres little masking going tooccur over instruments in the lower or upper frequency ranges.

Solo, the guitar is going to sould narrow in frequency.
If you have less instruments in the mix, you can widen the instruments frequency response
and still not have masking. More instruments need narrower bands to fit them in between
20~20K hearing range.

If you improperly mix two instruments into the same frequency range, the two will fight to be heard.
Volume wont fix this. Turn one up and the other dissapears. IE. If two pictures are both yellow,
and you overlay them, you can make the two out form each other, it winds up being a distorted mess.

Same thing for sound. You cant get a speaker cone to reproduce tow separate instruments if the cone is
vibrating at the same frequency range. It can only reproduce one or the other clearly. Both together creates
a confused mess.

you can widen most instruments responces so they sound good solo. A guitar like I said will produce tones from 100~6Khz
or more which is fairly wide ranged. You can do this on solo passages with editing tools if need be, but when the other instruments
come back in, that part has to be narrowed up again or at least dropped in volume to prevent masking.

If you have one guitar yellow and one blue, when you have the two play together the overlapping of the two creates shades of green.
This is a cool effect and is what you want to achieve between parts depending on the mix.

The big trick is developing the minds eye and alongh with it your ear to achieve the proper separation between instruments for a good mix.
Viewing frequency charts can help. Heres a few examples.

http://www.independentrecording.net/...in_display.htm
http://www.head-fi.org/a/frequency-r...-of-headphones
http://obiaudio.com/2010/07/11/eq-chart/
http://www.rfcafe.com/references/ele...nics-world.htm
http://www.dak.com/reviews/tutorial_frequencies.cfm

You cant paint by number to get a good mix of course. Your ears must be the
overlying factor in achieving a good mix. But using a frequency analyzer can help a beginner get his bearings.
If you download a free Frequency analyzer like Voxengo Spanhttp://www.voxengo.com/product/span/
and stick it in the main effects bus of the daw, you can solo instruments and compare it to the charts and
see what ranges the tracks actually produce.

If for example, a guitar track has very weak responce at 500hz, boosting that frequency with an EQ is only going
to raise the noise floor up and contaminate the mixes clarity.

On the other hand, is the guitar is strong between 500~5K and your snare has a peak resonance at 2K, and its hard to hear in a mix,
you can notch the guitar at 2K with an EQ and the snare appears clearly in the mix as you removing the veil of masking the guitars
were producing.

As you get better, you learn to do this with your ears and hands on with the tools, but using a visual assist tool can be of great
use to get you there. Like I said you cant paint by numbers but numbers can at least put you in balance and expose the range of sound
you have to work with.

The other way is to import a commercial recording into your mix that has a simular genre and beat you'd like to achieve.
Then switch back and forth between in an A/B comparison with one instrument in your mix at a time along with the commercial
and use it to target your EQing. Do each instrument in your mix solo against the commercial recording then mute the commercial
recording and unmute all your tracks. This should get you close to a good balance. Of course the timing and key of the two when you're doing this
wont be in sync but it should be close enough to ballpark the two. You can also get the Stereo pan, compression and reverb depth close this way too.

Occasionally I'll do a cover tune this way. Import a tune into the DAW then play all the parts, and then remove the import.
I'm left with a close faxcimilie of the original minus the musical talent the original artists produce, and the gear thay actually ise.

Heres an example or two of that method.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1682170/Driv...BMaster%5D.wav

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1682170/I%20...0(Master1).wav

After awhile the method gets boaring but you do learn more in one of those type of sessions than a year of
doodleing around blindly trying to achieve tyhe same results. you can build some nice EQ presets in the process too.

[WRGKMC]

Duplicate Post deleted

[gubu]

Originally Posted by samal50

the thing is when I track I try to make everything sound "good", but now I'm reading that this is a bad idea. very confusing. in pop music I observed that the vocals are the main thing and the music seem to be just "background".

Have a close read of what WRGKMC and jnorman say above.


The key to any method of mixing is to first define properly what it is you are trying to achieve, and how to go about doing so.

Saying something like 'make it sound not as good' is a kind of throwaway comment that does have some basis in reality, but is really not helpful in terms of guidance towards making better mixes. It's a very ill-defined statement, and very easy to misunderstand in terms of what it is you're actually trying to achieve in a mix.

My advice:-

Read the other replies in this thread. There is some great information within them.