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clothesburner · Location: USA

Okay, I've got all of my instruments recorded and I'm ready to mix. I want each instrument to have it's own spot within the stereo field, right? I want to go with the lows of the kick drum and the highs of the bass, both panned center. I want the snare also panned center focusing on the frequencies just above the bass, and then the vocals panned center focusing on the frequencies just above the snare. How do I tweek the eq so that my kick drum frequencies are between 33 and 125 htz, my bass frequencies between 125 and 500 htz, my snare frequencies between 500 htz and 2 k, and my vocal frequencies between 2k and 16k?

jonrose · Location: USA

Hi clothesburner,

I get the impression you are looking for a formula to mix.

Although there are a lot of rules and guidelines, these don't always apply and are constantly broken.

Have you put up a mix yet and played with volumes and pans, to see just exactly where you are right now? This can tell you a lot about where you should start. I don't recommend whacking frequencies by the numbers with EQ, just because you read or heard that this is the way to do things. You MUST use your ears. Listen first, and ask yourself, "What's getting in the way of the vocal?" Or, "That bass guitar isn't showing very well, maybe the balance with the kick drum is off a bit?" I think you get the idea.

Don't over EQ from the start. Let each project speak to your sensibilities. If you really want a primer on this stuff, there's a crapload of information available right here on the forum - just do a search. There's even a treatise by SteveG, as I recall, and you know that's got to be good.

All the best... -Jon
:-)

SteveG · Location: United Kingdom

jonrose · Location: USA

SteveG · Location: United Kingdom

SteveG · Location: United Kingdom

This started life as a basic primer about getting space right in a mix. The original poster wanted his mixes to sound as good as Paul Simon's - he described it as being 'strung out in a line between the speakers', or words to that effect.

Basic Primer

Those of us who have been fortunate enough to have been able to dissect multi-track recordings that sound as good as some of Paul Simon's do will tell you that the qualities that you are looking for have got more than a little to do with compression and limiting. It's a BIG subject, but I can certainly give you a few starting hints here.

For a start, you need to get INDIVIDUAL TRACKS sounding good and smooth on their own. Start with tracks as 'dry' as you can get them and limit any really bad peaks. How? To begin with, you probably need to get the top 5-6dB of each track squashed down to about 1-2dB. This is only a starting figure - it varies widely with individual tracks, especially vocals, which always seem to need treatment. Compression is a little harder to get right, as you have to be careful not to take all the life (dynamic range) out of the track and bring up the noise level. You have to experiment a lot with settings, but after a while you will get an ear for what's going on. Incidentally, the original poster mentioned that cassette recordings 'accidentally' sounded good. That's because all audio tape has a built-in mechanism which has a very similar effect to a compresser/limiter when you record it at moderately high levels. Especially cassettes. (It's all to do with magnetic saturation of the tape - any decent audio textbook will explain it.)

Anyway, if you want to add other spatial effects to an individual track, you can, but listen carefully to the results, and be prepared to go through the whole process again. Effects added to a compressed/limited track often stand out more than untreated ones - you may need less than you think. As for time-based (temporal) effects, delay is fine at this stage, but try to resist the desire to add reverb, if you can...

When you've got your individual tracks sorted out, you can position them in the soundfield. You might find at this stage that you've got tracks 'masking' each other, and it may not just be the panning that's a problem. As well as their own 'physical' space, most tracks need their own 'frequency' space to occupy as well, so you might find yourself eq-ing individual tracks to give others enough space to exist in the audio spectrum.

By now, you should be getting a good idea of the relative levels and position of each track, and hopefully the mix is starting to come together. This is often the point where you will need to apply a little overall reverb, and quite possibly a multi-band compressor to your mix, especially for radio. This will get the overall levels higher, hopefully without the bass and drums punching the rest of the track's levels up and down. You don't usually need too much of this, either - you should have got the sound pretty much right earlier in the mix. Quite often this is the 'magic fairy dust' element that gets added at the mastering stage, often with a judicious bit of final eq.

A couple of other things; If you feel that you need to use an enhancer, then try adding it to individual tracks, not the mix, and remember that 'less is definitely more' with them. The other thing is drums. They can be complete buggers to get right. It's often worth doing a complete submix of them on their own (using the same principles as above). Then add the bass. Then do everything else.

So the clue to your 'string line' effect is that every sound must be defined within its own space in time, position and frequency, and you have to get them right individually.

Finally, (for everybody else) I KNOW that there are loads of other ways to do mixes, and that everybody has their own little tricks that work for them. But everybody has to start somewhere, and the procedures that I've outlined are pretty basic. When you've learned the rules, however painfully, you can start to break them AND KNOW WHY!

I hope that this is some help...

The Follow-up

A couple of other things:
I checked out Steinberg's plugins page which has a ton of stuff listed - no, not just VST, but DX that you can use with CEP (or CE2000). They've done quite a good trawl of what's available, and there are plenty of mastering tools listed. Page is at

http://www.steinberg.net/infocenter/discoveries/pluginzone/chart.phtml?sid=02468076

Looking around one or two of the links, like dB for instance, reveals that you can get some very powerful tools for not a lot of bread. Well, cheaper than I thought you could, anyway.

The other thing that I should have included in the basic primer was a quick reminder of some of the basic rules for tracklaying, which are relevant to this topic if you are recording live musicians. So,

Use the best (most appropriate) mics you can, and if you are using a mixer, get the gain structure right. (channel fader at 0dB, set level with mic gain control)

Get the sound as good as you can by optimising the mic positions BEFORE you use any eq. Ideally, use NO eq. when recording. Don't rely on 'fixing it in the mix' - it ALWAYS sounds better when it's fixed at source. There's loads more to this topic than I can put in here - check it out.

Steve

SteveG · Location: United Kingdom

The only thing that I really want to add that's specific to your situation, clothsburner, is to suggest that you don't try to pan too much stuff dead-centre. Personally, I'd spread the drums slightly, especially the snare, which will (should!) have a significant amount of energy above 2kHz. Vocals and Bass, fine, but after that I'd do some experiments.

Last point: Make sure that you are monitoring on speakers that you 'know' the sound of, and try to mix quietly. If it sounds good when it's quiet, it'll definitely sound good when it's loud, but that's not true the other way around! If you do a search in the forums, you will find a number of references to this.

Steve

motorhead_6 · Posted - Sat Jul 14, 2001 12:51 pm

From my experience I (and others I have seen) tend to want to eq too much. So go easy on the eq or possibly not even use it sometimes. Try to use the eq only where it needs it and dont use it just to be using it. Sometimes I have better luck with the smaller band eqs like the 20 band.

My 2 cents.

SteveG · Location: United Kingdom

Sounds good to me, motorhead.

Steve

jonrose · Location: USA

And to me, also. Initially, I was trying to deter clothesburner from whacking away with the EQ before he even knew where his mix was, sonically speaking!

All the best... -Jon
:-)

motorhead_6 · Posted - Sun Jul 15, 2001 8:59 pm

EQs are very ironic in that they can enhance the sound so beutifully but yet so often so many bring the quality to some number that is not large enough from 0 to be able to be detected by humans or worse. Give a guy (average joe not musician or producer) a EQ that he can use when recording cassettes and you can bet your family jewels that he will have several to many BAD BAD sounding tapes probably with way to much bottom especially the almost sub sonic stuff. For me I go by how much time I have to play with it. If its not much I have learned it works out better to not use it because me personally every time I hear it I think of something that needs to be changed. I guess you could say that my ear is slow or it is just slow absorbing into my brain but I cant just listen once set the eq and go. Ill be jacking with one song for 3 weeks. At some point you have to just stop.

beetle · Location: USA

The hardest thing to do is to CUT instead of BOOST.

Understanding the frequency spectrum will help you zero in on the problem area quicker.

When I first used a eq IN THE EARLY 80'S I EQ'd everything in the attempt to make stuff sound dynamic or brilliant by boosting the treble, usually. I still have some of those tapes around and they sound horrible. Youth?

urumuqi74 · Posted - Mon Jul 16, 2001 12:31 pm

motorhead_6 · Posted - Mon Jul 16, 2001 8:23 pm

This is slightly off topic but : I am a radio buff and love to play with my many transmitters, recievers, and trancievers so I subscribe to "Popular Communications" magazine. (which by the way gets you put on the FBI subversives list because it is considered subversive literature) According to them (Pop Com not the FBI) after researching over 20,000 different bands who play all different kinds of music, Motorhead is the closest to white noise. Just in case 1 or 2 of you dont know white noise is, it is every audible frequency at the same level at the same time. What it sounds like is if you turn on a walkie talkie and turn the squelch all the way down. AC DC came in second. So if you are worried about being bugged and you dont happen to have a white noise recording then crank up the motorhead as it will be the hardest music to filter out. Plus they are a great band. Look up loudest band in the Guiness book of world records. If it says "The Who at 120db" (I know that 120db dont mean sh#$$ but guiness doesnt) then you have a very old copy. If you have a fairly recent copy it will say "Motorhead at 130db". They are the loudest band Ive ever seen live. They are really the only band Ive seen who was loud enough since the 70s. Zepp in 77 and Nugent in 78 were loud enough in big arenas. If seen bands loud enough in small halls but not in the last 10 years. By the way Branford Marsaliss (sp) is a huge motorhead fan and hes on the road right now. Might want to check him out if you like jazz. Princess Fergy (sp) says Motorhead is her favorite band.