Tutorials - Mixing - Feeling Your Way

You can take any approach to mixing you feel is appropriate to your music, from the 'wall of sound' (favoured by people as disparate as Phil Spector and hardcore guitar bands), to a cleaner, more considered approach where space is created around each instrument in terms of both frequency and time.

The latter approach is undoubtedly the more time consuming. You need a good ear to determine the area of the frequency spectrum in which each sound predominates and to prevent too much overlap. But that's what professional studio engineers and producers are able to do, and the results usually speak for themselves.

The most basic function of mixing - the balancing of levels between individual instruments (or tracks) - is not something anyone can advise you about. You know how you want your music to sound and the level controls are in your hands. But do bear in mind the likely destination for a particular mix. There's no mystery here. The primary requisite for the dance floor is a rhythm track which to hit the punters in the solar plexus. But apply the same bottom end to a song destined for someone's car stereo, and it'll cause major problems.

Bass needs to be tailored quite specifically to the needs of a particular track. Using EQ, it's possible to strip away low frequencies to quite a high level before the ear will tell you anything is missing (though this is where having an accurate monitoring system is so important). Very low frequencies are often not audible but will soak up a high proportion of a speaker's available energy. Filtering them out can actually increase the perceived volume of the audible bass and will certainly reduce distortion at high sound pressure levels. As effective as EQ is in such applications, it can be something of a mixed blessing in the wrong hands. Use it to correct minor problems with individual sounds and to create space round certain instruments by filtering out unwanted frequencies, but don't rely on it as a universal panacea. Obviously, much will depend on the versatility of the controls; sweep and para-metric EQ is much more effective at homing in on problem areas of the frequency spectrum. But they can just as easily be responsible for raising the profile of certain sounds till they just don't fit in any more.

There's no clear dividing line between the two, except to say that the ear is much more forgiving of frequencies which aren't there than those that are. So wherever possible, try cutting the frequencies you don't want, rather than boosting those you do.

Added by - Looperman

Date - 2006-05-01 00:00:00

Viewed - 5422 times

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