Professional Analog Mastering.
Professional Analog Mastering.
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This is a strange tip, but consider it similar to something like recommended listening levels to avoid ear fatigue, etc.
In short, the middle ear contains ossicles or three tiny bones that collectively act like an amplifier for the eardrum's vibrations, boosting the incoming signal by about 30dB before the sound travels to the cochlea of the inner ear.
However, for this process to work properly, the air pressure inside the middle ear should match that outside the ear—this is where the Eustachian tube comes in. When it opens, it relieves air pressure in the middle ear’s cavity, resulting in the proper transference of energy from the ossicles.
So, when mixing, to ensure your ears are working properly, especially while you’re bombarding them with significant air pressure via sound waves, you can yawn, swallow more often, or pop your ears to open the eustachian tube and restore equilibrium between the inside and outside of your ear.
Timbre is a term we often use in mixing, but knowing its building blocks completely changes how you approach EQ, compression, saturation, reverb, etc.
Although many other factors determine timbre, the two primary factors include the frequency spectrum over time and the transient or onset and offset of the signal.
For example, playing a note on a piano introduces the fundamental, as well as a series of harmonics and overtones. Collectively, this helps any listener determine the source to be a piano.
The attack and decay of the note, and to a lesser extent, the sustain and release, also play a role - without the onset and offset of the piano’s note, it would be difficult to determine the instrument.
Combining these ideas, the harmonics included in the transient, as well as the onset and offset or the transient itself, really play the largest role in our ability to identify an instrument or any sound source. To prove this to you, I’ll take the transient of a piano and build the sustain and release using sine waves.
It won’t sound perfect, but it gets surprisingly close to the sound of a piano.
Regarding mixing, the point here is to pay particular attention to your transients. Compression, saturation, reverb, and even EQ all alter transients to varying degrees.
Be sure to process your signals thoughtfully, or you can unintentionally alter their timbre. Conversely, understanding this helps you affect their timbres if that’s what you’re trying to do.
Watch the video to learn more >
Panning hard left and right makes sense sometimes, but not all the time.
It helps if we visualize our instruments within the stereo field.
If you have your kick, bass, and vocal in the center, but everything else is panned hard left and right, these “stacks” on the side, so to speak, make it incredibly difficult to discern what’s there.
In this example, all of the performances compete in their allocated small space, but panning some instruments a few ticks instead greatly improves clarity.
In short, utilizing this full field achieves a more complex and interesting mix since it becomes much easier to hear the entire arrangement.
Furthermore, it provides contrast between the hard-panned instruments and instruments allocated to different spots in the stereo field.
Let’s listen to a mix with too much hard panning and one with more carefully picked placements.
Watch the video to learn more >
Variation between stereo placements isn’t the only time when contrast plays a role in mixing.
If you heavily distort a signal, that distortion becomes even more impressive when played in tandem with a non-distorted signal. If you reverberate a signal, you need to give the listener a control variable, so to speak, so that they can differentiate between what’s meant to be up close and what’s far away.
This contrast also applies to garnering the listener’s attention. If I want the listener to pay attention to a particular lyric, I can deviate its reverb settings, saturation settings, compression, etc., from the norm or what’s been established as the baseline in the mix.
To demonstrate this, here are two personal mixes of mine—the first is a demo from a while ago, and the second is a newer mix. Granted, the newer version has live drums and different takes, but you should still hear how, in the demo, I completely overlooked contrast, especially when it comes to reverb.
Watch the video to learn more >
You can’t make a good mix using tricks alone, but once you have a solid foundation, they’re a fun way to introduce sounds indicative of a certain era or add something unique to the track.
Here are some of my favorites that I think will be useful to you.
Abbey Road reverb is simply equalized reverb—a 12dB/Octave HP is centered on 600Hz and a matching LP at 10kHz. You can perform this with any reverb that includes an EQ, or you can introduce reverb in parallel and then create the filters with linear phase EQ. Chamber or Plate reverb will give you a classic sound.
Side-image transient expansion is weird but sounds great, especially on drums. Send the signal to an aux track for parallel processing, then use the free plugin MSED or a similar one to mute the mids/solo the sides. Insert a transient expander and adjust until the side image, which usually lacks transient detail, has some actual impact. Then, blend the effect in with the aux track’s channel fader.
Lastly, a stereo detuning effect is incredibly helpful for vocals - nothing too extreme, just some subtle modulation of the pitch between the left and right channels. This increases stereo width like a chorus effect but makes the vocal sound more in tune by creating multiple voices, resulting in the perceived pitch being the average of the multiple frequencies.
Let’s take a listen to the first 2 I mentioned, being used on a drum stem.