A lot of singer-songwriters, and engineers alike struggle with creating a detailed and impressive acoustic guitar sound, especially when using only one microphone.
These are two things you should do to almost every instrument and vocal track, and is something that will definitely contribute to the overall quality of your mix.
Often times recordings sound good, but lack a certain defining characteristic that makes them memorable or distinguishable from other recordings.
Often times, these two processes are seen as one in the same and are used interchangeably, but due to some crucial details, they serve entirely different purposes when it comes to editing and mixing.
Today you’re going to learn how to create a linear phase de-esser, which is something that currently doesn’t exist as a plugin, it’s not something you can buy.
This test will help you to determine when two tracks are completely identical to one another, and just as importantly, it lets you hear the isolated differences between the two.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with mid-side processing, it’s essentially splitting your track not into left and right signals, like a regular stereo image, but into one mono, and one stereo signal.
I’ll be showing you how to turn the act of compressing audio, into a way that shapes the sound of your recordings, similar to how an equalizer shapes the sound of your recordings.
This technique will also help to clean up your mixes, by allocating specific times that a signal’s amplitude will increase.
By ‘vocal clicks’ I’m referring to the noises made during a vocalist’s performance which are not breaths or the actual notes
Although the English language has its fair share of pleasantly harmonious phrases and sounds, the ‘ess’ sound isn’t one of them. When properly balanced and mixed, the very common ‘ess’ sound (also referred to as sibilance) doesn’t present many problems.
We’ve all been there - we take a break from our mix, thinking that after we’ve given our ears their much needed respite, we’ll return to the same, sonically spectacular masterpiece we left only moments ago.
While many engineers dream of owning racks of gear and endless plugins, the reality is, we often only need to start with a few pieces of equipment and some free plugins. Lucky for us, there are all sorts of free plugins that can help improve a mix.
A great mix translates and accents the message of a song. Sure, the music and lyrics send the strongest signals when people listen, but the mix will aid in creating vibe and accentuating particular elements for a song.
As mastering engineers, we have all heard people describe our job as “making it louder”. We adjust gain levels, we use compression, and we limit to achieve these results. To a listener, it is louder and reaching for the volume adjustment becomes less of a necessity. To us, it is a careful combination of tools based on what a song needs to sound its best. Limiting is most often the last stage before dithering and its importance cannot be overstated. Using a limiter aggressively can squash the life and dynamics out of a mix at the last stage. On the flip side, using a limiter too sparingly may not bring up the low level parts of your mix, leaving your mix with dynamic range that may be too expansive for the genre. In the world of digital audio, engineers should familiarize themselves with the effects of different plugin limiters. Below are some of the plugin limiters that have proven to be effective for in the box mastering.
