How To Create A More Professional Mix - Part 1

Hello everyone! It’s been a pretty long time since I have posted anything here on the Nall In The Mix blog, and I apologize for that. Between home, my band, and the studio, I got pretty sidetracked and let NITM slip. And just recently, I had the honor of winning the 2018 Lexington Music Award for Best Engineer/Producer! Having said all that, I will try my best to do better by you from here on out, and to this end, I am starting a multipart series where I am going to give you tips on how I get my mixes to sound as professional and radio ready as possible. Some things will seem basic, while others are more involved. We are not going to take very in-depth looks into these techniques, however, as we have several things to go over and each installment in the series would be VERY long! Ready? Ok, let’s get started!

SETTING LISTENING LEVELS

So you have gotten a song ready to mix. The first thing you need to do is pull up the faders and get a good balance between the tracks so you can hear it in its most raw form and really hear what you are dealing with. Don’t worry about volume adjustments at this point, compression and automation will fix this later on down the line. Right now you just want to hear how things sit together and how their natural EQ affects each other. Does the guitar sound muffled in the mix? Is the bass guitar low end overpowering the kick drum? Are the vocals harsh and painful in the high mids? These are the type of things you should be listening for at this early stage of the mix so you can get your game plan together.

KNOW YOUR EQ FREQUENCIES!

The first real key to getting a professional sounding mix is the ability to use EQ and compression correctly and effectively. I know this sounds like a “duh” moment, but hear me out. Boosting or cutting the wrong frequencies can severely harm the sound of your mix. If you cut all your guitars (bass included) at 400hz because they INDIVIDUALLY sound better that way, there’s going to be a big, hollow hole in your sound. There has to be something in that area. If you add 8Khz to all your vocals, it’s probably going to be pretty harsh when combined in the mix. If your kick, snare, bass, and guitar all have 100hz boosted, your low end is going to be muddy and confused. You get the idea. Knowing your frequencies and their ranges will help you immensely! Just knowing that the kick low end is in the 60-80hz area, the bass in the 100hz, the snare in the 125-250hz range, and the guitars in the 200hz range will help you distribute the low end across the low frequency spectrum so that every instrument has its own low end but nothing seems muddy or stepping on each other in the mix. The same idea goes for your mids and highs. LEARN YOUR FREQUENCIES!

Some examples of separating the low end

SOLO MODE - FRIEND OR FOE?

I want to stop here and talk a bit about the SOLO button. It is, of course, the way that you can single out a track from the rest to hear it individually. To do all your EQ work in solo is going to really slow you down and hamper your workflow considerably. You don’t need to constantly be going in and out of solo on a track to make it sound good. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Here’s my technique and my suggestion to you when it comes to soloing. Only solo ONCE. Also, I only have the tracks that I have completed EQ and compression-wise in the mix, everything else is muted. I bring in the next track to be worked on and listen to it IN CONTEXT with the tracks I have already worked on. That gives me an idea about what to do to make it sit well in the mix. Once I have my game plan, I solo the track and look for the offending frequencies. I then put it BACK into the mix and give it a listen. If it needs more adjustment (and it almost always does!), I will make the changes with the rest of the completed tracks still being heard. This way you really hear what your tweaks to your track are doing IN CONTEXT with the rest of your mix. If you keep going back into solo mode, you have no reference as to how your changes are affecting the rest of the mix. There are some engineers that NEVER use the solo button and do everything in full song mode! Of course, you should always revisit your finished tracks EQ’s as you progress and make tweaks as the mix develops. One example I give students is that if you think you can’t hear your kick, mute it out. If something goes away, you CAN hear the kick, just not the frequencies you are looking for! If you just turn up the fader, now you have boosted what you need, but you have also boosted what you could still hear without the volume boost. Brightening up your high mid attack will bring out the “smack” of the kick without making the low end crazy loud and suddenly you can hear the kick again! It’s magic!

USE ONLY WHAT YOU NEED

And while we’re on the subject, remember that you don’t have to use all the frequency bands in your EQ! A crazy idea, I know, but it’s true. You only need to make the track sound good with the mix. If it only needs a little bit of a high boost, then do it! You don’t have to go crazy with a bunch of mid cuts or low boosting if the track only needs a little adjustment to sit right in the song. There are times that I only pull up a ONE band EQ instead of a 4 or 6 band, because I only have to do ONE THING. It’s also good to note here that sometimes you don’t need to EQ at all! Usually DI keyboard sounds don’t need any extra help. The company that created the keyboard has spent countless hours perfecting the sounds and they will almost always sound great just by turning them up. Don’t make your job more difficult than it has to be and MIX SMART!

THE DIGITAL EQ TRAP

Now a word on digital EQ. Most DAW EQs come with a graph window that shows you where your frequency lies on the spectrum, the Q curve of the frequency cut or boost, and the amount of cut or boost. In my mind, the first two things are great, the last, not so much. In my experience at LSRA, some people become “slaves” to the graph. By this I mean that they will be boosting the kick, for example, at 80hz with a 8db boost. It will sound great, but they will turn it down to a 3db boost because it “looks” wrong in comparison to the other boosts on the EQ. I keep trying to tell people that if it sounds good, then it is good. Don’t worry about what the graph shows you. I use mostly “after market” plug-ins. Most are simulations of analog gear that are only knobs. I have no graph to get in my way and I turn the knobs til it sounds like the sound I have in my head. Sometimes the boosts or cuts are HUGE. Sometimes they aren’t. But I just keep turning them until it SOUNDS right, not LOOKS right. I have been known to add a SECOND EQ to keep boosting because if I did it all on one plug-in, I would overload the plug-in! But in the end it’s how it sounds that matters, not how it looks. Don’t get caught up in that trap.

My kick drum EQ on a recent song, for example.

USING YOUR COMPRESSOR

The second most important element to a professional mix (in my opinion) is compression. If you don’t know how to set your attack and release times correctly, your mix will suffer and not come out like you hear it in your head. If you set fast attack times, your transient will be blunted and the instrument will become “rounded” and sit a little back into the mix. A slower attack time will give you a more aggressive front end and make your instrument stand out more in the mix. Vocals will sound more “mean” and the consonants will almost come spitting out of the track in a more urgent manner. A longer release time will give a more even signal and sustain the notes more, while a shorter release will keep the instrument or vocal more upfront and focused for the listener.

For rock songs, I find that my compression setting for drums and vocals are set with a relatively slow attack and a fairly fast release. This guarantees that those elements will be focal points in my mix.

A screenshot of my snare plug-in chain for a recent mix.

Many times, my bass guitar has a faster attack, but also a fast release. This is because I want to grab the transient immediately, but I also want to let it go almost as fast to keep it even but up front in the mix. The biggest problem with bass guitar is the volume and tone differences between the lower, thicker strings and the higher, thinner ones. By compressing with a 4:1 ratio and hitting the loudest sections with around 10db of reduction, I basically give myself an extremely even bass track. Sometimes I will either add some saturation directly to the track to “clip” the transient some more, or duplicate the track, add the saturation to the duplicate, and then buss them both to a group bass track and blend them to get the sound I need.

A screenshot of my bass plug-in chain from a recent mix.

Well, we have come to the end of part one of How To Create A More Professional Mix. Next time, I will delve into the world of DI guitars, Re-cab plug-ins, using samples to either replace or to support your drum sounds, and the use of quantizing, or griding, on your drum kit.

Don't forget that you are welcome to stop by and tour our facilities here at LIRCo and LSRA anytime. Just give us a call at 859-335-8440 (if you're local) or TOLL FREE at 877-335-8440 to set it up, so we can give you the ultimate LIRCo experience. See ya next time!!!

Steve Nall
Head Engineer, LIRS

Vocal Compression

Over all the years and mixes that I’ve done here at Long Island Studios and The Lexington School for Recording Arts, I have found that vocal compression is one of the hardest parts of your mix. It seems that many times it’s a chore to get vocal to sit on top of the mix all the time without getting covered up by the instruments. Today I'm going to tell you the way I like to set up vocal compression, as well as a few other ways that you may want to try.

Normally in rock music, you want the vocal to stay on top and out in front at all times, but a vocalist is a very dynamic part of your mix. So how do you do this?  The answer is compression. I like to use either the Waves Renaissance compressor or the CLA 1176 simulation, but any decent compressor can get you the results that you need.

I set my compressor up so that when the vocalist gets loud they are getting around 10 to 15 dB gain reduction. I know that this may seem like a lot to some of you, but it will guarantee that the vocal is even as it can possibly be. Now, the attack and release of the compressor play a big role in getting this done correctly. I generally set my attack times to 1 or 2 ms. On the 1176 compressor, the attack times run from "1" to "7" with "1" being the slowest. With some research, I found out that the "1" setting is around 1 ms, so that works out well doesn't?  On the Renaissance compressor, as well as other compressors, you generally have a sliding scale to tell you how many milliseconds your attack time is so that could be an easier path for you to go.

When it comes to release times, that part of compression is constantly changing from song to song.  The two main options are to either have the release time set very quickly and be releasing for every single word, or holding for a longer period of time (say 600 ms or so) to capture the entire line of vocal before releasing in time to catch the next line. The problem sometimes with fast release times is that if it is too fast, then you can get some audible distortions on the track. The problem with longer release times is that you may get some kind of a "pumping" effect because the compressor is slowly releasing as the line gets quieter. What I like to do, is have a fairly fast release time, usually in the 150 to 300 ms range. On the CLA 1176, the release time is also a range of "1" to "7", just like the attack time. The "1" is 1 second and the "7" is 50 ms, so I tend to have mine set to around the "5" area.  Then I just set the threshold to allow me around 10 dB of reduction, and use the output to gain to get the vocal back up to the volume that I need. Most of the time, this will get my vocal on top and "in your face" how I want it to be, so that every word is heard correctly and nothing is covered by the band.

For a more dynamic vocal, the same settings can be used, but just set the threshold so that instead of getting 10 dB of reduction on the loud parts, you're only getting around 3 to 6 dB of reduction. Then,set your output volume so that the loud parts are as loud as you want them to be, and the quieter parts will remain how they were recorded - without added compression.

Another way of getting somewhat "in your face" style compression (without the possible audibility of squashing the track), is to set up multiple compressors that are only compressing a few db each. Many times, this way of compressing a track allows you to compress in order to just control the peaks and then if anything breaks through, the second compressor will clamp down and keep everything even.  

Well, that's it for now. Don't forget that you are welcome to stop by and tour our facilities anytime. Just give us a call at 859-335-8440 (if you're local) or TOLL FREE at 877-335-8440 to set it up, so we can give you the ultimate LIRCo experience. See ya next time!!!

Steve Nall
Head Engineer, LIRS

Drum Miking - Part 1

Hello everybody and welcome back.  Being an instructor here at The Lexington School For Recording Arts means that you have to be able to wear many audio hats. So along with teaching the mastering class, helping in the Pro Tools lab, the analog portion of the school, the Waves certification class, and the occasional live sound class, the main course that I teach at the school involves actually recording a live band.  This deals with setting up the board, routing the tracks to the recorder, setting the separate headphone mixes, and of course, setting up the microphones for the band. This is the part of the course I would like to talk about today.

I have already gone over some of the guitar mic placement in the previous blog post, so today I want to focus about miking up the drum kit. Now a full blog about this could take a very long time, so today I'm going to focus on kick drum and snare only. I will do a part two for my next blog about the rest of the kit.

When you mic up the kick drum, there are two things to be aware of - the microphone you're going to use, and the  placement of the microphone on the drum. There are many great microphones for miking kick drums. Some I have used are the Shure Beta 52, the Audix D6, the AKG D12, and my personal favorite, the AKG D112.

The positioning of the kick drum microphone is very important depending on the type of sound you're looking to get out of the kick drum. You can put it in three general places: Outside the drum, just inside the hole in the front head, and completely inside the body of the drum itself. Although I have seen many many engineers use the second way of miking the drum, I prefer the third way, putting the microphone completely inside the drum.

When you put the microphone inside the kick drum, you achieve several things that you cannot get from any other way of miking. Number one, you get much more isolation from the rest of the drum kit than you do if you mic outside the drum or just barely inside the hole. Number two, you control how much snap, or attack, that you receive from the beater side of the kick drum. If you need more attack, you simply move the mic closer to the back head. If you need less attack, you just move the mic closer to the front of the kick drum. This option is not available to you if you do not have the microphone inside the drum itself. You are also able to do off axis miking from inside of the drum. If you like the bass to attack ratio that you are getting, but not the overall brightness of the attack, you simply turn the mic slightly to one side or the other so it is not pointing directly at the beater and you can achieve a slightly less bright attack while still maintaining the same amount of bass. For most rock drum sounds, my personal placement of the kick drum mic is approximately 6 to 8 inches from the beater side of the kick drum pointing directly where the kick pedal is going to connect with the beater head. This gives me a nice, natural, bright attack and still allows me to have a good low-end when I get into the mixing stage.

Occasionally you will run into the drummer that does not have a hole cut in his front drum head for you to place a microphone either just inside or fully inside the drum. This could be major problem, and my solution for this is one of two ways.  One way, is I tell the drummer that he must remove his front head so I can place the microphone inside his kick drum to receive the necessary attack that I need to get his kick to sound correct. If he won't take his drum head off, then I either have to use two microphones, one in the front (usually a condenser like a Neumann U87) approximately 6 to 8 inches away from the front head,and a smaller, tighter patterned dynamic mic (such as an SM 57) pointing where the drummer's kick pedal is hitting the beater head. Then I will blend these two microphones together to create one kick drum sound. Sometimes the bleed is too much on these microphones, and the sound is not good at all. When this problem happens, I usually do not use the front microphone.  I take the back microphone by the beater head and I trigger it with a drum replacement program. I have not run into this problem very many times in the past, but occasionally you will find a drummer who does not have a hole cut in his drum head and refuses to remove it, so it's good to have a back up plan when these incidences occur.

So enough about kick drums. Let's talk about snare. There's not very many ways to mic a snare drum. You can mic it from the top, or you can mic it from the bottom, or you can mic it from top and bottom. Personally I like to mic from the top. I have tried miking from the bottom as a blend with the top microphone, but it never seems to sound good to me, so I stopped using the bottom microphone many years ago. So today we are going to focus on top of miking only.  

Although there are quite a few small diaphragm dynamic microphones that can be used to mike up a snare drum, the most used (and the one I use) is the SM 57.  How far you place the microphone away from the top head of the drum changes how the drum sounds. If you put it too close, you will not get much body at all. If you put it too far away, you will not get very much stick attack. Plus, you have run the risk of getting too much bleed from the rest of the drum kit onto your microphone, making it almost impossible to compress or gate correctly. What I have found to be a good position for the snare mic, and what most other engineers have found as well, is to put the microphone approximately 2 to 3 inches up above the snare head and about 2 inches inside The perimeter of the drumhead ring.

Now, I don't usually go through my drum kit with a ruler or measuring tape and make sure that the snare mic is exactly 2 inches up or that the kick drum microphone is exactly 6 inches away from the beater head, I just use very basic rough estimates.  You can use a tape measure and get exact measurements if you would like. If you were doing a major label session where the drums will be recorded many different times over the course of several months and the microphones must be placed back exactly where they were to begin with, then I highly recommend using a ruler or measuring tape. But if you're going to record all the drums for say, a local band that is going to only be in the studio for one month total, then the exact measurements aren't that crucial because you're going to record all of your drums at once or possibly even just leave your drum kit miked up for the entire session so that if overdubs are needed, the drum kit will be available and ready to go immediately. This is how I usually do my sessions, so I rely on what I refer to as "the finger method".

I know that my index finger is 4 inches long (yes, I measured it), so I just use my hand to get my distances on my microphones. I do this for the entire drum kit: snare, toms, Hi hat, you name it, I use this method. The only thing that I can't do with it, is measure my overheads, because of course, they are more than 4 inches away!  Now  I know that my snare drum should be 2 inches off of the head and approximately 2 inches into the head, so having a 4 inch finger, I just place my finger down on the snare head, and position the microphone to touch my knuckle. I do this for the up and in and it is almost exactly 2 inches up and 2 inches in every single time. It may not be the most exact method, but it works for me, and I get a good sound on my snare drum, so I'm not worried about it. If it works for you, use it. If you need to measure with a measuring tape and get the exact number, do that. If the sound of the snare is good, what ever way you use, then you did it the right way. That's what's great about music, to quote Eddie Van Halen, "if it sounds good, then it is good".

So that is how I do my kick and snare mic placement. Next time I will go over my placement for toms, using dynamics and using condensers. Also we will go over miking the cymbals and the role room mics play in the overall sound of your drum kit in a later article.

Well, that's it for now. Don't forget that you are welcome to stop by and tour our facilities anytime. Just give us a call at 859-335-8440 (if you're local) or TOLL FREE at 877-335-8440 to set it up, so we can give you the ultimate LIRCo experience. See ya next time!!!

Steve Nall

Head Engineer, LIRS

My thoughts and technique for Bass compression

So I recently got a new bass guitar (a Spector Legend 4X), and while trying it out in the studio here at The Lexington School for Recording Arts, I started thinking about bass compression in modern music. I do a seminar here at the school on this subject, so I thought I'd talk to y'all about it too.

The major problem I find when mixing a song is the overall volume of the bass guitar. When they're playing on the lower strings, you can hear everything clear and full, but when they're playing on the higher strings, things tend to thin out and sound quieter. So how do we fix this problem? Well, besides riding the track fader with volume automation, compression is a major tool in fixing this. A lot of it has to do with where the threshold is placed and the attack time. If your threshold is too high, then you won't be able to compress the more average notes and only get the loud notes. If your threshold is too low, you may compress the loud notes way too much. So how do you do it you may ask? Well, this is how I personally compressed bass guitar.

I first find my average level, and I put my threshold to where the average level is getting about 3 to 6 dB of compression. My attack time is generally around 1 ms. This gives me a nice, fast attack but still allows a small bit of transient information to come through. If you want more transient attack to come through, then a longer attack of maybe 15-20 ms would be best for you. My release time is usually between 300 and 500 milliseconds. This allows the note to fully fade away for most instances before the compression goes away. The ratios I tend to use usually fall between 4:1 and 6:1. It gives a nice amount of compression, but not too crushing.

So with the threshold giving around 3 to 6 db of compression to the average volume of the bass, my louder hits are going to have somewhere between 6 and 10 db of reduction, and my quieter hits will not have any. What this will do is compress my average down a little bit and, of course, the loudest notes lowered even more. So what should be happening is that everything is coming closer to the volume of the quieter parts. If you were to record through this setting, you would see that your very dynamic loud to soft bass waveforms are now a lot more uniform. Not really a rectangle, but more in the same general ballpark of overall volume. This will allow the bass guitar to stay at a steady volume in the mix so that the instrument does not get covered by the guitars.

This technique will not change the overall low end of your track though, because the lower strings have more natural bass resonance than the higher strings. What you can do, however, is to add a bass roll off (HPF) filter around 80 Hz. This will take away some of the overall big bottom end, and the kick drum is really going to be down in that area anyway, so we're trying to keep our bass guitar and kick drum away from each other to have them more defined as individual instruments. If I really need the dynamics to be gone completely from my bass guitar, say that I am mixing a metal band, then I will move my attack time even faster than 1 ms and bring it down to around 500 ns and move my ratio up to a limiting threshold where it's higher than 10:1; usually I'm around 30:1 (if not 100:1), effectively making it a brick wall limiter. Now, remember, when you are using extremely fast attack times you must also have a longer release time or else you will have distortion on your bass guitar, which you probably don't want to have. 

So that's how I do it. I generally use a soft knee compressor like the Waves Rcomp or the CLA1176 compressor on my bass tracks, but really any compressor will do the job if you set it up correctly. Just experiment with the attack and threshold while maintaining average ratios and release times and see what you can come up with on your own. Most of the fun of mixing is trying out ideas and figuring out ways of making things sound even better than they actually are!

Well, that's it for now. Don't forget that you are welcome to stop by and tour our facilities anytime. Just give us a call at 859-335-8440 (if you're local) or TOLL FREE at 877-335-8440 to set it up, so we can give you the ultimate LIRCo experience. See ya next time!!!

Steve Nall

Head Engineer, LIRS

12.2.15 - Studio and School

What's up, everybody? Welcome back to my little corner of the net. So what's been going on at LIRCo and LSRA you ask? Well, we're only a few days into the week, but I'll tell ya what's going on so far…

Local guitarist/vocalist Chandler Shelton was in just yesterday with his band laying down some more basic tracks for their upcoming release. Our own in house producer/engineer extraordinaire, Michael Thomas, was at the helm for this session and by the end, the band had an awesome drum track to build on. They're coming back in later this week to drop in guitars and bass, and next week we're gonna hit it hard again with some more drum tracking. With the project in such an early stage, it's unknown which one of us will be there for the mix stage, but being a heavy rock guy myself, I know I'm gonna be throwing my hat into the ring on this one!

On the Recording School side of the coin, our Production class has finished the tracking of their project song and are now in the mix stage. Everyone has a part to play in the final product, so while a couple of the team handle the mix, the others are in charge of album art and video story boarding. After the mix comes mastering! All these skills they are using for this project they have learned from months of classes and labs, and it's all coming together at once!

Not too far behind them is the live sound class who are learning all that goes into being the man that makes the band sound awesome live. From the basics of plugging in the gear in the right order, to hooking up crossovers, to getting proper gain staging, to ringing the system, these students are learning what it takes to be FOH and monitor world all in one!

I've got a few topics brewing in my head for later, but that's about it for now. Don't forget that you are welcome to stop by and tour our facilities anytime. Just give us a call at 859-335-8440 (if you're local) or TOLL FREE at 877-335-8440 to set it up, so we can give you the ultimate LIRCo experience. See ya next time!!!

Steve Nall
Head Engineer, LIRS

EQ before or after compression? My take...

So besides being the Main Engineer for Long Island Recording Studios (LIRCo), I am also an instructor at the Lexington School For Recording Arts (LSRA), which is housed in the same complex. When beginning students start to learn the basics of EQ and compression, I am often asked the question, "Which comes first, Eq or compression?" And, "Why?" Well, here I hope to clear a few things up on that subject. This might get a little long winded, so stick with me, ok?

I'd like to preface this by saying that there really is no right or wrong answer to this question. You can go online and find this topic on many audio forums and the pages of arguments will be endless. It really comes down to your preference, and I am going to try to explain why mine is almost always going to be Compression First.

First, when you Eq something, what are you doing? Well, you are finding a few bad frequencies and cutting them out, and then finding a few good ones and boosting them, correct? Now, when you boost frequency, you are adding energy and volume to the audio. This is an important concept to understand.

When you compress audio, you are working on the dynamic range of the waveform. The dynamic range, basically, is the most quiet the audio can get up to the loudest. When you compress, you are controlling that range by bringing down the peaks in volume to a more manageable level to work better with the average sound of the audio. The lower the threshold and the more compression added, the lower the peak level becomes.

Now, when you Eq first, you are adding level (volume) to the signal. Usually being a bass and/or a treble boost. The compressor is going to react to that boost and take some of it away in an effort to control the dynamics of the track. So you will lose some of your Eq'ed sound. You will then have to go in after the compressor and add another Eq to get the sound you had before the compressor did its job and controlled the output volume. To me, this is counter-productive to workflow. Why Eq twice when you can just do it all after the compressor has worked on the raw signal?

Having said that, I did previously say ALMOST always earlier in this article. I would like to put this theory to you as well.

When you are working with the raw, unprocessed signal, you have many frequencies that are making the track muddy, or mid heavy, or some other natural problem. If you compress the raw signal, your compressor will sometimes grab those and give you kind of a "false positive" of where the threshold should be set. If you Eq out a few of those naturally "honky" or "shrill" frequencies, you should be left with mostly "good" frequencies and the compressor will be able to work more efficiently. I have found this out myself by setting a compressor up on the raw track and then going back and adding some pre-Eq and watching my compressor input go down because of the lack of muddy mid frequencies. So cleaning up the mids in your audio BEFORE compression, I believe, is a decent workflow tool, because it allows you to compress a better, cleaner version of the audio and gives you a better base to work from when you add the "real" Eq after the compressor has done it's job containing the dynamics to a more even range.

This is how I understand the differences and this is the way that I teach others. Like I said before, there are many people out there who think BEFORE is the only way and many that think AFTER is the only way. I lean more towards the AFTER camp, but it's really up to your personal ear as to which you like best.

I hope after reading this you have a better understanding of the basics of using Eq with compression. Feel free to ask me your questions and I will try to respond as quickly as I can.

Well, that's it for now. Don't forget that you are welcome to stop by and tour our facilities anytime. Just give us a call at 859-335-8440 (if you're local) or TOLL FREE at 877-335-8440 to set it up, so we can give you the ultimate LIRCo experience. See ya next time!!!

Steve Nall

Head Engineer, LIRS