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

Drum Miking - Part 2

Hi everybody and welcome back to part 2 of my drum miking series. Last time we discussed miking kick and snare drums so this week I want to delve more into miking rack toms and floor toms.

When you're miking toms, there's a couple of different things that you need to take into account. Do you want to mike just the top, or do you want to mike top and bottom? Do you want to use a dynamic mic or maybe a condenser? What kind of heads should you use? All of these are very good questions, and hopefully I will provide you the answers that you need.

Normally, I just mike at the top of head of the rack tom. I find that miking the bottom head of the tom, while providing some additional resonance, really doesn't do very much for the overall sound of my drum kit, and is a waste of a track to be honest. So let's stick with the top head. As far as what type of drumhead you should use, it really depends on if you're in the studio or if you're doing live work. In my experience, I have always found in the studio, that batter heads tend to give me the best results, while when I am doing a live sound gig, I find the clear heads are the best. Also, it's a good idea if your drummer knows how to tune his drums! I use a tool called Drum Dial. It is a tempanic pressure tuner that works off of the tension of the head, not the sound, to achieve the correct tone of the drum. And lastly, you need to decide if you want to use dynamic microphones or condenser microphones to record your toms. I would say that the studio standard is the dynamic microphone known as the Sennheiser 421. It's a very good mic I'll admit, and I use it sometimes to make musicians feel at home in the studio since it's something that they are probably used to seeing in other studios. Personally, the microphone I like to use for rack toms is the Audio Technica 4050. It is a large diaphragm condenser that just seems to have more attack and brightness then the 421 while still having about the same amount of body as the 421. I like to have a little more natural stick attack coming through the microphone than the 421 offers me most of the time.

So let's talk distance. If you using a dynamic microphone such as the 421 a Shure 57 or an Audix D2, then you want to be approximately 1 to 2 inches off of the drumhead. For me, with my "finger measuring system" that we talked about in my previous blog, it would be about a knuckle up off of the head. When you use a condenser microphone, such as the 4050, the AKG 414, or even the Neumann U87, you want to be approximately 3 to 6 inches off of the drumhead. In my finger measurement, that would end up being a whole index finger to about half of your hand. Remember, the further away your microphone is from your drum, the more bleed you will get from the surrounding the pieces of the drum kit, so it is very important to find that optimum distance that provide you with enough body and attack, but still gives you the necessary isolation from the rest of the drum kit so that your compression (and possibly gating) will work correctly and not against you. You can also mike both of your up rack toms with one microphone if you need to. I have done this on several occasions when I did not have enough inputs on my console to allow me to record both toms separately. What I did in the situation is, I used a large diaphragm condenser (which happened to be the 4050), and I put it about 6 to 8 inches up directly between both toms, facing straight down. Then in the mixing stage, I added a new audio track to my session and separated the second tom hits from the track and moved them to their own track.

For miking floor toms, my go to microphone is the Shure PG 52. I find this microphone (which is actually a lower level mic made primarily for kick drum miking) gives the floor tom a nice round "boom" while still maintaining some of the attack that is needed. I mic it up generally being about 2 to 3 inches up off the drumhead and 2 to 3 inches into the drum itself (over the ring).  I'm not pointing at the middle of the drum like you would a snare mic, but pointing more towards the outside edge about 3 inches into the drumhead.

So that's it. Not nothing too difficult, just your basic mic set up. I do EQ the tracks coming into my system and as well as a EQing them after recording. I find that this gives me the best possible sound I can get going down to my recorder and gives me a good base to start the mix with.

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 and Lexington School for Recording Arts 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