| "Rapmusic.com's very own guide to MIXING: Tools you need & How/When to use them."- Bodi MIXING Recording is making sure you have all the ingredients. Effects are the spices. Mixing is having the correct portions of those ingredients, and using the right amount of spice. Now if you're using bad ingredients, you're going to make a bad meal. You may have heard this referred to as the "polished turd", wherein a great mix is applied to a crappy bunch of tracks. Before you even attempt to mix, make sure you've done your best with the raw material. Once you've got quality tracks, you're going to want a quality mix. You should have the ear for your desired music and the technology to make the most of your tracks. Ensure that each instrument in the mix lives in it's own space and dynamic range for your song. Ever had an overly beefy guitar that was bleeding into your bass and making your mix sound muddy? That's what EQ is for. Sometimes you gotta create pockets for your instruments to live and breath in. In addition, your mix will sound a lot less "squashed" and "over-produced" if you compress and EQ the individual instruments properly (and only as necessary), rather than trying to squash the whole mix. After all, just because your bass is heavy and needs to be contained, doesn't mean your voice section needs compression too. Individual Tracks - Silence Removal Hum, noise, and musicians recording when they are supposed to be 'laying out' can make your recording sound less than professional. The first thing to do is remove the parts on your track that are supposed to be silent, including significant unwanted noise between notes, and loud vocal breathing. Compression An often misused, and seldom understood (and very necessary) element of mixing is compression. Compressing individual tracks as necessary results in a mix which limits the dynamics of the individual tracks, while maintaining the dynamics of the project as a whole; However, Over-Compression will squeeze the life out of the track, and combined with errant attach and release settings will cause that 'pumping and breathing' sound (sounds like someones playing with the volume while your listening). Under compression leaves you with a wild and unprofessional sounding mix wherein the peak sounds are too loud, and the average sound is too low. This is great if you are going for that uncompromising garage band sound, but it's bad if you actually want to get signed/book shows/get radio play as an uncompromising garage band. Graphic Equalization If you are going for a particular combination sound (deep-n-slappy, vocal clarity) graphic equalization is the tool to use. It allows you to adjust varying frequencies by varying degrees. Before you add effects to a track, try a little EQ. You must experiment...how do you think audio engineers become the best? Parametric Equalization If you are trying to remove or limit specific frequencies (60cycle hum, hiss, mud tones, etc..) parametric equalization is the tool to use. It's like taking a magnifying glass to your track and picking out the frequency you want to effect. Hip-Hop artists use this technique (a method of filtering) to remove the unwanted frequencies of a sample. Pitch Correction God forbid your artist doesn't have the perfect pitch. As long as the vocals are recorded individually, you can make it better, if not perfect. If you have the pitch correction software (Antares Auto-Tune) then that allow you to take whole vocal tracks, or just particular vocal phrases, and tune it to a given key and scale. The beauty of the Auto-Tune is that it's graphical mode gives you the ability to correct your pitch without ruining the emotion content of the track. Effects Finally, once you got your mix sounding great bone dry, we splash on the effects to your taste. Whatever type of sound you're going for, your combination of internal (DSP-FX DirectX algorithms), and external (Alesis Quadraverb) effects can create it (IF YOU HAVE THESE). If your intention is to overdo it, then by all means do so; otherwise make sure your tracks get just the right splash. Mix Formats Red Book standard Compact Disc (CD) Digital Analog Tape (DAT) Analog Tape Real Audio MP3 Wave & AIFF Hope this helps everyone just a lil bit more....holla |