Mix Balance

Building The Mix
Despite what you might think, there is no standard instrument to start and build a mix from. Modern mixers employ various techniques and they’re all valid, especially in different genres of music. For instance, here are the places from which a mix can be started:

From the Bass
From the Kick Drum
From the Snare Drum
From the Drum Overheads

From the Lead Vocal or main instrument
With all of the instruments and vocals in right from the beginning

When mixing a string section, from the highest string (violin) to the lowest (bass)
There are some mixers that just push up all the faders and mix with everything in the mix from the beginning. The theory here is that everything will eventually be in the mix anyway, you might as well start with it all in as soon as you can. The advantage to this method is that by hearing all the instruments and vocals, you’re able to make an aural space for everything. If you insert one instrument at a time, you begin to run out of space and frequently have to go back to the beginning to make sure everything fits together properly.

Whichever way you select, there is no right way or wrong way to build a mix. The method of the following exercises is frequently used, but feel free to change the order if it feels better to you.

Wherever you start from, it’s a good idea that the lead arrangement element (usually the the vocal) be inserted into the mix as soon as possible. Since the vocal is the most important element, it will use up more frequency space than other supporting instruments. Many mixers find that by waiting until late in the mix to put the vocal in, there’s not enough space left and the vocal just never sits right with the rest of the track.

In our next exercise pod we’ll experiment with different methods of getting a mix balance where we’ll look at all of these methods.

The Drums
In the early days of recording there was no such thing as balancing the drums since the entire kit was treated as a single instrument and miked with just a single mic. As producers began to understand how important the beat was, a mic was added to the kick. Eventually the modern drum sound evolved to where each drum and sometimes each cymbal is individually miked. As a result, the internal mix of the drums is a very important part of virtually every modern recording.

Different engineers approach this mix in different ways. Some begin with the kick drum and build around that, while others start with the snare, since it provides the backbeat of most songs. Yet others want to build their drum mix around the toms so they don’t get lost in the mix, especially if they’re prominently featured.

A unique case has the mix being built around the overhead mics. The overhead mics are placed further away from the cymbals than normal cymbal miking, and are meant to pickup the overall sound of the drum kit. If overheads are used, many mixers like to start their mix from there and then fill in the sound with the other drum mics. This won’t work so well when the mics are placed lower with the idea of just picking up the cymbals.

Setting The Levels
Wherever you start your mix from, keep in mind that the mix buss level will get louder and louder with every instrument entrance. That’s why it’s best to begin your mix with the mix buss meter (the master meters) reading at about -10dB regardless of what instrument you start off with. With each instrument that enters at the same level as the current mix, the master mix meter should raise about 3 dB. Also remember that the sound of every drum will change anywhere from a little to a lot when a new drum or cymbal is added to the mix due to the leakage of the other drums into the mic.

Let’s try them all the starting places so you can get a feel for how each method works.

Exercise Pod – Balancing The Drums

E4.10: Building From The Kick
A) Raise the level of the kick drum until it reads about -10 dB on the master mix bus meter.

B) Raise the level of the snare until it’s about the same level. Did the sound of the kick change when it was paired with the snare? Is the kick masked by the snare and no longer distinct? How high does the master mix buss meter read?

C) Go to a place in the song where there are tom fills. Raise the level of all toms until they’re about the same level as the kick and snare. Did the sound of the kick and/or snare change? Does the kick and snare sound different when the toms aren’t playing? How high does the master mix buss meter read?

D) Raise the level of the cymbal or overhead mics until the overall sound begins to change and the cymbals become more distinct sounding. What happened to the sound of the other drums? How high does the master mix buss meter read?

E) Raise the level of the high-hat mic until it becomes a bit more distinct sounding. Does the sound of the snare change? Does the sound of any of the toms or cymbals change? How high does the master mix buss meter read? 

E4.11: Building From The Snare
A) Raise the level of the snare drum until it reads about -10 dB on the master mix bus meter.

B) Raise the level of the kick until it’s about the same level. Did the sound of the snare change when it was paired with the kick? Is the snare sound masked by the kick and no longer distinct? How high does the master mix buss meter read?

C) Go to a place in the song where there are tom fills. Raise the level of all toms until they’re about the same level as the kick and snare. Did the sound of the kick and/or snare change? What does the kick and snare sound like when the toms aren’t playing? How high does the master mix buss meter read?

D) Raise the level of the cymbal or overhead mics until the overall sound begins to change and the cymbals become more distinct sounding. What happened to the sound of the other drums? How high does the master mix buss meter read?

E) Raise the level of the high-hat mic until it becomes a bit more distinct sounding. Does the sound of the snare change? How about any of the toms or cymbals? How high does the master mix buss meter read?

Setting The Compressor

Reverb Basics

Before we get into adding and adjusting the reverb in your mix, let’s look at some of the reasons to add reverb first. When you get right down to it, there are four reasons to add reverb.

1. To make the recorded track sound like it’s in a specific acoustic environment. Many times a track is recorded in an acoustic space that doesn’t fit the song or the final vision of the mixer. You may record in a small dead room but want it to sound like it was in a large studio, a small reflective drum room, or a live and reflective church. Reverb will take you to each of those environments and many more.

2. To add some personality and excitement to a recorded sound. Picture reverb as makeup on a model. She may look rather plain or even only mildly attractive until the makeup makes her gorgeous by covering her blemishes, highlighting her eyes, and accentuating her lips and cheekbones. Reverb does the same thing with some tracks. It can make the blemishes less noticeable, change the texture of the sound itself, and highlight it in a new way.

3. To make a track sound bigger or wider than it really is. Anything that’s recorded in  stereo automatically sounds bigger and wider than something recorded in mono, because the natural ambience of the recording environment is captured. In order to keep the track count and data storage requirements down, most instrument or vocal recordings are done in mono. As a result, the space has to be added artificially by reverb. Usually, reverb that has a short decay time (less than one second) will make a track sound bigger.

4. To move a track further back in the mix. While panning takes you from left to right in the stereo spectrum, reverb will take you from front to rear (see Figure 8.1). An easy way to understand how this works is to picture a band on stage. If you want the singer to sound like he’s in front of the drum kit, you would add some reverb to the kit. If you wanted the horn section to sound like it was placed behind the kit, you’d had more reverb. If you wanted the singer to sound like he’s in between the drums and the horns, you’d leave the drums dry and add a touch of reverb to the vocal, but less than the horns.

If we were going to get more sophisticated with this kind of layering, we’d use different reverbs for each of the instruments and tailor the parameters to best fit the sound we’re going after.

Typical Reverb Parameters
One of the mistakes that many beginning mixers make is to simply add the reverb and never attempt to adjust it to make it work better with the track. While some sophisticated reverbs have exotic parameters like Spinand Dampening that can confuse all but the select few engineers, if you concentrate on just a few of the parameters that make the biggest difference in the sound and that are commonly found on most reverbs, you’ll find that adjusting it gets a lot easier (see Figure 8.2).

The Major Parameter Controls
Although many sophisticated reverbs have a wide variety of somewhat obscure parameters, you can get exactly what you need for any mix with only the following five:

Reverb Type – Most variable software reverbs have four environments that you can dial in; hall, room, chamber and plate. A hall is a large space that has a long decay time and lots of reflections to it. A room is a much smaller space that can be dead or reflective, but it has a short decay time of about 1.5 seconds or less. An acoustic chamber is an electronic representation of a tiled room that many of the large studios used to specially build to create a great reverb sound (see Figure 8.3). Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” was built around an excellent acoustic chamber at Gold Star Studios, for example. A plate is a 4 foot hanging piece of metal with transducers on it that many studios used for artificial reverb when they couldn’t afford to build a chamber (see Figure 8.4).

Each of these reverb types have a distinctly different sound and there’s no rule on which one to use. In most reverb plug-ins available today, you can usually just find one that you like and adjust the parameters to fit almost any song, or you can be more adventurous and try a different setting for every song. Either works.

Decay Time – The decay time represents how long it takes the reverb tail to fall off to where we can no longer hear it. Longer delay times push a track further back in the mix, while short ones (under about one second) make it sound bigger.

Pre-Delay – This parameter delays the entrance of the reverb. A Pre-delay not only makes the reverb sound larger, but it keeps the reverb from clouding up the mix by allowing the listener to hear the attack of the sound clearly before the reverb kicks in. In the days before electronic reverbs, pre-delay was achieved by using a tape recorder and setting the delay by the playback speed. Pre-delay can be usually be adjusted from 0 to about 120 milliseconds or so, which is about an eighth of a second.

High and Low Pass Filters – The High and Low Pass filters are often overlooked, but they’re the way that the tone of the reverb is shaped in order for the reverb to fit better in the mix. If you want to clearly hear the reverb, you typically wouldn’t roll off the high-end much so it can stick out of the mix a bit. On the other hand, if you wanted the reverb to blend in better, you’d use the LPF to roll-off the highs anywhere from 10k to as low as 2kHz.

On the other hand, if your mix has a lot of low end and is already busy, too much low end on the reverb would just muddy it up. That’s why you’d use the HPF to roll it off anywhere from 50Hz to as high as 600Hz. As an example, the famous Abbey Road Studios reverbs that have been heard on hundreds of hit records over the last 50 plus years (including every Beatle record), set their LPF at 10kHz and their HPF at 600Hz.

If a reverb that you’re using doesn’t have it’s own built-in filters, you can always insert an equalizer or filter into the send or the return channel and roll the frequencies off there, or even boost them if needed.

Dry/Wet – The Dry/Wet control (sometimes called Mix) allows you to mix the reverb signal with the dry signal. This is essential for dialing in the correct amount of reverb if the plug-in is inserted on a track, but it’s normally set to 100% wet when inserted into a dedicated effects return channel.

Many reverbs also include a parameter known as Diffusion, which simulates how reflective the walls in a particular space are. For instance, a more diffuse environment has hard walls with a lot of reflections, while one with softer walls has fewer reflections. A simple way to think of it is that high diffusion provides a thicker sounding reverb, and low diffusion is thinner sounding.