Key Of Grey

Photo courtesy of randomwire

May 22nd, 2009 – So you’ve completed recording your 42 track masterpiece and now you want to make it all sound good. Your most important tool, other than the volume knob, will be an equalizer. An EQ allows you to selectively adjust frequencies. Just how many places in the spectrum you can adjust, or how granular the adjustment, depends on what kind of EQ you have.

There are different types of EQ’s from a fixed EQ all the way up to a graphic EQ, but they all will allow you to blend multiple tracks into one cohesive song. Lets say you are mixing a typical rock band that includes drums and a bass. You might decide that the kick drum needs more authority; right now, it’s occupying the same range as the bass and is losing its punch. You boost the low frequencies expecting to hear the thud you’re looking for. Instead, you peak out your master volume, and have to lower the volume of the whole mix to avoid distortion. To add insult to injury, your kick drum is louder, but it totally masks your bass.

This is a typical problem and a fairly typical remedy that a new engineer might administer. In contrast, an experienced engineer will subtract instead of add. Just like a chef, adding too much sauce overpowers the food. Having good ingredients prepared carefully before blending, will bring out the true flavours of your music, and combine to make something greater than the sum of the parts.

Let’s apply this philosophy to the kick drum and bass guitar. A kick drum is percussive and, while they can certainly be tuned to achieve a desired effect, the instrument has fewer harmonics to be concerned with than a bass guitar which is more tonally musical (ie. it can play more notes than a kick drum). Keeping this in mind, we might try to exaggerate the low end air movement of the drum, and the punch of the pedal hitting the skin.

To cut off the excess fat, in keeping with the chef analogy, we set a high-pass EQ filter to cut the low end below 35hz and lower a little scoop around 150hz. This will do two things, it will take out the low frequencies that a listener won’t likely hear anyways due to limitations of their equipment (and that mp3s don’t render regardless if your audience listens to mp3s), and at the same time takes out some of the frequencies that the bass drum peaks volume at. Ultimately, the end result will be a tighter kick that has a cleaned up low end, and an exaggerated higher end slap (due to the frequencies at 150hz being rolled off). These subtleties were created all from cutting. You might also consider cutting the high end that is unimportant to the kick drum to clear out even more room for the bass and guitar. If you want even more slap, then you can think about boosting the frequency where that skin slap occurs.

By carving out the 150hz from the kick drum, the bass guitar now has extra room to inhabit. If you want to roll off some of the super low end for a slightly poppy bass sound, feel free to; you won’t lose the tonal definition of the bass guitar since the perception of the note will be available from higher harmonics that will sound.

Cutting also has another strength over boosting: by cutting frequencies that are causing peaks in individual tracks, allows the post-eq’d track to be turned up louder than before. Imagine the EQ curve to be like a mountain. If we wanted to raise the land around it up, the mountain is still up top, so it peaks out earlier than we might want it to. In audio, this causes distortion. So if want the land around the mountain to be louder, we can cut off some of the top of the mountain, and then the peak is lower which means we can overall raise the land higher.

An equalizer is like a volume knob for specific frequencies. If some frequencies are too loud, we can turn them down without affecting the others. In the mountain example above, the eq is manipulated so that the entire track can be raised in volume and avoid peaking. If you have the mix of frequencies you already want, but still want to squish the energy of a peak, you use a compressor. A compressor adjusts overall volume and is basically like having an assistant adjust the volume automatically for you so that the overall sound level is more even.

The thing that’s important to keep in mind when mixing is that a track may sound good by itself, but sound awful when mixed with everything else. Soloing a track to adjust parameters is all fine and dandy, but make sure to listen to what it sounds like with everything else, or you’ll end up frustrated when it doesn’t same the sound interacting with other tracks. Mixing is about the blend and getting it right will take a while when you first start. But as with most things, experience will make an engineer more effective and efficient.

Ultimately, there is no right or wrong way to mix. As long as you are able to achieve what you set out to create, then you’ve succeeded no matter how you got there. Cutting frequencies is the most effective way I’ve found to mix, and generally gets me the best results. If you don’t like the way it sounds when mixing one of your songs, try different things until something works for you. Everyone has a slightly different mixing style, and creating your own unique signature style puts you on the path of being your own artist. Yes, engineers are artists in the same way a painter is an artist. I said it.