5 Tips to Improve Your Mixing!
Let's imagine a situation. You successfully finished your recording session, everything sounds good and you did some pre-mixing which also makes your satisfied with the results. Now, it's time to go to mixing and polish everything you recorded/produced. The mixing process can be exhausting due to either lack of knowledge, skills or just because you're not patient enough to get everything right.
Well, I’m going to go through some important tips that'll help you to improve your mixing skills and save your time.
Use Stems for Mixing
I may not be completely right for saying this, but this helped me A LOT. Once I'm done with the production or when my client is done with the production process, I always ask for stems. Not because it's easier for me to mix, but it's much easier to organize and to focus on mixing only. If you're mixing in the original production project, it's very likely for you to think "Well, let's change that, I don't like that", while when mixing with stems that's not possible which let's me completely focus on the mixing aspects.
Sorting & Using Bus Channels
This is a must, and everyone should know this. First, make sure to group/sort all your stems or files (if you're in the production stage). Every stem/file should have its own mixer channel. Next, you send multiple simple-orientated tracks to one channel which you can name depending on those elements. That's the process of Bussing channels. For example, the kick, clap, snare etc. can be routed to a bus named "Drums". You can do this for as many instrument groups as you want. Bussing helps to apply effects/processors directly on that instrument group without a need to go on individual channels. However, if there's a need to do on an individual channel, stick to that. Bus channels are also very useful when you want to quickly bring the volume up or down. For example, if your drums are too loud, you can quickly lower the bus channel fader and adjust to taste.
Use VU Meters
VU Meters can be used to "calibrate" your sounds for a much better mixing session. Basically, you want to place a VU Meter on each individual channel in your mixer. Next, make sure to "calibrate" each sound so it hit around 0dBVU on your VU Meter. Once your sounds are calibrated, you can proceed to mixing. This is why you have all those VU Meters on an analog console for each individual channel.
Clip Gain before fixing
Before you start using any other processors, carefully listen to your sound. Use clip gain to either boost or attenuate certain parts. Next, you can go with different processors such as an EQ, Compressor, Saturator etc. Clip Gain is mostly popular on vocals since you can achieve a much better balance before you actually compress your vocals. It's also very useful for treating sibilant frequencies before using a de-esser or multiband compressor to do that.
Complementary Equalization
If two instruments are competing for the same frequency range, that can cause muddiness, and that's how mud usually happens in most cases.
One of the ways to prevent that is to use complementary equalization method which means attenuating one instrument while boosting (or leaving as it is) the other instrument at the same frequency range.
To understand this technique better, let's imagine one example where we have our kick and bass. Now, imagine they're playing at the same time. You can obviously hear how the mix becomes inconsistent and the kick has trouble cutting through since there is too much energy coming from the kick and bass at the same time. Now, you have to make a decision which instrument should be on top (kick in this case). You're going to load an EQ on both Kick and Bass channels. Open your EQ on your bass channel and create a gentle bell cut around the area where the kick & bass are mostly active (that can be all the way from let's say 60-80Hz or so). Once you did that to your bass, head over to your Kick channel and open an EQ. Create a point at the same frequency range where you cut your bass and boost the kick (only if necessary).
Once you did this, you'll be able to easily hear the effects. You kick now steps upfront and doesn't clash with your bass in the amount as before. This is only one solution to lower the clashings which can cause muddiness.
The same technique applies to the mid range. For example, your vocal fundamental frequency can be competing with other instruments such as snare, guitar or maybe piano. Complementary equalization can help there too.
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