Subject: Clarity - and I like to add transparency

Plugins: EQs, saturation and arrangement

Procedure:

1. Give your sounds a task, like lead, rhythm, melody, upfront, background, add ons... This will help you to make clear decisions.
2. Spread your sounds from fully left to center to fully right.
   But this doesn't mean you should make the sounds fully wide, rather the opposite.
   Three sounds at 100L(or 100L-80L), 70L(-50L) and 40L(-20L) will sound more transparent than to set all three to 100L-20L.
   With a lot of narrowed down sounds, one or two with full width can be catchy.
3. The less sounds you use, the better when it comes to calrity/transparency. Like with a crowd of people. You can easily differentiate six people who are standing still or moving around slowly, but with 60 people jumping around wildly, no chance.
   
4. A supporting pad, be it vocals or strings, must not have the same dominating frequencies as the lead sounds (vocals, synth, guitar).
5. I'm a friend of low cuts. There are some technical reasons why every recorded sound (samples are recorded too) has a bunch of low frequencies which do not belong to the instrument at all. The lowest note of a standard tuned six string guitar has a fundamental frequency of ~ 80Hz. But every analyzer will show you frequencies down to 20Hz for this instrument.
   I use low cuts on almost every sound to get rid of these artifacts and to narrow the frequency spectrum to the desired range. You normally don't need 80Hz in guitar. This is mainly the range for bass drum and bass. Although pianos and organs, to mention only two, can easily go lower than 80Hz, I normally low shelf or cut this range in those instruments too. The less instruments occupy the same frequency range the more transparent the mix is. And clean, defined and transparent low freqs are incredibly important for a mix.
6. But low cuts have a drawback. 'Normal' EQs shift the source's phase. The more you dial it in, the more the phase is shifted and this can in deed be audible. And since a cut is the maximum 'invasion', the phase is maximal shifted/distorted. Therefore for lowcuts I use linear or minimum phase EQs.
   But this has a drawback too, latency. Linear phase EQs always come with latency. So, as long as the recording process isn't finished linear phase EQs are not a good idea. I use them only when this is done and I can focus on mixing or mastering only.
7. 'But what is with all these expensive and saught after analogue EQs and their emulations?' Good question, I thank you for that.
   In the old days they just didn't have linear phase EQs, so they couldn't use them (they are purely digital). On the other hand high quality hard- or software EQs can contribute to the sound even for low cuts or shelfs and furthermore, 6 or 12dB slope low cuts don't twist the phase that much. This is to some extend also a matter of taste. Just try and compare yourself.
8. When it comes to higher frequencies these phase shifts are not so huge anymore (rarely steep cuts here in mixing) and they do in fact sound more musical, more pleasant.
9. Before adding EQs in the mids and highs and raise them up to the sky, I normally try saturation. I could demonstrate more than once, that to add a low cut at ~ 400Hz, a saturator and raise ~ 4kHz just by 1 - 2dB can make female vocals more transparent and upfront and keep them more natural than by just rising 4kHz sky high. Same goes for other sounds (with different freqs) aswell.
10. Normally you do not need the sound's fundamental freqs, because our brain rebuilts them!
11. Additionally the range from 100 - 200Hz tends to sound boomy, so I normally eq a small gap in here.
12. In the mid range nearly all instruments are present and sometimes it can really be difficult to achieve clarity/transparency here. First make a decision if two or more sounds are meant to work as a layer or if they should be audible as separate sounds.
    If the latter is the case, different pan positions, pitch and eqing will contribute to the transparency (see link below, Educational Series: Width). Avoid different movements (rhythms, melodies, arps...) for different sounds in the same pitch and pan position at the same time! This will mess up your mix.
13. As a general approach it is useful to find the dominating frequencies of the various sounds. Normally, a sound has a body and a harmonic range, emphasise these (unless it's the vocals' ess-sound, ofc) and lower the others a bit. This keeps the sounds most natural.
    There are two exceptions of this rule. Usually, the freq spectrum of an acoustic BD is more or less turned upside down and you don't need to emphasise the low freqs of a bass, normally. An acoustic bd has no high level lows so these are raised, mostly mids so these are lowered and hardly any kick sound so it is dialed in. Depending on the genre these can range from just a few dB up to more than +/- 12dB.

Summary (for the TLDR-generation ): Different tasks, different pan, narrow pan, low cuts, focus on a sound's characteristic frequencies and saturation will contribute to clarity and transparency.

So, these are my suggestions. What do you think and which are yours?

My special thanks go to Giggity, who initiated this series to help others and to stir an exchange of ideas and experiences

Please, see also
Educational Series: Width and Educational Series: Depth

 

Last edited: Oct 29, 2019

sorry to say, but i would really like a synopsis or resume at the end, or what do the yung kids call it? "TOO LOONG DIDNT READ" ? :D

help a old brother out. cant be the only one feeling this :D

 

Easier said than done, but I'll think about it.

 

let me give a quick example of what i mean:

your no11. - i think it belongs to the top and be the first thing you mention.
that way it makes all your explaining in detail thru the list make much more sence from the very beginning.

maybe its just me

but super quality post nonetheless!

 

Clarity. Find the right way back home and win awesome prizes.

 

Finally something interesting to read in this lousy forum

 

Ok, when you get three 'agree' ratings I do this.

EDIT: I do down to two and changed my rating.

 

Last edited: Oct 29, 2019

Thanks for the compliment, but this forum isn't (that) lousy, imho.

 

really interesting post ! Thank you !

 

To enhance the clarity of a sound (and avoid harshness or unnatural results), most of the time I use parallel eq : not the New-york routing parallel one, but the use of bandpass filter at a chosen frequency and a given Q factor. It's implemented in some plugins, like the free (or the GE edition) TDR Nova, and gives very smooth and natural results, even with big boosts. An expensive counterpart for the TDR Nova would be the Sonoris Parallel Eq, who sounds also very nice.
It makes wonder on natural instruments and voices, and can also open the sound of a pad or a synth like nothing else.

 

Good post!
Maybe I can add a little something to that?
A smarter man than I once said, "The secret is, you have to find the gap!"
That means first take care of the dynamics and the micro arrangement.
I don't know why, but I wonder how many guys use an eq first, instead of changing the level of an instrument by 0,xx dB and taking advantage of the masking effect. Accurate leveling is so incredibly powerful when it comes to positioning instruments in frequency and soundstage.
Also, inserting a sampledelay on individual instruments can make a real miracle if you want to create a clear mix.

 

but why ?

sry for dumb question but why you call it paralell...runnin 2 signal thru tdr nova then ?

 

great thread! usefull!!!!!!
thank you.

 

Because music is the interaction between different frequencies over a certain period of time.
If you change the position of individual instruments on the time axis by a few samples, you change the interaction of the phases and thus the perceptibility of certain frequency ranges! Of course you have to be careful not to overdo it. Tiny steps go a long way.
But cleverly used, you hit two birds with one stone!

EDIT:
Before I intervene in the phase of a single instrument with an EQ or saturator, I first take care of the phase & time relationships of all instruments. Of course you can also nudge the clips, but:
1. A change to the sampledelay is easier to undo
2. Over time, I've learned that it does not matter what the phase relationship of two instruments looks like, but how it sounds!
3. Sometimes I make just tiny adjustments of +-0.6ms or less and sometimes I make really brute changes up to +-10ms!

 

Last edited: Oct 29, 2019

Never be sorry to ask!
I call it paralell because it's what it's called... It's a little confusing at first, but it makes more sense when you understand what happens in the plugin : in the case of "parallel equalisers", there are several signal chains inside one plugin. There is a Dry signal path. And each time you add a point on the eq, it adds a new signal path with a bandpass filter at this frequency an Q factor. The filters are parallel to each other as well as the unprocessed signal.
So internally, the plugins does the kind of routing you could make in your daw, and you could consider each gain of each eq-band as a dry/wet control.
And therefor it is called "parallel eq".
You use it the same way you would use any classic EQ, as insert on a track. The difference is in the sound, much more smooth and natural with parallel eq, due to its internal architecture and the interaction between bands.

 

Last edited: Oct 29, 2019

.great...thx a lot guys

 

An Italian guy:

A German guy:

Shouldn't it (stereotypically) be the other way around...

Seriously thank you all, esp. @No Avenger for sharing your knowledge!

 

Probably because it's easier to be done, people are used to eq sounds and it's a deliberate and targeted change.