Hello everyone! I have bunch of questions about mixing stage I asked couple of questions before and it helped a lot. And here i am again.

When I'm working on mixing session, I am usually using same path i thought it's ok but recently i have some doubts about it.

-first of all; putting a mid/side eq with mono maker function and making all frequencies mono under 130Hz
-second step; putting a bus compressor, 2:1 ratio with relatively fast attack .3 or 1 ms, auto release time in general.
-third step; when i ended my process with drum&bass elements and i'm not happy as i should be, putting pultec eq on stereo bus and making arrangements which makes me happier than before. (I am doing this so early because of it could be destructive to other instruments and vocals when i use too late.)
-fourth step; a parametric eq with spectrum analyzer, so i can hear and watch spectrum in total mix before i bounce it.


additionaly, i am working on mono most of the time. Is that ok? just checking stereo for to be sure. my goal is the have a consistent sound on mono.

 

Currently I am working, studying on different approaches. Not expecting perfect job so soon but yes, I have some issues about my work. Honestly, I'm feeling like lost in session sometimes. I'm aware what i need to do, but second thoughts affecting me about how much aggressive or how much smoothly I should do.

Mostly mixing multitracks from different sources. Generally Rock/Alt Rock. Bass guitar-kick-snare-lead vocal, sometimes the back vocals occupying mid space. So i turn on the mono maker button up to 130 Hz.

I'm avoiding squash the track with higher ratios trying the keep dynamic range, but I think I'll give it a chance to 4:1 or 1.5:1

 

this is common. the cutoff depends on the content, but 130Hz will be close.
the reason for this is that bass sounds can have phase problems very easily when summed to mono and low frequencies are omni directional anyway.
also if you are pressing to vinyl the needle can jump out of the groove if the low frequencies are too wide.
personally i do this on individual offending channels rather than on the master buss, but the master buss can work too.
for me it is easier because i work with 99% digital software instruments, so i keep the width and frequencies in mind when creating sounds, meaning i have to do very little side HP filtering after the sound is completed

personally i do not use any compression on the master buss during mixing, i save that for the mastering stage. i do not even use one to hear what it might sound like.
a lot of people do do this though and it works for them, so if it works for you then go for it.

same as above, i do not use any EQ on the master buss during mixing. if something needs adjusting i will do it on the offending channel.

i use voxengo span as my spectrum analyser, but any one will do. i find it useful to have one sitting on the master buss all the time so i can quickly see frequencies, not only for the whole mix, but also for soloed channels.

personally i work in stereo and occasionally check in mono. my music is made to be played back in stereo primarily, so that is how i will work.
unfortunately there are very few ways (only one that i can think of) to make a sound stereo without harming the mono result, so i will always lean in favour of stereo.



these things are really a matter of preference to be honest. if it is working for you then keep doing it, if it is not then try to figure out why and either correct it or ditch it completely. and do not work to other peoples rules, it is your music, not theirs

 

Last edited: Feb 22, 2020

thank you very much for your help, i guess 'it's probably good when it sounds good', no matter what. I'm studying, practising, listening day and night since i decided the make a career on mixing-recording engineer. but it is hard to be understand to be sure you are in right way without any mentour/teacher around you. being a self-taught is tough i can say.

 

How are you studying? What are the mediums you are learning from?

 

don't mix and master at the same time. putting a tape sim and compressor on during mixing is ok, but bypass them when bouncing, so they are not printed in and you know you gonna use them during mastering. just make the mix sound good and finish it up later at the mastering stage. thats it.

 

I'm downloading multitracks as much as possible, opening the pro tools and listen and mix and listen and mix...

i've got some udemy courses, puremix tutorials (andrew scheps, cla etc.), almost all of the youtube tutorials and trying to get some opinions from people with the better skills then me. But mostly i'm trying to do something, letting myself to make some mistakes for learning better.

 

yes, i am bouncing the mix then going for mastering stage. just taming peaks on ssl bus compressor around 2-3 db with 2:1 ratio. sometimes i'm using waves cla mixdown which is have a mix bus compressor in it.

 

yea it is kind of "good if it sounds good", but the problem is that it is hard when you are starting out to know what sounds good because typically people at that stage are using sub par setups and do not yet have an understanding of how things translate.
unfortunately "its good if it sounds good" is not always as clear cut as that.
a lot of people are against visual analysers, but personally i highly recommend things like spectrum analysers, correlation meters, etc. everybodys ears are different and every playback system is different, so the best thing to do is find a balance of what works best across as many playback systems as possible, favouring those your music is likely to be played back on.
for example, a lot of people will add overtones to their sub bass knowing that their typical playback will not reach as low as the sub, so that the sub can still be heard.
i know thats not what you wanted to hear, but its okay, things will get easier. with time you will start to "just know" where to start with settings and workflows and will be able to reach your goals much quicker.
but also the learning will never end and you will always crave more knowledge

i am somewhat self taught too, so i feel your pain, but forums like this mean you do not have to be self taught. you might have to dig through all the trolls and bullshit to get to the info, but once you get through it there are plenty of people who are happy to help and plenty of info available with extensive duckduckgo searches.

i suggested this guide to somebody else recently on here, maybe it can help you too. it doesnt really cover the topics you asked about, maybe it is not what you need, but maybe it will help anyway:
https://ia800706.us.archive.org/25/items/GuideToMixing/mixing.pdf

 

this is extremely helpful, thanks! trying to learn all by yourself is hard but not impossible. I'm gonna read the pdf like i'm doing all sources that i've found. Actually exploring new sources is exciting, there is a lot of junk and '0' value-click bait tutorials but you can learn something even from them somehow. but this book seems quite useful. i give you heads up when i read.

by the way, i recently shared a thread about my latest mix i've made today. it's about 90 sec. Some feedback could be useful about my wrongs and some corrections. here is the forum link https://audiosex.pro/threads/what-would-you-change-and-why.52297/

 

This is almost exactly how I'd work before minus the EQ. A monomaker, maybe a widener, a compressor/limiter. Sometimes I would put a tape emulation on my master bus too. Nowadays it's always either a clipper, compressor or limiter. I usually use different ones for different mixes. The more mixes I did and the more I learned, the less things that ended up on my mastering chain and now I'm at one. And I will do maybe 70-90% of the mix and add one of the aforementioned processors. I'll then make a few notes, make a few changes to make it sound right with the plugin, then I'll turn it off and make it sound good on it's own and I'll either stop there or find a compromise between the two. Then I make a note of my input levels going into the plugin and I'll take a screenshot of my settings in the plugin and I'll bounce two versions. One with that's processed and client approved and one that's dry. Then I'll send the mastering engineer the screenshot and the two versions.

Now I was thinking about the idea of light compression on a master bus all of last week and it occurred to me that it definitely has it's place during the mixing process because when you listen to music that's been mastered there's usually some EQ and compression and magical stuff going on. The compressor is making the track interact with a threshold, attack and release times, a ratio. There's sidechain EQ engaged sometimes to prevent the low end from over exciting the compressor. Crafting a mix that does can be difficult for some and quite impossible for others without the right gear. Especially with analogue comps which aren't exactly linear. So to answer your question with another question...
Are you satisfied with your mixes?
Do they stand up to mastered tracks?
Do your mastered mixes stand up to mastered tracks?
Are you satisfied with your monitoring chain?
Are you listening on multiple play back devices?
Here's my two biggest pieces of advice.
1) Signal chain over everything. Start with the best monitors you can get. Then treat your room and make it as flat as you can. There's amazing software out there to compensate for bad rooms and make good rooms even better. Then work on conversion, meaning your audio interface or Digital to Analogue conversion. Gain matching plugins are also great at helping you hear what you're really doing. Mix at three different volumes. Take breaks. Make notes.
2) You could be mixing on terrible earbuds or bookshelf speakers directly through a laptop headphone output, it doesn't matter. If you're not satisfied and things aren't competing to reference tracks, don't be afraid to start over or bounce your project into another set of multi tracks and work from there. Sometimes, that's all you need.

 

thank you for your feedback, we are on the same page i guess. i got the idea about your advices. I could afford the ok pair of headphones and trying the demo of sonarworks reference headphone edition with my headphone profile. this is the flattest sound i can get at the moment and a/b reference not so bad i got the similar sounds to my references but still something is wrong and guess i need more time to get better on this.

 

I've tried that and it does make your moves more translatable but just like you things sounded very wrong. However now that you've given more context, I think I can give a solution to your specific problem.

First of all, just in case you aren't. Be sure to listen to your references with Sonarworks on too. And it'll take a while to get used to if you're not spending time listening to the flat mixes. My first mix using Sonarworks was definitely more translatable but sounded very coloured. Like an amateur just used a world class studio. It makes a while to get used to because you're so used to hearing a mix excited by EQ.

Another great tip I think is not talked about among young engineers is the difference between a Grammy awarding winning engineer's hearing and our hearing and the trends it has made if the high end. There's usually a dip, somewhere in the high mids for almost every genre. Your mix may actually sound good to yourself and me and my 22 year old ears but that dip is prevalent in all music nowadays and a quick and easy way to solve this problem is to put a linear EQ on your master bus and exaggerate that peak while your reference track is playing so it sounds a little brighter but not too much. Just enough. Something broad but not too broad. Also try not to use the EQ in conjunction with any other processing is my personal advice. At that 70-90% mark when I would add a clipper, I'd definitely turn it off and never use it again.

My biggest advice for mixing on headphones is definitely crossfeed. I spent years walking in and out of the crossfeed club and ironically, since I put up my new rig and was listening to my mixes using monitors, the most translatable mix I had was one that had a crossfeed emulation. It wasn't just the width that was right but the mix had layers in height and the tone was way better than my other mixes. I was done with crossfeed and now I'm a firm believer. So get you a mix that has complex stereo moves and play with the crossfeed settings for your headphones. For closed back headphone mixing, which I consider superior for the mixing stage, it can definitely take your mix to the next stage.

Bass will be your biggest challenge after all this. Monitors and subs will really let you point out visually where and how the bass and kick is sitting in your reference tracks. I also find that on monitors the frequency range is less glued together so you can tell what the bass really sounds like. In headphones you'd be more inclined to make a warm bass sound that is in the mix but below it in frequency content when in fact, with most reference tracks, when listening on monitors you can actually hear some sort of a brightness in the bass and that makes it sounds more like part of the mix. On headphones, the midrange and high end will mask those frequencies. In short, headphones excel at high end. A possible solution for this I think would be to use a high self (instead of a high cut because this will preserve the integrity of your mix more but either one will work) to remove some of the high frequencies when you want to work on your bass and kick so your can hear the low frequency to high mid range interaction more accurately.

 

glad i can help. i agree even shitty tutorials can often teach you things. i honestly do not think people need to pay for tutorials and help when it comes to all elements of music production, there is so much free information out there and, better still, people who are happy to help (a lot of people with far more knowledge, skills and experience than me too, although sometimes experience can be mistaken for knowledge).

my studio is currently in the middle of a move, so i cant really help much by listening to the mix i tried with my headphones with a sub par amp, but hopefully somebody in a better situation (and more skill) can give you some better feedback.
it sounds very nice to me, but i do hear some fighting in the low end, which is a common problem. it was most obvious where the kick and bass punch in together at 51 seconds.
voxengo span is a free spectrum analyser and is the best i have ever used. i recommend using this (or another spectrum analyser) to look at the frequencies each track is producing and make sure those frequencies do not happen at the same time. if they only clash at certain points you can automate an EQ to cut problem frequencies from one of the signals only when they clash.

fabfilter pro-q is actually a much better tool for this though, it can display the spectrum of other instances of itself, while allowing you to make EQ changes directly within the same window. i still recommend span highly though, i usually leave it on the master bus to use as a general analyser to quickly see what is going on in my mix or on individual channels (by soloing them).

i wish i could help more with the mix but i do not trust my situation enough right now to offer more

 

I for one actually don't wanna listen to the mix and tell you what to do. I only do that in real life for people because it's more comprehensive to do so in person or over calls and voice notes. It's tedious to type and wait for replies and all that. Although I think I feel for you so I might make you the exception. Might as well make my sub do something good for once.
EDIT: But now that I think of it, I think my advice should get you most of the way, so suffer for now. When you do another revision, I'd love to hear and compare the two versions. Then maybe if you need the second ears with subs, I'll lend a hand.

 

thank you for your kindness, i know it's hard to listen completely twisted work but i promise it'll be get better and better every day. at least i'm working on it.

having a solid low end is my curse nowadays. honestly great topic to discussion. it's all about the frequency masking right? i have some problems about it. I am using fabfilter eq for extra visual information. eq comparison tool is extremely helpful. so lets go in to that so it might help any person who is struggled with low end issues.

Usually i lay down bass and kick spectrum in FF-Q3 and watch the collision. they fighting on some of the exactly same frequencies, so i am trying to let them peak around same level because i want both of them to be noticable. is that right for masking issues? or am i doing totally wrong? In other words, can we explain the frequency collision, masking, whatever, is the problem cause of one frequency goes way over from another one so we can't hear the lesser one in context.

 

i totally get that, currently i'm looking for someone to help me close to where i live. it seems i am gonna change my license degree over the music technologies (it's the best option in my country the closest term 'audio engineering') Music is not great topic to discuss in words completely.

By the way, your crossfeed suggestion about the mixing with the headphones helped me a lot. I downloaded the demo of Waves NX virtual mixing room vst, and lack of the ambience feel that headphones gave me totally went away. It simulates at least a room ambience over the headphones as close as the real one. I realised how boxiness reacts to big places with strong speakers, too much delays can be annoying more then headphone situation.

and i'm using it with my sonarworks reference 4 in this order; first i insert reference 4 then i insert for virutal mix room. sound changes a lot. i hope it's ok

 

its not that your work is twisted, i actually liked the mix overall, certainly good for a beginer, i really just dont trust my listening environmet right now.
it will get better every day i can assure you. keep up the good work!

you are actually making phase problems worse by matching the level of frequencies.
if, for example, your kick has a 100Hz tone in it then you want to make sure that nothing else has 100Hz content in it while the kick is playing. the goal is for all instruments that are playing together to have their own frequency range.
in this case it means that you will have to choose if this frequency is more important for the kick or the bass, then cut it out of the least important one so that only the important one has this frequency.

there are many ways to keep instruments seperate, but it all starts with the moment you choose/program a sound. keep the theory in mind while choosing and choose sounds that already work well together with no clashing frequencies.
this is not always completely enough and sometimes you will still have problem frequencies. from there you can EQ frequencies out completely, automate an EQ to cut those frequencies only when needed, or use a sidechain input to control an EQ or multiband compressor.

there is loads of information out there about this that might be able to explain things better (pictures of signals helps understand this). it is a very common problem, so is well covered in online tutorials etc.

edit:
just to be clear, the same applies to all frequencies, not just low ones, but it is more noticable in lower frequencies

edit 2:
here are a couple of tutorials to get you started. i didnt read them, but i skimmed over the titles of sections and they both appear to cover some important information:

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/mix-tips-kick-bass

https://iconcollective.edu/kick-and-bass-mixing-tips/

 

Last edited: Feb 26, 2020

I got it! so they can be noticable on their own sites. i'm gonna try it asap. i know how to use sidechain compressor but honestly i'm not using it. i should use more often. also i'm working with digital vu meter on pro tools. it shows peaks and vu at the same time. and i'm trying to keep loudnes levels close but slightly difference. keeping drums as much loud as lead vokal bass close to drums guitars a bit more quiet and keys close to the guitars etc. is this approach ok or not?