Europe: A Beginner’s Guide
Sound Guide 2: The Mix
Welcome to the second part of my sound guide series. This month, I’m bringing a topic that was requested by a reader. It’s also a highly relevant topic that always comes up in conversations about sound. You can have a perfect grip on all technical aspects, high end mics and what not, but what is sound without a good mix?
To understand how to mix, it’s important to understand that good sound requires a good mix but that a good mix is only 2% of what makes good sound. Good sound is like baking a cake. If all the ingredients are shit, it’s gonna be a cake of shit. It’s the good old tale of “shit comes in, shit goes out”. The first step is obviously making sure that you aren’t trying to obtain good sound by mixing shit.
The next step is equipment. A high end expensive oven won’t magically turn your cake of shit into a tasty dessert, but an old rusty oven won’t necessarily destroy your crisp tasty cake as it bakes. A common misconception, especially in punk where money is tight and equipment sparse, is that you can’t get good sound with bad gear. Obviously, you’re not gonna get world class sound with mediocre equipment, but you can get at least decent sound with bad equipment if you’re willing to make the effort to work around it.
The last step is the actual mix, the 2%. It’s a delicate figure that can easily be destroyed by the wrong turn of a few knobs. Or by blindly following a recipe of what should be right instead of trusting your ears.
Let’s start with the first step: Making sure you aren’t mixing shit.
Maybe you’re looking for a way to make your band sound better, maybe you overestimated your abilities when you said “sure, we can mix our band ourselves” and are struggling to meet your goals, or maybe you’re (aspiring to be) sitting in the sound technician’s chair. Nevertheless, the tricks to get good ingredients for your mix are identical. The key factors are volume, tone, comprehensibility and context.
In terms of volume, the struggle with many punk and hardcore bands is loudness. Loudness doesn’t make a good mix and there certainly are other ways to obtain an aggressive roaring punchiness. On the other hand, any band can be too silent. And recording or playing at a too silent volume will destroy the mix before you’ve even begun the mixing process. The overall volume must be adjusted to the setting and the volume of individual sound sources must be adjusted to each other. A sound dogma is that the bands with the quietest lead singers are paired with the guitarist who turn their volume all the way up to beyond ten.
Tone is important both to define your specific sound, but also in terms of a) tuning your instruments and b) not overshadowing each other in a band context. We’ve all listened to a band’s recording to later realize that ooh so they have two guitarists. Good tone is also knowing that you’ll need to tune your snare differently to make it distinct and tolerable depending on if you play in a noisy raw punk band or a semi-acoustic folk punk band.
Comprehensibility and context go hand in hand. No matter how narrow your sub-genre is, you’ll want your audience to comprehend what you are musically communicating. Context is the key, as muffled delay ridden vocals that might be the norm in raw punk hits would never work in a Top 40 pop tune. However, no matter how noisy your raw punk band is, you do want to obtain a sound with elements intelligible to the human ear.
I won’t go much into the equipment topic in this column. In the past, there have been columns dedicated to musical equipment and I think that fact alone illuminates why that’s too complex a topic to go into in a superficial matter. As well as the fact that any gear talk brings along talks of budgets and class. Of course I enjoy mixing on a brand new $50,000 desk more than on an old $250 desk, but having access to such a desk is a huge privilege. And talking about gear in that league isn’t relevant for this column, as it’s not going to be relevant for you, the readers. And I’ve had shitty mixes on an expensive desk and really good class-A sound on an old desk that should belong in a museum.
And exactly that is the point. You have to make it work with the equipment that’s available to you, both in punk contexts and in corporate gig contexts. Better gear can be a helpful tool but limit your skills to that and don’t be scared off by using not so good gear.
Now, let’s take a look at the 2%. The number one tip to mixing is to trust your ears and not your eyes. If it sounds good, there’s no reason to make adjustments because your settings don’t look “right.” Digital desks and appliances bring many visual tools, such as a frequency visualizer. While tools like that can be great for finding tricky feedback frequencies, they can also fool you into believing you should get or manipulate a completely linear frequency output from your sound sources. I recommend to only base your mix on visual tools that are available with analog gear—such as input and output meters.
Sound source fidelity is an important factor for good sound—and a reason to trust your ear and not your eyes when mixing. Only in cases where you are purposely trying to obtain a non-true sound of a certain sound source (such as heavily reverbed drums, vocals with effects, and so on) can you break the rule of fidelity. And if you’re the person performing the music, you can of course go crazy in the name of creativity and musical expression.
In live mixing situations, a tool I use a lot is to simply listen to the sound sources before I start turning my knobs. This can both be handy in order to make sure you’re not trying to fix things in the mix that are caused by acoustic problems—i.e. Badly tuned drums. But also to make sure you’re obtaining the sound that the band is aiming for. Often miked up guitar and bass speakers don’t need much work apart from gain and volume settings—just make them sound as the sound coming from their speaker cabinets. In terms of sound fidelity and mixing, note that this counts for staying true to genres as well. Obviously you can’t have the same approach for acoustic folk music as death metal.
A dealbreaker for a good mix to me is if the music is living inside an authentic and audible dimensional space (with room for exceptions when the music calls for a more lo-fi sound or a two-dimensional space).
A mix that has width, depth and height is the key for excellent sound. These physical measures are easy to transform to terms for the audible world.
Width is about contrast and the relationship with your left and right ear. The width of a sound is a matter of if we perceive it as coming from the center of two speakers or how far to the left or right it’s coming from. The greater contrast between what’s coming from the left and right side, the wider we perceive the sound image.
Hence the key to a wide mix isn’t just placement. Two identical guitar tracks panned to each side won’t be as wide as you might expect it to be. The trick is to bring in more contrast, for example by using different microphones, or using two takes rather than copying a single track or using a doubling effect.
Note that a mix having width doesn’t mean the more width the better. For example, panning cymbals all the way to the left and right, isn’t true to the acoustic drum kit sound, neither for the listener or the drummer, and can make a mix sound overproduced.
Height is a strange phenomenon where we perceive high pitched sound as physically coming from above and low pitched sounds as coming from below. Hence, contrasts in the frequency spectrum can create a taller mix. Of course, while still staying true to the sound sources. Where you choose to place a sound source in terms of height is also a way to define the mix—for example a low pitched punchy bass drum versus a clicky, more high pitched bass drum. Overall, the trick to a tall mix is to make sure you use the entire frequency spectrum audible to the human ear. Adding a bit more of low frequencies to a bass drum can do wonders for a mix lacking elements in the low frequencies in terms of height. In my opinion, unlike width you can’t be too extreme with height—as long as you stay true to the true sound sources—unless you’re aiming for a very lo-fi mix.
Depth is the most complex dimension. The greater contrast in depth, the deeper a mix is perceived. In order to make something sound very close, something else has to sound very far. A rule of thumb is that depth is dependent on three factors: loudness, brightness and the amount of reverb. The louder a sound is, the closer we will perceive it. When mixing, consider where in the space you want a sound to live. Think front to back when you set levels. Where you for example place the vocals will make a huge difference for the mix in general. Keep in mind where a sound is expected to live—for example having backing vocals more to the back and main vocals pretty much up front for most bands and genres or making a choice to place a bass guitar more up front than the norm.
The brighter a sound is, the closer we will perceive it. Often brightness is confused for loudness because of this. Instead of adjusting volumes, rolling off some high frequencies can move a sound more to the back and boosting a bit can move a sound more to the front. This works great for guitars that are too much in the front and overshadowing other instruments too much or vocals that need help getting more to the front to stand out from the band and be more understandable to the audience. But handle with care as this is easy to backfire and create feedback or make a sound even less intelligible.
The more reverb we add to a sound, the further away we will perceive it. Reverb is a big topic in itself, but we can work with this rule of thumb for simplicity. Reverb can be used both as to create a realistic spatial sound but also as an added effect to the sound. It seems that every punk and hardcore band is using heavy reverb on vocals these days, which is getting a good amount of criticism in the scene. I’m not necessarily against the reverb trend, as I see it as a way to create depth and a personal style. But what I’m seeing is that most bands have no idea how to use the effects and don’t seem to have put thought into what it does to their sound. Unless they’re all aiming for having their vocals sound like muffled reflections coming from across a canyon. A tip for reverb pedals is to find a good relationship between the wet and dry signal, usually adjusted on the “mix” knob or similar.
This is a shame as the key to aggressive hardcore lyrics is to have the vocals barking up front in front of the mix. For reverb, consider how long the reflections are as well as the level of the wet and the dry signals to adjust to your desired sound, no matter what that might be.
What a good mix is, is quite complex and it’s impossible to pinpoint a single factor that makes for a great mix. While there is no “great mix” knob to turn, there sure are many knobs you can turn that’ll make your mix sound like shit. There are no quick fixes. It’s all about learning for experience and knowing that you will never stop learning and improving. But it’s also about knowing when to stop working, when a mix or certain sound source sounds good enough. A one hour snare drum sound check is good for nothing, and once you have a live band up and running with a good mix, don’t fall for the illusion that you should be turning knobs constantly.
Happy mixing out there and remember that sound, like us, lives in a three dimensional space!