Song Mixing:
More Guidelines From
The Mastering Viewpoint
Good song mixing is all about keeping the excitement! The dynamics and contrast between the verse and chorus; the drama and climax from the opening intro to the closing chords or fadeout. While keeping that in mind, there are a few technical things to consider while you're creating your opus. One of them is mono compatibility. Mono didn't fade away after stereo and surround sound took over. It's as important as ever for many reasons. If you 'lose' an instrument when you check in mono, that means you have polarity issues involved with an effect process on that particular instrument in the mix. If that instrument is highlighting a certain lyric in your song, that drama and impact will be lost when it's heard in mono. In stereo this instrument would have a surround-sound-like effect or 'phase-iness' to its sound. Changing the polarity in one channel may solve the mono problem, but might lose your original intention. Ease back with the amount of processing on that instrument or experiment with a different effect – you may find something much better. The situation I described would give that instrument an out-of-place sound in the overall blend of the music mix anyway to a trained ear. Whenever I hear that, I immediately check it out in mono to confirm or deny. 99 per-cent of the time it's a confirmation and a call to the client! The transition from verse to chorus in song mixing, often involves a very dramatic change and usually places instruments panned left and right and across the soundstage to give that big wall-of-sound. You want to make sure that impact is just as effective in mono as it is stereo. Why is mono so important? There are still some radio stations – over-the-air and internet – that broadcast in mono. You still want your song to have that important first impression as much as possible no matter how it's played back. I was surprised by a client who told me that he was missing the sound of an important instrument completely when he auditioned his (yet un-mastered) mix CD for his parents. It turned out that the CD player was a simple table model with mono playback only! And the situation with his music mix, of course, was the polarity problem mentioned earlier. Granted things like this are increasingly rare. But don't you find that when they do happen, it's always at the most inappropriate moment? Another tip you should consider is to mute portions of tracks where the instrumentalists or vocalists are not playing. This helps avoid the build up of residual noise that can happen – with instrument amps or effects units, for example. It will also eliminate the 'mouth' noises from singers while they're waiting for their next entry. Sometimes, mastering can (un-intentionally) bring out those noises if they're not muted during the song mixing process. Finally, if your music style matches something on a commercially released CD, it's not a bad idea to A/B your song mixing progress along with a suitable track off the CD as long as you remember this: Most commercial CD's released these days (with some rare exceptions) are mastered very loud – too loud if you ask me. To make a fair comparison between your mix and the CD track, bring down the level of the CD track about 10-15 dB. First, this will avoid ruining your entire mix by running it through compressors and limiters, merely in an attempt to match what is probably an insane level anyway. It will avoid distorting and clipping mixes especially at the most climactic (loudest) moments. It will keep your levels lower, and give your mix headroom that would be needed to prevent inter-sample or reconstruction overs. That brings up another point regarding headroom. Your final mix should have from 3 - 6 dB of headroom. This lets you know you're not clipping and unintentionally distorting during final song mixing process. But don't go overboard, either, trying to maintain that headroom exactly within those parameters: the odd peak to -1 or -2 dB should not cause problems, especially in the case of something like ballads, which are generally at an overall quieter level. When you give people advice like this that calls for monitoring and mixing at low levels, they'll say: it won't be loud enough! I say: after you turn down the master faders, simply turn up the controls to your playback monitors to compensate or until you're comfortable with your listening levels. Mixing is an art and it encompasses many more points than are covered here. Let you ears tell you what's right – and give them a rest now and then, too, to avoid making bad judgements. Stop worrying about how loud your song should be. Make it great, first! Then you can make it loud. But you may be surprised, though: You'll find you sound so good that you won't need to make it as loud as you thought!!
Return from Song Mixing to
Music Mixing
Return to About Audio Mastering Software
|
