If you’ve been mixing for a while, and working hard to improve your craft, it’s likely you can put up a pretty good mix in short order. Having mastered gain structure, microphone selection and placement, the use of EQ, compression and finding space for everything in the mix, you might be wondering where to go from here.
That’s where I found myself the last few years of full-time mixing. I had long advanced the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 principle. Applied to mixing, getting to 80 percent of the “ideal mix” is A) a good bit of work, and B) generally more than good enough for most people listening to it. Moreover, the last 20 percent will take about as much effort as the first 80.
Once you’ve mastered the 80, let’s start chasing that last 20. What I’m here to share are four techniques that I worked on to take my mixes to the next level. It should be understood that these are things you do after mastering – and I mean mastering – the basics. If your mix doesn’t sound good now, doing these four things won’t make it better. Master the basics, then move on to advanced techniques.
It should also be noted that these will make subtle changes to the mix. They’re the final dashes of seasoning the chef throws on (while yelling BAM!) right before the meal goes to the guest. But that’s what the final 20 percent is; small subtleties that make the mix just a little bit better. This is an overview of each technique, and if there’s enough interest, I’ll do additional articles expanding on each one – presented in the order that I developed them.
The Vocal Smash
This one is actually fairly common, and not terribly complex, but it really makes a difference in where the vocal sits in the mix, especially on big songs. What we’ll do is double-patch the lead vocal channel into two channel strips. The first one is processed normally; a little EQ, a little compression and that’s it.
On the smash channel, it’s mainly compression, more compression. Whereas my normal vocal channel might cut 2 to 3 dB in the comp, by smash will be 6, maybe 8 dB down. I also add makeup gain on the smash, something I rarely do on the normal channel, to bring the level back up.
Once the smash is set, it’s just a matter of bringing the fader up of the smash channel up when the band really gets rockin’ and you need a hint more lead vocal to keep it from getting buried. Essentially what you’re doing is adding an additional 3 dB, more or less, to the lead vocal (doubling the power adds 3 dB). However, due to the additional compression, the second copy of the vocal fills in gaps, dips and quieter parts of the vocal that make it hard to hear.
I refer to this as a Z-axis control for the vocal. It doesn’t so much make it louder as “more there.” You can almost feel the vocal being moved forward in space toward the audience.
The Drum Smash
If smashing the vocal is good, smashing the drums is better, right? It’s actually the same principle – we’re not going to make the drums louder just more there. Instead of double-patching the entire drum kit, use groups. I patch all my channels to two drum groups, normal and smash. On the smash channel, I put a multi-band compressor to attain finer control of compressing the lows, mids and highs.
You’ll need to spend some time dialing this in as the drums typically interact with the room more than the vocals do. Generally speaking you’ll be going for 6 to 8 dB of gain reduction in each band. But it’s up to the room and mix.
In use, it works the same as a vocal smash. When you need a little more love from the drums, bring up the smash. Again, it doesn’t really make them louder, but you get more power and impact. By playing with the crossovers gain reduction and makeup gain on the multi-band comp, you can control where that power comes from. This one takes a little more time to get it right, but once it’s done, the payoff is pretty cool.
Timing & Frequency Splitting Effects
This one may require its own article at some point. Back when Andrew Stone was still with us, we started playing around with the idea of first timing our effects to the tempo of the song, and then frequency splitting them.
First, timing the effects. One of the big problems with effects, especially on vocals, is that they sound like an effect if the decay time doesn’t match the tempo of the song. What we want to do is use a tempo calculator (there are several apps available) to calculate the time in milliseconds (msec) of various musical note values at a given tempo. For example, a half-note for a 94 beats per minute (bpm) song at is 1277 msec. A whole note is double that, 2553 msec. So, you might set the decay time on the vocal reverb to 2.55 seconds, and the delay at 80 msec (or 1/32 note).
On slower songs, say 82 bpm, I might go to a whole note – 2.93 seconds – or even a double-whole – 5.85 seconds – on the decay time. By timing the decay of the reverb to the song temp. the reverb decays in time with the music and doesn’t sound “effecty.” When I started experimenting with this, I was mixing in a “no reverb” church; the worship team wanted the vocals dry.
I don’t know why this became the current trend because it doesn’t sound very good. I grew up in the 1980s – vocals swam in reverb. By using this technique, I reached 8 seconds of reverb one Sunday and received no complaints!
Where do you go from here? How about frequency splitting your effects? Typically, lower sounds take longer to decay than high frequencies. So, let’s put a Hall effect with a double-whole note’s worth of decay on everything from say, 400 Hz down, and a Plate with a whole note for 400 Hz and up. There’s almost no end to the combinations, so I suggest blocking out an afternoon with virtual soundcheck and seeing what sounds good in your specific settings.
Bonus: The Lead Guitar Lifter
This may be one of my favorite techniques because it’s so simple and so effective. When building a mix, everything needs to be in its place. The lead vocal should be louder than the lead guitar, but if you have a good lead guitar player, they often drop nice little fills in between vocal phrases. I like to highlight these little bits, but they are often just a few notes so they are easy to miss.
Because I love efficiency, I put a compressor on the lead guitar and set it so it was running pretty consistently at -3 dB worth of gain reduction. I then side-chain the lead vocal into that compressor.
The side-chain uses an external signal input – in this case the lead vocal – to tell the compressor to do its thing. As long as the side-chained signal is above a certain threshold – the vocalist is singing – the compressor is on. As soon as they stop singing, the compressor releases. BAM! Instant an 3 dB boost on the guitar at the end of a phrase to pick up the fill.
Because we’re effectively using the compressor backwards, I set the release time fairly quick, something on the order of 50 msec. Slow the attack down a bit, somewhere between 100 to 200 msec. You may need to play around with it to make it sound natural. The goal is for it to come up pretty quickly so you get the fill, then fade back under the vocal when the next line starts. Since we’re only moving 3 to 4 dB, it’s a subtle change, but you’d be surprised how cool it sounds.
As noted at the outset, I’m happy to expand on these if there’s interest. Just flood the editor’s inbox with requests (he’s at [email protected]) and he’ll pass them along to me. Happy mixing and keep improving your craft!
