There is an old saying in the music production business that has to do with polishing a turd. Essentially what that means is trying to take a crappy sounding piece of music and making it sound good. No matter how much you polish it, it’s still going to be a turd. What you’re about to read is what to do and not do so that when you reach the point where you’re creating your final mix, you’re not, so to speak, polishing a turd. I hope you find this informative and helpful.
Music producers are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. In theory, the purest sound is the best sound. What I mean by purest is recording an instrument, whatever it is, with absolutely no effects whatsoever. That means no reverb, no EQ, no distortion, no delay, nothing. Just plain raw sound.
However, the problem with plain raw sound is that is lacks character, which is a nice way of saying boring as hell. If you’re creating royalty free music for somebody else to use, the last thing you want is for that music to be boring as hell.
So what do we do?
We add effects to the sound. This helps take away the blandness. It also, unfortunately, muddies the sound. How muddy will depend on how much you do to it. Adding a little EQ isn’t going to do much. Running it through a distortion, overdrive, phaser, flanger and God knows what else is going to turn it into a completely different beast.
Obviously, we need to strike some kind of balance between the two and make it so that when we do our final mix it doesn’t sound like a bad high school band stuck in a black hole.
How do we do this?
For starters, you want to make sure the sound is not only recorded cleanly but at the right level. What’s the right level? Under 0 db but loud enough so that pumping it up with EQ or compression doesn’t distort it. If the original sound is recorded too loud or too soft, it’s going to be close to impossible to get right in the final mix.
Another thing you want to do is make sure you get the stereo field right. If you’re recording in mono, the only thing you have to worry about is levels. However, with stereo, you want to make sure each instrument sits properly in the mix. Do no try to make it so that every instrument is heard perfectly. It won’t happen. Something has to give, especially if you have a lot going on in the mix. That 16th note high-hat slice is probably not going to be heard over a screaming lead guitar and a Hammond B3 with the Lesley cranked up. The key is knowing what instruments need to be up front in the mix and what instruments can take a backseat. And that’s going to depend on what kind of music you’re doing.
You also want to make sure that the instruments in your mix actually mix well together. One of the biggest problems producers run into, especially if they’re using VSTs, is using one sound that is completely dry to start with and another sound that was originally recorded with some reverb. This is common with a lot of orchestral instruments. If you’re mixing dry and reverberated instruments together, you will want to do one of two things. You’ll either want to lower the volume of the dry instrument so as not to completely overpower the reverberated one or add reverb to the dry instrument. Ultimately, in the end, you want the instruments to sound like they were all recorded in the same place. Otherwise, they will sound out of place.
Getting away from the sound issues, you want to make sure that when you record each track that they are in time with each other. No amount of processing is going to cover up a song played out of time. This is pretty easy to accomplish by simply either recording to a metronome or inputting the music step time. Another option is to score the music in something like Finale and then export the MIDI file into your digital audio workstation. From there you can add processing to each instrument. Which brings me to my next point.
Process each instrument separately. Let’s say you have a piano, bass, drums and guitar in your track. You want to take each instrument, one at a time, and add the EQ, reverb or whatever else you want to add to the sound, independent of the other sounds. After the individual processing is completed, there will actually be less to do with the track in general. That isn’t to say that you won’t have to do some post processing after creating your initial mix. You might want to EQ, compress and even limit the entire track together, especially if you’re doing a dance track and want to pump the whole thing up. But get each instrument as alive as possible so there isn’t as much to do in the final mix and what IS done isn’t, as they say, polishing a turd.
Finally, use your ears, a lot. Don’t mix with headphones because they won’t give you an accurate representation of your final mix.
Now, having said all this, you may decide that the particular song you’re doing is one that you WANT to sound all gritty and dirty. And that’s all well and good. But you want controlled dirtiness. And the only way to get that is to make sure that the original sounds are clean and processed correctly individually. Otherwise, the resulting sound is going to be worse than dirty. It’s going to be pure chaos and unorganized filth. And that is never good for a music mix no matter what kind of music you’re making.
Anyway, while this article isn’t all inclusive of everything you can do to get a clean mix, hopefully it will give you a good head start so that your next mix doesn’t end up as a polished turd.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim