5 TIPS TO IMPROVE YOUR MIXES

what's up everyone I haven't been out in a while we're talking about five tips to improve your mixes these are tips that will really go across any genre of music by the way welcome to all the new subscribers since the last video that I did live which was about a week ago week and a half something like that there's thousands more people and welcome to any of you who are new to the channel if you're new to the channel you'll know I always do a discount on my live streams that goes for 24 hours for my Beato book which only comes in PDF form although I printed out a copy and edit bound and the code is RB 150 aaron is moderating the the channel and/or the live stream he'll be periodically posting it in there I see all of you in there even though it's going by fast I can read fast okay so let's get to this okay this is these are things that I talk about a lot when I'm when I was producing I would talk to people that were in bands that I worked with because these were things that I haven't produced in about two years or so but these would be common things that people would come in and ask because there's always somebody from every band I worked with that was the guy that did the recordings they would typically do the demos for the band and they're the guys that eventually go on to be future producers okay and it doesn't really matter what genre because the things I'm going to talk about go across genre and they really cannot be applied to you know to rock to hip-hop to jazz everything okay so let me talk about a few principles here that that I think are really important one of them is to understand the registers of where things are for example sibilant okay or where things are boo me where things are muddy where things are honky you hear these words but you don't know what those words mean or actually some of you probably do with know what they mean and these are things that in your mix will you know on the you know on the level where it's maybe not that bad they'll improve your mix and make it ten percent better but there are also things that will kill your mix that will actually really make people not want to listen to your music okay and I think that the the most important thing that that you can do is to reduce sibilants now sibilants can be anything from essing me saying the word s those s's can rip your head off in a mix with a vocalist okay but sibilants doesn't just have to be on vocals you can have siblings on cymbals okay and I've heard this a lot of times where I'll get I'll get into recording and the cymbals will be really really hissy sounding and that kills your ear it also impedes your ability to turn your mixes up loud when vocals have a lot of siblings it's very distracting which is why they use de-essing now back when I was started on tape we would use de esters to track with now you don't have to do that because they have plug-in DSS and there's a lot of good plug-in to use there's many different ones that you can use everywhere everything from you know waves as the Renaissance waves that's just a regular de-esser which is very good but you know Massey plugins are great that I'm trying to think of some other dealers that are that are and then you can get in the Oxford this suppressor you know these really really sophisticated dealers or use you know your you can turn an EQ and a compressor into into a de-esser I mean there I used to use things before they had dedicated compressors the very first plugins and ProTools mcdee SP had a frequency dependent compressor in their compressor bank for example so de-essing is really important but also reducing siblings in the 3 to 5 K range or 3 to 4 K range is incredibly important ok these are the areas that if there isn't enough of this your mix will not have presence but if there's too much it'll kill your ears ok human beings can really hear 3k very well 3 to 4 K we can hear them it's in everything we listen to pretty much is that that range the articulation of speech is really in that range which is why you'll see people that get in their 50s and 60s are always saying huh huh you know your parents what is he saying that and the reason I've got a lot of friends that are like that and the reason is that they get this 4k knotch in their hearing that can be a lot of times down to minus 18 DB like an incredible reduction of the ability to hear those frequencies so what do you typically do when you when you can't hear those frequencies well a lot of people will turn them up okay so what do you do if your you know if your hearing is impaired in that range well there's a couple things you could do you can use a frequency analyzer and I will see professional recording engineers that will I was talking with somebody about this recently up incredibly good engineer that's done a lot of big records it's a few years ago I went in this to the studio I won't say where it was but it's a guy that I had worked with before and I was doing a couple songs with a span that he had just finished so soon as I walk in I said to the to the to the head engineer said so that what's up with the frequency analyzer and he goes oh that's that's I said does he use that a lot he says yeah that's the first thing he puts up well why does he put that up because he is in his 50s late 50s and he wants to make sure that he's not missing anything and that is an aid in which to do that now they have frequency analyzers that are plugins now they have plenty of different ones Andre just said humans perceive 4k better that's why and and but that's also why it can why it is fatiguing to the ear as well it can hear that so it can become fatiguing the ear which is why you have to really be careful a lot of times your mix you cannot turn it up loud if you have too much three to four K in it those upper mids are just absolute killers okay so you have to be very very careful of that same thing is with the a 1k range now the 1k range well actually let me talk about a couple other frequency ranges if I want to bring out a piano for example in a mix okay I'm gonna start going into two and a half K range or so where I'm gonna get that you know the the meds to where where I can hear it if it's a dense mix and I want to hear it there I'm gonna do that I'm gonna reach for something in that area okay as you move down into the 1k area this is where you get your honky nough strum 1k is is really has a very very nasally sound to it okay if you have one a lot of 1k a Peter if you have a lot of 1k in your guitar for example it will sound very honky and it's typically with distorted guitars and clean guitars if you have 1k a lot of times that will actually help you have presence in your single note definition if you're a jazz musician so not having enough 1k in in your sound can make your sound hollow but having too much will make it nasally so that's a problem area that you have to look for now as you get into your lower frequencies let's say 350 to 600 or even 350 to 800 this is where your where your boxiness comes in your boxiness is these are areas where there's a lot of information from a lot of instruments okay hey Peter so for example when when you're gonna eq a kick drum no typically this is not necessarily if you're going for a John Bonham drum but a typical Rock kick drum or even a kick drum that's like that would be a hip-hop sounding kick drum you're gonna reduce the that range there because that takes up a lot of area in the mix especially as you get into a dense mix that mid-range then that this started to be the style in the 70s where people would start dipping out the mids in the kick drum usually between 350 and 350 to 500 or so and then later on and mix down you would dip out even more and you would see these curves like this well they started then putting those those curves into microphones if you look at an AKG d112 that looks like an egg that microphone has a frequency curve that is really built around that removing all those mid frequencies from the kick drum because those things just make your mix sound money okay you want to hear the attack of the kick drum you wanna hear the the air of the kick drum those are in two different places typically the attack of your kick drum can be anywhere from 2 K up to 8 K okay if you're listening to a Metallica kick drum you're gonna have a lot of you know 6 k 6k attack where it's really spiky sounding which is what I call it but if you listen to somebody like you know Annie Wallace's mixes for example we'll have a lot of two more 2k where it doesn't rip that often doesn't sound like a typewriter okay so this is it this is the thing that guys that do a lot of metal you know you'll have a lot of attack and a very processed kick sound but as you put this into the mix especially if there's a lot of double kicks going on it can get really clicky and annoying to the ear so you have to really be careful with that now on the low end of the kick drum typically you have to decide what is going to have the low-end emphasis and your mix is it going to be a bass heavy mix or is it going to be a kick heavy mix and and that's where you're going to decide what instrument is going to occupy those instruments they can't both occupy the same frequency range don't go in and boost 60 Hertz on your kick drum and boost 60 Hertz on your bass okay if you're gonna boost 60 Hertz and your kick you're gonna cut 60 Hertz on your base you might boost a hundred Hertz on your bass okay but these are things that you figure out beforehand okay these are these are well like when you're tracking these are things to be looking for so that when you get to the mixed stage you're not trying to fix all this stuff so you want to get your sounds as close as possible to what they're going to be and make sure that every instrument is occupying its own frequency range okay guitars don't need if they're if they're in with a bass and you want your basses sound big they don't need a lot below 100 Hertz acoustic guitars electric guitar sometimes with distorted electric guitars you'll shelf you'll shelve it up to 200 Hertz okay because you only want that mid-range information another thing you might do with distorted electric guitars so they don't sound like buzz saws is you may low pass it meaning you may take some other high end off it although I don't like to do that I don't like to necessarily limit the ranges on the top end I will usually use a shelf and dip it down so that I don't have so that I don't have a lot of what I call hair on the guitars that's that's really annoying buzz eNOS I like buzz eNOS if it's a square wave buzz eNOS okay something that's from you know guitars I'm trying to think who's really good at doing those square wave guitars well I mean honestly a lot of these bands like periphery or Chevelle or you know bands like that they have a lot of square wave information in their guitars okay and I like to call those buzzsaw guitars I like those they're very aggressive they're they have very aggressive square wave II son that really cuts through this is the other thing distortion helps instruments cut through I talked about this a lot on live streams if you want to hear something you can add distortion to it and you will be able to hear it if you can't hear your bass in the mix bleed in some distortion put a sansamp or or to put a Decapitator on a send or put you know some type of a you know run your bass out and and through some type of a distortion pedal and and bring the signal back in and make sure it's in phase into Pro Tools or logic and bleed that in okay that distortion is going to help give instruments clarity it doesn't matter what it is you can put distortion on a snare drum I do it all the time or I used to do it all the time okay Distortion you'd really go on anything it will give it presence okay that's why people like things like tape compression because it's not just the tape compression it's the added harmonics if you look at a snare drum that's gone through onto tape and you bring it into Pro Tools and you a be it verses the direct into Pro Tools waveform and you just look at it the waveform is way more complex the waveform that is gone to tape okay so it'll be much more jagged looking as way more information it will also look like it's compressed because it will have more length to it that's what tape compression does that's what compression does it can don't you know it can add length to thing compression doesn't always add length okay saturation I keep seeing saturation in here saturation Distortion they're just the same you're adding you're adding harmonic information here okay but I saw this does the square waveform come from the compressor you can have your waveforms when if it hits a compressor Fitz gets gets limited okay and you print it that way you'll see that your your snare drum for example or anything with a transient can be squared off at the top because it's hitting a compressor and it's limiting that okay now that can be used to great effect but it also can be limiting the dynamic range like that can also really affect your transients and your punchiness okay so you have to be really careful with this kind of stuff this is why compression is another thing that you need to that you need to understand okay compression is not just dynamic used for dynamic control it can be used for tone shaping okay there's many types of compression in the digital realm now we have things like multiband compressor x' that are very common they didn't when when Pro Tools logic things like that started cube a started 15 years ago you didn't have all the choices that you have now but now there are so many different types of multiband compressor x' and limiters for example mcdee SP makes the MC 2000 multiband limiter or multiband compressor they also make the ML 4000 I believe it is a multiband limiter okay these things can be used for tone shaping these compressors and they're used basically like a de-esser would be you can go in and radically change the the sound of an instrument no matter what instrument it is by using a multiband compressor and it acts differently than an EQ does okay so that's another thing that that is really great to experiment with is multiband compression because it will can act like EQ compressors that's when I say that their tone shaping well they're also in addition to to limiting the frequency range they can be used to create excitement through pumping okay now there's good pumping and there's bad pumping and sometimes you know when your mixes where the cymbals are sound all washed out where there's too much compression on either on the drums drum sub mix or there's too much compression on the master buss limiter or compressor you'll start getting into this really hashey sounding noisy cymbals that basically bleed over the whole mix and and actually weaken it and make it hard to listen to symbols that are compressed too much you really need to be careful with cymbals you can compress room mics but and you can compress overheads but you want to make sure that you're not compressing them too much because what you don't want is you don't want that wash of the cymbals to start interfering with the guitars for example or the vocals anything in the mid-range where you have where you want to have presence I think that that's you know these are areas to be really really careful with okay so be careful not to make your drop your your cymbals so I think that's the biggest mistake that I hear in mixes is is compression too much compression on drums too much compression on cymbals it can be either from the overheads or from the room mics now done just right compression is amazing but you need to get your compression attack and release correct okay for example if I'm using a compressor on a bass and I'm doing a tune that's at a slow tempo and I'm playing with an electric bass or where the or where the keyboard bass that has an attack but then has the sound the sound will die off what I will do is I will try to time the release of the compressor to hold the note the length time that you need to hold it until the next main beat occurs it's the same thing for example with reverbs they work in the same way if you have a snare reverb you want it to last to a till the next important beat it may be that the snare hits on to and the reverb lasts until 3:00 till beat 3 and cuts right off with a kick drum that if there's a kick on 3 these are important things the cut offs of these everybody always thinks of the attacks but they don't think of the back end this actually goes for improvising - you've been - no you give it a vibrato but what you do at the end of the note is just as important as what you do at the beginning of the note okay so so always be thinking of these things is my reverb cutting off in the right spot is my snare drum of using a live drummer is our my are my wires my snare wires lasting for a long enough period for example on slow tempo songs you want your snare wires it's typical to have them last longer meaning that they rattle longer to take up more time fast tempo songs you don't want them you want your snares tighter so they don't last as long and bleed onto the other beats okay so all of this stuff is really important the same thing goes in using reverb on things that have any high frequency information vocals drums if you use reverb on those if you use reverb on drums let's say you use a reverb on your snare if you have a lot of hi-hat bleed or cymbal wash in the snare drum mic what you don't want to be doing is you don't want to be putting it through a reverb that's gonna accentuate that sound every time okay which is why you would either copy the track put it a very tight gate on it so it sounds natural still and send that to the reverb or you could take a sample put in a sample on its own track you can actually send the sample pre-fader sample to the reverb where it's not even being used in the track so you have the NEET you have the real snare being played but the gate is triggering the reverb okay I'm see I'm sorry the the sample is triggering the reverb without being heard okay so somebody put up Michael just put on your how do you prevent bleed okay a lot of bleed is caused by bad playing it's the same thing as when I gave my five tips for guitar or for bass muting of the right and left hand is incredibly important probably the most important thing with playing cleanly in whatever you know whatever you're doing okay well with drums it's the same thing but you have to learn how to not bash your symbols like chaining on the hi-hat is what I call it where you're playing the hi-hat you know thirty percent louder than you're hitting the snare you want to reverse those if you listen to old recordings of guys like John Bonham or Keith Moon or whoever great drummers would always balance themselves in the room and I always tell bands listen if you can't balance yourself at L drummers if you can't balance yourself in the room you can't get a good drum sound there's that there's that funny story about Glyn John's I told on here I think I don't know or maybe I told on the other channel but where Don Henley came to him and said I think the kick drum needs to be a little bit louder and so Glyn John said well you need to hit it louder hit it harder like you know it's he's listening to the room mics he comes back on playback and good drummers will come into the control room and listen to playback I've worked with guys you know I've worked with drummers like Josh Freese or Vinnie Colaiuta or whoever these pro drummers like that right they will typically go out you get your drum sound they'll do they'll do it pass and they'll come in and listen and what they listen for is they listen to see how their drums are mixed if one of them is playing is Andre just said lead cymbal okay that is a you know if you're hitting your cymbals too hard what you want to do is you want to hit your drums hard and your cymbals not as hard and you want to have those drums you want to have that balance just right so you can actually compress the drums nicely so you get the punch out of them but you don't get the excessive wash now what are other ways to keep wash out of drums well for example your hi-hat pointing away from the or the mic on the snare pointing away from the hi-hat you ever notice on the hi-hat that that your that your mic will be pointing away from the snare like that okay the reason they do that is to get as much rejection of the snare in the I at Mike it's the same problem right now you also have to know about getting things in phase there are so many different things on this but - oh see I see this guy I says in the comment section you says I'm going to get killed using superior drummer okay so I use superior drummer all the time or I used to I do four demos the toms and superior drummers on a lot of the the a lot of the drum kits the Tom's last way too long the it's not like you can just pull up those drum things those drum sounds and just use them like they are the drum sounds even on those they what they don't do or they have a long decay on them on purpose so that you can actually use them on all different tempo songs but if you're doing an up-tempo song and you have a long decay on your floor time it's going to get it's going to muddy up your whole mix especially if it's hanging over the next important beat you know if the drummer's hitting the floor time on four and it's lasting till two of the next bar it's going to be smearing the downbeat of that of the the transients on the first on the kick on beat one okay so you're gonna want to put gates even in superior drums you have to control the sound of the Tom's for example okay now some of the sounds are really well recorded some of the libraries in superior drums like the Avatar drums I think are very very well recorded that was who did it Niger Nigel I forget who did those but it's got about seven different snare possibilities it's got it's got a lot a lot it's got a lot of different possibilities and you'll start the thing about using superior drums a lot of people will use these things for their for their actual recording and when I hear him I'm like oh man he's using drum kit from hell or he's using just the stock pop drum kit or he's using that you know or she's using this whatever right it's like you recognize these things everybody that uses these things recognize is all the stock sounds on there so you don't want to just put up the presets you want to try and sculpt if you're using a drum program like that you want to try and sculpt using the available samples that are there tune them to the track okay don't be afraid to use the pitch control in there and and and make them you know make them fit your track just right so that they're not easily recognizable okay another incredibly important tip high-pass almost everything okay everything that you can what you do is because because really there's two instruments that are going to occupy the low end okay it's going to be your kick and bass or in your orchestra it's going to be your base your bases or or your tubas or your you know for your bassoon or your contrabassoon okay these are things that are going to going to occupy the low frequency spectrum and anything above that with with with acoustic instruments there actually been you know if they're recorded properly in sample libraries if you're using Spitfire or something like that and they're recorded really well then you don't have to worry as much about these things but if you're using things from the same sample libraries okay and they're done in the same room you're going to get a lot of the same resonances okay so you might so it's going to still sound you may not have the clarity that you really want so you may want to go in and EQ the sounds you might want to do something you may want to use you know cinematic strings blend it in with your strings or some of the cinematic strings blend it and with your spitfire audio to give them a different tone so that they have you may only use it on the violas or something like that so to give them a different tone so that they will actually have their occupy their own space and that's really what this high passing is it's about getting things to occupy their own your own space a lot of times for example if you're recording metal and you have a drummer you'll high-pass the drums many times all the way up to five hundred Hertz you'll take all the low-end out of it and one of the reasons that you do this is that you don't have the same phasing issues if you take the kick drum out of out of the equation and you take a lot of the bottom end of the snare drum out of the equation in the overheads and you bait and you them use them as cymbal mics you don't have to worry as much about these and you can have more control okay and this is one of the reason and that you want to use rides as much as possible okay one of the best tips that I ever got is to is riding the overheads on cymbal crashes for example so that they have this the right kind of decay so I will typically go in and and I will you know if it's a demo in tune Shh and I will go up with a fader Shh and then back with it and when you come back you're able to control the punchiness you get the decay of the drug the budgets of the drums occurs you know the the the transients without having all that cymbal wash yet you have really nice decay on your cymbals okay without having to compress them a lot that being said um don't be afraid to use compression on your mix buss everyone uses compression on their mix buss they just do okay all big mixers I'm going to be interviewing Chris Lord LG next week I'm going to talk to him about that when I go to NAMM we're gonna talk a lot about compression I would imagine and most Pro mixers will put a compress around right at the beginning of their mix and they will mix through the compressor okay now this is this compressor is either an analog compressor that's coming off a console or it's on your mix bus your two bus okay now many times you will not only have a compressor on there but you'll also have an EQ and a lot of people will EQ the entire mix it's very common you asked Joe Parisi yes Andy Wallace ask anybody I mean so many people will will EQ their master buss urban people that do pop music whatever I mean it's very common to have EQ on your on your mix buss as far as how much compression to use on your mix buss it's so you know I've had mixes or I've seen mixes where you know people have used 8 DB of compression on the mix buss for heavy rock music using auto release on an SSL or on as Alan smart c2 compressor and and it sounds incredible okay and then I see people that we use very little compression and they'll just couldn't want to control the transients I have a video on compression if you guys want to really get into it more I have a video on EQ and compression that you should definitely check out on this channel but those are more well I talked about mix buss compression in that and I demonstrate a bunch of different compressors although that video is a couple years old and I want to go back and do another one using more you know some some of the more contemporary plugins that are out now along with which I will do with Pro Tools twelve for example so the attack and release of the of the compression on the mix buss is incredibly important okay the slower the release the more transients get through before the compressor grabs it okay so if you if you're feeling like your drums aren't punchy enough make the attack time longer so it doesn't engage as quickly if you want to get more attack out of them if you wanted to grab those transients you do it the other way same thing a lot of people if they're using an SSL compressor or if you're using a focus right red three even the plug-in versions many people will go in and just put on auto release okay that's like program dependent but you can shape the the your mix and the pumping of your mix by using the release okay once again this is dependent on the tempo of the track so you can't make generalizations on it necessarily right because you really can't say what's up Levi you can't really say what the you know I can't say because I'm not listening to your mix if you know you may have a very mixed with very few elements in it that actually can have a tremendous amount of bottom end in it okay because there's nothing competing in the low register if it's a you know it's if it's if it's you know if you're doing some hip-hop music or something where there's just not a lot of mid-range information or you can be doing you know some progressive metal and there's just every last bit of it is eaten up every frequency range you've got distorted guitars and stereo you get you got guitars up the center you've got a big bass it's got distortion and you got drums you got a lot of compression on it and then you're trying to get the vocal to stand out okay so so there are so many different elements of this to understand and I would suggest I would suggest going back in and watching some of these older videos of older videos that I did on this I mean I've done videos on recording on tape I've done videos on tape compression where I show the difference between what a snare sounds like direct into Pro Tools or coming off the tape machine and put into Pro Tools I guess I got it I got em all in here there's 600 videos a lot of people I think most people watch the current videos and they'll just look down the thing they'll just but they're there's so much information on my channel that I've already put out there that you know like the EQ how the pros use EQ how the pros use compression those those are very very very very important I see renzo put guitars cutting through equals more mids yeah depending you know certain people will add 3k in their guitars to make them jump out other people will take it away guys like Eric Valentine who's a great engineer he doesn't like a lot of that a lot of that upper mid distortion he likes to be able to crank your you know your your guitars up really loud I mean you think about some of the records that he did well he did you know the he engineered the Queens of the Stone Age songs for the daffy he did Third Eye Blind he did he's done he did him a lot of great signing records and and his guitars have a very unique sound whereas you know chris lord-alge ii his guitars are right in this you know they they occupy just the right around amount of mid-range Andy Wallace has more agree more 3k in his guitars Julian just asked what I think about parallel compression I use parallel compression all the time parallel compression in the old days with plugins it's easy because everything has a mix knob on it so it's it's not it's not as much a Dan what's up it's not as much using mix busker using parallel compression used to be a thing that people talked about a lot more but pretty much every plug-in now is has a mix knob on it and use the mix knob on it okay because that's really important with that with parallel compression because you can put a lot of compression on on an instrument back that off and find the sweet spot where you're actually blending in the the uncompressed sound with a heavily compressed sound now a lot of times people would you know you called the New York sound or the LA Sun they would do they would actually go to a track to add compression and eat hue on it and they would use that there a parallel compression track like that which you can still do but but I think that most people now with that are using plugins I think most of you do I bet 95% of you use plugins they're not using you're not using outboard gear so I'm not mixing through a console anyway so these are the these are just a few tips here with to you know improve your mixes it's it's mixing is an art that's why they have people that get paid a lot of money to do mixes that's why if you know a good mixer and you're not good at it hire somebody to do it for you okay it's really crucial a great mixer can make a massively big difference okay by the Beato book everything is 20% off in my store today are be 150 is the that's how I make a living for my family is through that and for and you can I've got coffee mugs have all the you know the the harmonic major scale the the melodic minor scales the formulas for all for all the all the scales all the triads everything you guys are the best thank you so much check out my newest video on hard times with Pelini I feature a Pelini track on there was a he's a great guitar player with a very cool band and you should check it out tunes called electric sunrise subscribe if you haven't you guys are awesome thank you

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 71,105

Keywords: audio mixing, mixing tips, audio engineering, how to mix, music production, pro tools, mixing class, audio mixing tips, audio mastering, logic pro, home studio, audio mixing techniques, audio mixing course, Rick Beato, top 5, rick beato what makes this song great, Music Production, ableton live 10, cubase 10, cubase 5 mixing and mastering, logic pro x, how to use compression, mix buss compression, how to eq drums in logic pro x

Id: oVcE-BNnLI0

Length: 40min 47sec (2447 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 13 2019