How to Achieve More DEPTH in Your Mixes

hi this is justin kelly of sonic's group thanks for joining me for this week's episode of the sonic scoop podcast you may recognize i'm in a different space than usual i've just moved into a new house new studio still kind of getting the fine-tuning of this studio going and thinking about building out a new one maybe that'll be the topic of something new coming up but for right now we're going to be going deep into a topic that's all about depth when we talk about depth how to get more depth in your mixes and when i talk about depth we're not just talking about you know deep as in low we're talking about depth like front to back and this is one of the last things that i think a lot of people master when they first get into audio and music production and i'm going to give you a few key guidelines as to how to get more depth out of your productions let's get right into it the briefest of shout outs to our sponsors including you how do you sponsor by smashing the like button down below if you're on the youtube version of this podcast make sure to hit like and subscribe and hit that notifications bell make sure you don't miss any more great episodes like this one also you can if you're on the audio only version consider giving us a five star rating review it really does help spread the word also big thanks to sound toys making some of my favorite creative mixing effects more about them later and steinberg making some of the coolest daws out there like cubase and nuendo more about them later too all right let's get right into this idea about depth this is something that people learn to listen for last and it shows a lot in what i'm mastering for kind of newer mixers often i have to give advice in this area because it's one of those things people haven't keyed in to listening for in their mixes but once you key into listening for depth you can easily increase depth in your mixes and you can also fix mix problems that you didn't even realize were there things that are bugging you that you just couldn't put your finger on are sometimes depth issues front to back issues so how do we achieve depth and why is it important let's get into the why is important real quick and then we'll get into how to achieve why is it important well really great hi-fi sounding mixes and masters are often three things they are tall deep and wide we've talked a little bit about how to get wide mixes on this channel i'm an advocate of starting with the lcr approach the left center right approach and you can find a podcast episode where i talk about that a little bit and the height thing is really more about your overall tonal balance whether low frequencies and high frequencies are you know proportionally represented in a good way but the depth thing that's the thing that people have trouble with at first and you're just not going to get an immersive sounding mix unless you get depth figured out you're really going to be limiting yourself as far as space in the mix too people think about how they place things you know height wise deeper elements versus higher elements and they're trying to avoid frequency masking things like that and people have an intuitive sense about you know spatializing things left to right but there's this whole other dimension where you can play stuff in your mix either further forward towards the listener or further back sunk into the speakers and if you don't think about depth in your mixes you will accidentally make bad choices around depth which i hear constantly the world that we're in every single day we're taking depth cues for how far away things are from us right now in my new studio here there's the littlest bit of traffic noise way off in the background because i haven't totally dialed things in yet and i can immediately hear it's super far away how do i know that compared to my fingers next to my ear making a little sound like this that sounds so close and there's a few things that give us cues for depth one of them is let me make it sound really simple one of them is a volume one of them is brightness and one of them is ambience and any three of those can impact how close or how far things sound but also there's the element of transient which i'll talk about a little bit and there's also the element of localization whether things are really hard left right or far away now i'm going to go deeper into a few of these tricks let me give you some examples of where depth often goes bad in new mixers mixes and here's a common one someone will have mixed a track and they'll have put reverb or delay on the vocal maybe they'll put reverb or delay on the snare drum maybe they put reverb or delay on some of their synths and things so all of those sound a little bit further back away from the speakers but then there'll be these other elements like say a shaker or a hi-hat that's mic'd close up and it sounds like it's glued right to the front of the speaker so you have this weird soundstage impression of maybe a guitar solo that has reverb on it and it feels like it's coming from further back but in front of that guitar solo is a really loud dry hi-hat that's weird right but it happens a lot i i bring this up the hi-hat louder than the guitar solo thing often because it's a common thing that you find in newer mixers mixes a really hot dry hi-hat in front of elements that should be in front of the hi-hat now that's not to say you should never have an up front and dry hi-hat but it's something that you want to think about and do intentionally and notice so let's say you were in this case where you have a hi-hat that sounds really dry and upfront and glued to the front of the speakers compared to say your guitar solo or your vocal which is not an uncommon thing with new mixers and you can substitute guitar for other things if you're not in a guitar genre you know you could have a hi-hat that sounds really upfront in an electronic format with you know a lead like a synth lead that's way behind it maybe that's appropriate but maybe it's not so i want you to notice it so what's the first thing that you can do to address this well thing number one is volume right think about real life sounds that are further away from you are quieter generally speaking than sounds that are closer up right if you take the same person banging the same real live drum in you know a football field that real live drum a snare drum right in front of you is going to sound louder than the other end of the football field duh right so thing number one turn down your head if that's the offending thing that's too close compared to other elements but that's not the only thing you can do to make say a drum sound further away or a hi-hat sound further away another big thing you can do is to play around with brightness generally speaking sounds that are further away sound darker than sounds that are closer up again imagine your buddy is with you on a football field smacking a drum when they go further away from you the lower frequencies from that drum carry relatively far compared to the highest frequencies so generally speaking sounds from far away are going to have a relatively more low end content than high-end content think about a lightning strike that's really close by compared to rolling thunder far off in the distance one of them has more high frequency content than the other think about standing right next to a starter pistol or a cannon going off compared to a cannon shot way off in the distance the one way off the distance is going to sound darker than the one closer up so generally speaking sounds that are darker are going to sound further away so another way to tuck something further back is just to make it a little bit darker now another element that plays into this is the idea of transient and this is a little bit of a kind of more ephemeral one but once you start to hear it you start to really hear it and this is that sounds that have a lot of transient a lot of initial impact and articulation will generally sound closer than ones that have the transients smooth it off more and you can think about this in terms of compression one of the things i talk about quite a bit on this channel is learning to hear compression and one of the first things that i recommend people listen for is the difference in what a slow attack time sounds like compared to a fast fast attack time the second thing i recommend listening for after that is what a fast release time sounds like compared to a medium or long release time but generally speaking if you have a slow attack time that lets do a lot of attack a lot of initial punch a lot of initial transient those sounds are going to feel like they're jumping out of the speakers at you like they're really coming at you relative to a sound that has a really fast attack time sorry a compressor with a fast attack time that's smoothing out the transients that's going to sound relatively further back into the speakers so that's another factor you could play around with and then after that there is the obvious factor that people go for of reverb delay ambient effects things like that and this is a factor in depth but it's not the only factor and there are ways to make things sound relatively closer or relatively further away using reverb or delay let's take a reverb example real quick imagine you're in a church with someone who has the drum when a big cathedral right and they're standing right next to you and they smack that drum you're going to hear the initial impact of that drum very close up and kind of uncolored by the space around you but then you're later going to hear the reverb off of that drum it's not necessarily going to be dramatically later like an artificially long pre-delay but there's some separation where you have maybe a little bit of dry sound followed by the reverb and that will make things sound like they're in a big space but relatively close compared to if the sound and its reverb reach you at the same exact time that's going to relatively speaking push things further back into the mix further back into the speakers or even more so if like the somehow the reflections reach you before the initial impact i guess that would sound uh super weird and super far away but that would be a very uncommon thing to hear in music production or in real life so there you go i think you have a few good ideas for how these things are handled but i also want you to think about how just because you have a really long reverb time or really long delay that's not necessarily going to make something sound super far away relative to a short reverb time or a short delay because a short reverb time or short delay where the ambient sound is arriving at almost the same time as the initial impact it's possible in that context for the thing with the shorter reverb time to sound further away than the thing with a longer reverb time and what matters here is proportion right how loud the dry signal is compared to its reverb how soon the dry signal arrives compared to its reverb if you want to make a snare drum still feel up front and clear and present but have a lot of ambience on it a good way to do that is by setting a longer pre-delay on that reverb so these are some of the things to think about when it comes to depth and just having this conversation and starting to think about depth to actually pinpoint each element in your mix and say how close or far away does it sound that's big because a lot of people especially early on don't start to think in those terms but i'll tell you what your favorite deepest most immersive most impressive sounding mixes that you love the sound of chances are they're playing around with depth in an interesting way or at least conscious of it and at least making good choices about depth so those are some ideas for you around what depth is how to achieve it how to make it work better do you play around with depth in your mixes what are some of your favorite tricks to make things jump out of the speakers and feel really close to the listener or to set them far back are there any mixes out there that you can think of you know popular ones that use depth really well that have been stunning to you or if you can't think of any go listen to some of your favorite mixes now and think about depth as you're listing them i want to hear from you in the comments down below or if you prefer to write me an email you can hit me at podcast sonicscoop.com i hope this one has been useful for you this has been justin colletti of sonic scoop big shout out and thanks to a company that makes awesome effects for getting more depth in your mixes and that is sound toys you gotta check out their echo boy and delay is absolutely one of the best ways to get depth without taking up a lot of space if you want things to set further back often especially in dense mixes delays are going to take up less space and be more effective than reverb there's a time and place for reverb but there's a reason that sound toys first goes for things like echo boy and primal tap focusing on delays i mean just super useful tools so definitely check those out and everything they make you can get 30-day free trial on any of their plug-ins at soundtoys.com also big thanks to steinberg for sponsoring this month they make some killer daws like cubase and nuendo the mastering platform wavelam also very cool doraco the music notation software definitely checking out steinberg.net all right this has been justin claddy of socksoup oh last thing if you want free stuff for me first of all you can always go to sonicscoop.com contest where you give away like a hundred thousand dollars worth of free gear every year but if you want a workshop that goes deep in mixing check out the five habits of truly great mixers at sonic scoop.com mixhabits that sonicscoop.com slash mix habits or if you want to go deeper in on mastering with me you can check out my free mastering workshop mastering 101 you can check that soundscoop.com mastering101 that's sonicscoop.commastering101 thanks for joining me thanks for hanging out with me this has been justin colletti of sonic scoop see you next time you

Channel: SonicScoop

Views: 14,212

Rating: 4.965517 out of 5

Keywords: depth, mixing, Justin Colletti, SonicScoop, mastering, master, mixes

Id: KxlvUNrrTpc

Length: 14min 45sec (885 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020