Mixing With Saturation (Essential Tips)

hello and welcome to the video today it's all about saturation i'm going to help you identify different types of saturation how to really listen out for it i've got plenty of examples and i want to deal with some audio myths and misconceptions about saturation but most importantly i want to show you how to use saturation in your mixes and productions to actually make them sound better so for a full list of topics covered check the description but for now let's just jump right into it saturation is a very broad effect and it can be a deliberate and obvious effect such as an overdriven guitar tone or a heavily distorted 808 bass sample but it's also the more subtle side effect induced by signal processing so virtually any circuit tube tape transistor or even plug-in has saturation to a certain degree and it's this analog style saturation that i really want to concern myself with this video all of these terms you hear thrown around like warm thick silky creamy smooth these terms that you hear audio engineers and also companies throwing out all the time in their marketing that's the sort of saturation i want to address in this video part of the appeal or fascination with saturation is that as a lot of these devices are analog records made back in the good old days often sounded really sort of warm full punchy and thick and part of this is down to the fact that there was subtle saturation on every single track in those mixes just naturally due to the devices they were recorded on and mixed through but let's get straight to some examples so what actually is saturation so it's basically when extra sound is induced or added to your original signal and there's two main types of saturation or harmonic saturation and these are even and odd harmonics this first example is extremely simple but it sets the groundwork for the later examples that will be a lot more musical so to start with i have a 100 hertz sine wave and this is what we're going to call our fundamental so on its own it just looks and sounds like this and what i'm going to do is induce even harmonics onto this signal and these will be even multiples of that 100 hertz so 100 times 2 200 hertz times 4 400 hertz etc we'll come back to that in a moment but now for the odd harmonics these are odd multiples of the original signal so in this case 100 times 3 times 5 7 9 and so on and these look and sound like this in both cases we're adding signal or notes that weren't there previously albeit at a slightly lower level and these were often pushed into the higher frequencies in general the even harmonics tend to give a feeling of support and clarity and fullness mainly because you're adding in that octave and another octave above as well and adding the octave to the original sound sort of gives this feeling of support maybe a subtle sort of feeling of doubling that original uh sound that you had whereas the odd harmonics definitely added a lot more richness i would say a lot of edge bite and sort of buzziness to the sound you had just a whole lot more high frequencies there now this is sort of general between even and odd harmonics both can sound excellent depending on what you're using them for it's not that one is better than the other but there is another topic we have to address very quickly with this basic example and that is that besides a few plugins and wave shapers almost all plugins and certainly all analog hardware doesn't simply induce even or odd harmonics as many people believe all of these different devices and plug-ins have a different combination or distribution of these even and odd harmonics depending on a lot of different factors so you may well have heard that tubes have only even harmonics and maybe tape has only odd harmonics but this simply isn't true it is true that certain devices favor certain harmonics even or odd but it's so much more than just whether it's got a tube in it whether there's a bit of tape there from an engineering background it's all to do with the topology of the circuit not just the tube or the tape it's every single piece of wire every capacitor especially the transformers make a huge difference it's just the general design of the circuitry and not just one component i'll discuss a little bit more about that later but the last topic i need to introduce is non-linearity or non-linear behavior which sounds confusing but trust me it's not that bad so basically with any device that induces saturation or distortion what you might expect is that at all levels of volume or gain that you feed into that device you'd have exactly the same type of saturation so the same distribution of even an odd harmonics and you just get more or less volume of them but this couldn't be further from the truth what you actually see with almost all of these devices and plugins is that if you feed a different amount of volume into them or if you drive them differently you get dramatic differences in the distributions of odd and even harmonics and the tone of the saturation that's generated so i have an example here with a tube emulation and you'll see that as i increase the amount of drive there's a big difference in the distribution of harmonics at some points it's favoring those even harmonics then the odd then back to the even again so you really have to be careful of this and just remember that these devices respond completely different to transients different amounts of signal so anyway let's take a quick listen to this non-linear behavior [Music] i know that a pure sine wave is not a very musical way to represent saturation but i really just wanted to keep it as simple as possible for those first three fundamental points the even harmonics odd harmonics and then the non-linear behavior of these devices so if any of that's confusing please you know just take a break come back to this re-watch those sections i think it's very important that you understand that before moving on moving on to some more fun examples how do we actually hear this saturation hear it in tracks set it in our own tracks and productions and what type of saturation do we even want to use at all because there's so many different types first thing pop on some headphones especially mixing and mastering headphones you need something that can give you an extended high frequency response reference monitors are great in a well-treated room but most of the time the subtle differences of saturation are a little bit harder to set correctly on studio monitors whereas in headphones you can tend to hear if you're overdoing it a little bit too much the next step is to get your hands on a lot of different options for saturation there's tons of free plugins out there and stock ones you need to experience a lot of these different plugins it's one of these effects where there is no sort of wrong or right plugin there's just so many of them and so many producers have tons of different analog gear and plugins especially for this purpose particular tools tend to fit very particular jobs the next thing is once you've got all these plugins if you're confused about what they're doing simply download this span analyzer plugin that i was using earlier in the video it's a free plugin i'll link to my free plugins video in the description you can simply run a pure sine wave through it and then see what your plugin is doing what it's inducing it can just give you a little bit more data a little bit more information if you're unclear the next thing you must do when you're using saturation plugins or hardware is send in a good amount of signal if you're you know sending in -30 minus 40 db of signal you might actually not experience any saturation with these plug-ins as i explained earlier with the non-linear behavior some of these plug-ins don't even react to anything until you give them minus 20 minus 10 db of gain going into them surprisingly so experiment with pushing up your gain going into the plugins make sure that you're maintaining really good gain staging and now into the example i'm going to be adding some distortion to this drum track but i'll play it clean just to start off with so it sounds okay but it is a little bit boring the first thing i would recommend which i don't usually recommend when mixing is to solo the track in this case i really want to tune in to what is happening with the saturation so for the sake of this example i'm just going to be using this ozone 9 exciter plug-in just because it lets me pick between some different types of saturation easily let's start experimenting with some of those different types of saturation first i'm going to use tube saturation and what i want you to notice is that as i'm maybe increasing it up to around halfway you might hear that the low mids start feeling a little bit more full and a little bit more reinforced and then beyond there it's just getting a lot brighter a lot more high frequencies and things actually start distorting and sounding almost clipped so let's just take a listen for that [Music] sounding more reinforced and louder but what was interesting was that even though things were distorting and sounding a lot louder the peak loudness was actually going down on this db meter which is on the output so as i increase it we're getting less peak loudness but the average loudness and the perceived loudness is increasing and this is why i really wanted to explain that non-linear behavior at the start even just going a few more percent up here just radically changes how how this distortion sounds now what is very common is say distorting something quite a lot and then pulling the mix down so this means we're distorting it like crazy but then we're only going to blend in actually a small amount of that crazy distortion so let's experiment with that [Music] so to me that just sounds a little bit broken for this particular track i would pull it back like this let's try some different types of distortion so this time i'm going to go to warm and this should be a lot more subtle but you'll feel that instead of adding a load of the high end it's simply just reinforcing that kick and snare it's pulling out the bottom of the snare it's beefing up the kick drum a little bit [Music] but you can hear that as we get to the higher frequencies the hi-hats start sounding almost like some sort of read instrument they sort of start to flutter and break apart so that's something to listen for in the high end just as we push up to here and i'm i'm sorry if you're hearing all of this really obviously but i do have a an ear training series on my channel so this is what i'm doing now i'm just sort of talking through exactly what i'm hearing in the hope that you can sort of pick up on it too and train your ears but if you're much more advanced than this i'm really sorry you might want to skip ahead now i'm going to swap over to tape and what you'll hear is that it starts boosting the sort of high frequencies so the the mid and top of that snare and the hi-hats i hear that it starts boosting them a little bit sooner than i hear with the tube saturation so let's start this [Music] even by the time i get to here i'm hearing those hi-hats substantially louder so what i'm going to do for this is the tube because i don't want the top end to be so so boosted but although it says tube it's not just modeling a tube it's probably modeling the whole circuitry that was in that tube device i really want to highlight a tube on its own does not provide warmth i mean it it glows really hot it is warm if you were to touch it it would be hot and that's exactly why companies get us with that marketing the tube on its own is actually just inducing higher harmonics it's the whole circuit and mainly the transformer that is adding all of that weight and sort of extra body and warmth to the signal so now the crucial step once you've picked the type of saturation you want this is when you kind of really need to turn everything else back on and this is what you use to blend in the amount because on its own you'll almost always get the wrong amount of distortion or at least i do every single time now if we listen with and without the saturation you'll see that the one with the saturation is actually much more quiet in terms of peak loudness it's 6 db quieter give or take but the perceived loudness and the overall loudness in my opinion is a little bit higher at least in these headphones so let's take a listen [Music] and i think that overall it's just a lot more interesting so the way i like to use saturation in a mix and i will get on to another example here is usually just subtle so every single track just have a little bit of saturation in there it doesn't have to be in your face those drums were probably a little bit over the top but especially when you're using saturation to reinforce a track or subtly support it say with those extra second order harmonics what you'll find is that if you use just a teeny little bit on say 10 or 20 tracks all together it sums together to a much more sort of punchy much more full sounding mix now i'm going to go on to the guitar which is an excellent example of why you should be blending in the saturation with everything else playing and what this saturation plug-in lets me do is not really increase the loudness but just add a little bit of grit a little bit of texture to the guitar whilst also keeping it pretty smooth but more importantly it just lets me hear the guitar without having to stand out in the mix so i'll play before and after the saturation [Music] in this case i think it lets the guitar sit a bit further back in the mix yet it pulls all this detail up all of those extra harmonic overtones are pulled up in the guitar and it just sounds a little bit more cool a little bit more textured but again it's not an in-your-face sort of screaming wall of guitars it's just sort of a subtle amount of saturation so that's the end of the examples and that's all i've really got for this video but i hope that it's clarified you know what is saturation the difference between even and odd harmonics i hope it's also showing you the difference in the non-linear behavior of that circuitry and also maybe cleared up a few doubts or misconceptions about you know tubes and all that sort of marketing that's thrown in our face all the time the type of saturation that's induced really is all down to the specific topology of the circuit or the plug-in that you're using so the real take-home from this video is that you've just got to get your hands on a lot of these plugins feed them a lot of signal and just learn you know it takes a bit of time to tune your ears into these things but you will learn the differences between all of these different types of saturation and it's not your rocket science at the end of the day so anyway thank you very much for watching please do let me know what you want to see in the next video and i'll see you soon bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 111,333

Keywords: saturation, distortion, even vs odd, in the mix, saturation explained, how to hear saturation, tube, tape, analog, analogue, analog saturation, tube distortion, tube vs tape, which, music production, mixing, mixing with saturation, everything you need to know, how to, distortion in mixing, need to know, what is saturation

Id: n6ew5mMN2pQ

Length: 16min 3sec (963 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020