Alex's advice for past Alex, part 2
We’re continuing on today from yesterday’s post, in which our friend Alex Spencer was sharing some of his takeaways on self-producing and mixing:
Always change levels in reference to another sound. There should be some anchors. In my case it's the kicks, snares, and pads. I first get those three to a level that feels good, and everything else is mixed in reference to those. Do I want this bass to be more or less powerful than the kick? Does this instrument break the sheen on my mids and highs? These decisions can come down to like 0.2 dB changes. Changes that are hard to make when the sounds haven’t first been cleaned up and unmasked.
My issue was seeing the level of, let’s say, my hi-hat, and it's only a few pixels on the dB scale. I could not tell if I was ok with that or not, because my mix was cluttered and clashing. But I would assume that hi-hat was part of the issue. So I would turn it up, and create another issue. 🤣 But when I’m working hard to clean my sounds before they hit any compression or saturation — only making cuts, no boosts — it's like yeah. It's quiet and it sounds good, because that's its place. It's not clashing anywhere. Quiet doesn't translate into indistinct.Creating stereo width. This one had me stumped for a long while. But I feel I have a more solid understanding of what a good stereo mix is. If I could say one thing to my past self to make it click, it would be timbre. When I slide between the mid and side channels, the timbre of the track should not change. Stereo width should do just that, make it wider. The key I found is using eq, compression, and saturation on the mid/side channels to find the timbre, and then to expand on that.
And so again, there is first a lot of cutting things out and un-widening sounds, to get each sound into its purest form. But doing that creates sooo much free space for the sounds to play in.
I use FabFilter Pro-Q 3 to do this final EQ shaping — I can do EQing on the left side, the right side, or the center. So now instead of a super-wide pad that's constantly phase-cancelling itself, I can use those panned EQ moves to create stereo width. I might boost some of my mids from the snare on the left. And some of the highs in my cymbal on the right. And some low-mids in my pad right, and some high-mids in my lead instrument left. It becomes like a puzzle that my brain loves solving. And it's so much easier, because I'm locked into each sound’s basic timbre — now it's just making little frequency nudges on the sides to widen the mix up.
I usually have 3 or 4 Pro-Qs on any given sound — one for center, one for right, one for left, etc. Trying to do it all in one instance of Pro-Q is creating an unnecessary obstacle imo.Essentially, before my sounds go to any sort of bus, all I care about is getting a super clean signal. I might need to resample my kick or snare to process it again — but I think I should be doing this anyways. It saves cpu and project size. Probably a good practice to start with many of my sounds. I can always save presets of my virtual instruments, to return to if I change my mind later and want to revisit the sound.
To Alex’s last point: I do this too. I’m constantly rendering out audio from the virtual instruments in my sessions. There’s stuff that you can do when a track is waveforms that you can’t do when it’s still in virtual instrument form, and waveforms are 100% reliable, whereas sometimes VIs glitch out and screw up the sound. So once I haven’t touched a VI in a while, I’ll render it — that way I don’t have to worry about it any more. The sound is kind of “locked in.”
And regarding Alex’s practice of panned EQing — this is super interesting to me! It’s sort of a 3D version of normal EQing. I’m into it.
Thanks so much Alex for sharing your insights! — jamie