Balancing Tracks and Automation with Dead Soul Revival
If you’ve been following my “first single release” journey for my new band deadsoulrevival.com you know I’ve been examining how we recorded, mixed, and promoted our upcoming release.
In my last post I was discussing mixing bass. Today let’s pause before we get into guitars and talk about balancing tracks.
For an even more depth look into balancing your tracks pick up a copy of my course The Sound Visualization Method.
At its most basic mixing is getting your tracks to be at levels where you can hear everything. This is where I like to start as I introduce new elements. I want them to be loud enough to hear but not so loud that anything else is getting covered up. This is often called the “rough mix.”
If this was all there was to mixing it would be easy. Unfortunately there are several problems that can crop up while you are trying to make this happen. One is uneven performances volume-wise. Another is frequency masking (more about this one in my next blog).
Let’s start with uneven volume performances. Even the best players out there are not going to play at the exact same volume all the time. Don’t mistake dynamic playing for being uneven.
Let’s use the bass as an example. A build up part may have some needed dynamics. Riding on some eighth notes may very well need to be very even in volume.
There’s a couple ways to handle this problem. One is automation. In other words manually drawing in the appropriate fader moves or recording the automation moves in real time.
The other way is to use a compressor and/or limiter. I’ve mentioned before that doing this in stages with the bass can sound a lot more natural. In other words, run the bass through several compressors.
Often I’ll use several LA-2A’s in series or an LA-2A into an 1176. I basically lower the threshold until the compressor starts sounding unnatural. Then I insert another compressor and doing that again.
You may wonder why I don’t use just one compressor. Doing radical moves to try to solve a problem in mixing is often a bad idea. Besides that I like to use the 1176 not just to even out dynamics but also as a tone shaper. It’s great for getting an aggresive bass tone.
Sometimes after all this I will still need to do some small volume automation moves to fix notes that are popping out. Bass volume can be different across the neck so it can take some massaging.
Later on in the mixing process when I have everything sitting in a good place relatively I will consider doing volume boosts or cuts for certain sections. When I want to give a part the spotlight I give a boost.
Often the reason I’m boosting is because that instrument or vocal is the most interesting thing going on at that moment. Another little trick I like to do is pick out a spot where you get to hear guitar, bass, or drums playing by themselves if even just for a moment.
This gives the listener a chance to hear the full tone of the guitar for example. Even just a taste will let people’s imagination fill in what each major element sounds like when they are all playing together. Listen to commercial mixes and you’ll hear this done quite often.
Next time we will get into the guitar/bass relationship and making them work together in a mix.
Until then…
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