Mixing Keyboards and Additional Production Elements 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. You can now download Black Roses and Down for the Last Time at the link above.
Today let’s get into keyboards and additional production elements like strings, percussion, and special fx.
For an even more depth look into this topic pick up a copy of my course The Sound Visualization Method.
As I’ve said before I like to nail down the meat and potatoes of my production before I move on to the additional elements. I would rather sculpt these kind of parts around guitars and bass than the other way around.
If keys, for example, are more important than your guitars then I would make sure my keys were out front and then sculpt to guitars to fit with them. This of course is purely an artistic choice.
Generally speaking I’m going to be rolling off the low end of these types of parts a bit so they don’t interfere with my bass part’s low end. Go too far with your low end roll off and add back in slowly until it feels right.
I will often make these types of parts fill in a frequency area that in under-represented in the mix thus far. That may be in the ultra high end for example. Pads can work great for this. I like to tuck them in so you don’t even notice them. But you would notice if they were gone.
I’m usually panning these types of parts fairly wide. Not full left or right with the guitars but maybe 80% of the way. This helps maintain a little bit more separation.
If for example, I’m working with a percussion element like a tambourine I will usually pan it opposite of the hi hat. This way I get a little high end dance going between the speakers that serves as ear candy.
808 drops I like to pan right up the middle. No rolling off the lows on those. The whole point is to light up the listeners’ subwoofers. These need to be verified through a sub generally to get the level just right.
Special fx is usually serving as ear candy so I like to get creative with the panning if it serves the song. Drawing in automation to have the part bounce between speakers can be an attention getting move.
I often like to experiment with saturation on these extra type parts. Throwing them through a Decapitator or similar plugin can add some dirt and additional harmonics to give these some cutting power and attitude.
Don’t get caught in the trap of making all these kind of parts in stereo. Keyboard patches are pretty much always in stereo. Often you can narrow the panning or just make it mono. If you were hearing a part in person live and it was farther away from you it would sound mono anyway. This with a bit of reverb can help reinforce the illusion of depth in your mix as opposed to width.
Until next time…
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