Mixing Guitars 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 balancing and automation moves. Today let’s get into guitars and balancing them with the bass.
For an even more depth look into mixing guitars pick up a copy of my course The Sound Visualization Method.
Where I like to start with guitar parts is listening to all the guitar parts and organizing them so they are layed out chronologically on the timeline. So top tracks are the first guitars that are heard and as a different part appears it is next.
If the tone is not changing on the main rhythm guitars I will keep those on the same tracks. If for example, the tone changes during the verses I will probably create new tracks for just those sections.
This way I can use different eq, compression, etc. on the different tones. It will also allow me to easily change the volume of just the verses for example.
Sometimes when I mix projects there will be tons of guitar tracks that all combine up playing one part. Often this is not necessary to get a big tone. In fact it can make things kind of mushy.
Generally I can make rhythm guitars sound plenty big by just panning them hard right and left and getting them to work as a team with the bass with eq moves. A lot of people stack up tracks to try to make things sound bigger. On paper this sounds like a great idea. But, most of the time to me this is a mistake. There are exceptions of course.
Guitars are really easy to screw up if start going overboard with eq. So tread very lightly.
For the most part I am going to be high pass filtering off some low end to make way for the kick and bass. You still want to hear the low end of the guitar, but most of your consistent low end power will be coming from the bass.
I suggest rolling off just the subs to begin with and once you get the kick and bass in with the guitars experiment with how much you can roll off without it killing the tone. It depends on tuning of the guitars but I’m usually rolling off in the neighborhood of 100-150 hz.
I will also roll off some highs with a low pass filter. This is to make space for the cymbals. Try the 8-10K range.
It’s at this point when I bring up the bass and listen alongside the guitars. If you haven’t done this a lot the blend of these two instruments is something I suggest listening to soloed so you can really hear how they interact frequency wise.
What I like to do is give each of the instruments their own “zones” that they are a little more emphasized in. So for example if I see on my spectrum analyzer that a lot of the kick drum’s energy is at 80 hz I may boost the bass at 100 hz. This will bring out the clarity of each.
I do the same with guitars and bass. If you do an eq boost on the bass and move it around you will find frequency ranges where it sounds better. These are the areas to emphasize with boosts.
Where they don’t sound good at all is where you want to be cutting a bit. Switch over to guitar and try boosting where you cut on the bass. If it sounds good you just found a good way for them to coexist in that frequency range.
The goal here is to get drums, bass and guitar sitting together where you can hear everything being played from each instrument clearly. If any of the players listened to your mix they would think their instrument is the loudest.
Until next time…
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