today we are going to be talking about one little thing and its a very little thing,
it's a very simple thing.
One little thing you can do to make your mixes cleaner, to get rid of that muddy washed out
sound, to get more bass and more impact from your bass instruments or elements in your
mix.
And it is something that is easily overlooked.
So let's jump right into this, it's about the idea that less is more.
And I know that sounds confusing at first but trust me, I've trained artists all over
the world for many years and many of them are quite resistant at first to this idea.
Especially those who produce electronic or bass heavy types of music.
Because more equals more right ? Well actually no and it really just comes
down to the idea that there is only one frequency range at the end of the day for your music,
there may be one hundred different tracks in your project and each one is meticulously
handled, each one sounds great on their own, but unfortunately they all need to play nicely
together, they all need a space in the mix.
And we're going to cover how to make that possible or a bit easier, anyway, through
one proactive measure that you can apply to just about every single sound in your mix.
And of course the end game here, the end goal is to create more room, just in general in
your mix of course, but for those bass heavy elements, that's what people really want these
days.
So we're going to show you how to do that.
We're going to use, instead of, how a lot of other people try to approach this when
explaining this concept is they'll take a bunch of sounds, you know, basically a full
mix and they'll let you listen to how those bass elements will sound, how the song itself
sounds overall and they'll start making adjustments and then they'll let you listen to it again
at the end and you can form your own opinion about it at that point but what I'm going
to do is show you with just one sound, one very common sound, how this theory actually
works.
Because without that I feel like there's just too much room for questions that could be
answered very easily by just focusing on one thing.
So here we go.
We going to look at rain, this sound of rain.
And this is a pretty common type of field recording, found sound, environmental sound
that you hear in music, commercials, movies, television shows, it's everywhere, it's everywhere
around us so lets listen to this for just one second.
The very first thing that should jump out at you at this point is the environmental
noise, if it doesn't don't worry, you're not alone, the longer you train your ears, the
more attune they will be to these frequencies and where these frequencies actually lie across
the spectrum.
Ok, that environmental noise that you're hearing is not a high frequency sound.
Let's listen to it again.
Now perhaps you don't have very well trained ears or maybe you have perfectly trained ears,
either way, the second time listening to this, you probably heard a couple more raindrops
than the first time, your ears slowly become acclamated to the environmental noise and
that is why it is really important to deal with this issue pro-actively.
And its not just environmental noise, its unnecessary frequency activity, is really
what it is.
That's really what it comes down to.
There's a reason why something like birdsong stands out to us when we're walking around
out in the world and that's because those are high frequency sounds and they pretty
much stand on their own.
The rest of the sound that we're hearing that we don't even acknowledge is just kind of
the smear of low frequency noise and when you capture a sound recording outside all
of that frequency information is recorded and now you have to deal with it.
The same exact thing is true with any instrument or sound that you might be using in your mix.
Ok so the first part of less is more is getting yourself in to the habit of making subtractive
decisions before you make additive decisions, in other words instead of bumping up the bass
frequencies on a bass instrument, what we should be doing is attenuating or decreasing
or removing completely those low end frequencies from everything but those bass instruments,
ok so its in addition to subtraction, so less actually is more, its just that you need to
get through the entire concept before you can start to trust or believe in it.
So let's jsut open up an EQ, and we'll just leave this sound looping here till we get
started and I'm going to slowly shape this sound by removing frequencies that are incredibly
unnecessary and we won't complete this today, we won't actually complete this sound, we're
not after isolating just individual raindrops or anything, this is simply a lesson in less
is more and how to get your mixes very clean, ok ? So the key to making this happen is the
high pass filter.
It's also called a low cut filter by some folks.
And its not just the high pass filter that's important here but the high pass filter is
going to be your reminder to approach things with a subtractive mindset before you begin
adding, ok ? So we'll just go ahead and we'll start playing our sound here and turn on our
analyzer and the very first thing you'll notice is, if this is a recording of rain, why in
the world is all of this stuff down here in the low end.
So we'll just go ahead and we'll turn on our low cut or our high pass and we'll start to
roll this off.
Now this is going to seem pretty extreme at first but your ears will aclimate ok ? you
should begin hearing a difference pretty soon here.
Those who have less trained ears will be closer to 200 before hearing the first significant
change, ok and we'll turn this off and you should be able to perceive a difference and
we're going to continue to roll this up and you'll see that right around here is around
where all of this noise activity stops so what we're going to do is virtually hold to
down there and then we're going to change our curve.
And we're going to work from left to right here, that's about right.
So these are pretty significant changes in each one of them, individually, it may not
seem like it but add them all up at the end of the day it makes a very big difference.
You don;t want to take all the environmental noise out, you just want to remove a fair
bit so everyone tuning into this can hear exactly what we're doing, can hear the changes.
So it's a constant balance of reduction and then finding the right bandwidth that's appropriate
for your sound and usually in environmental recordings like this and often times any kind
of synthesized sound, almost all sounds have really nasty shrill reasonant peaks hidden
in that sound somewhere so we'll just use this bandwidth quickly and we'll boost this
up a bit and you should be able to hear something, just move across this, we'll find it, there's
almost always at least one, usually several sounds.
Now we'll just go ahead and make this even more narrow.
This is the best way to find, you can kinda hear, you can hear it, hear this resonance.
Ok you know what, it may not get any worse than this, just going to back that out a little
bit.
Ok, so, this is another key to a clean mix, is these things will pop out more, though
they'll be more noticeable as you take away low end so often times you might need to make
a pretty surgical removal of noise or resonance up here in the higher frequencies even though
the end goal is to clear up the bass elements of these lower frequencies and then we might
even just kind of give a small bump up here to a high end, to get those crispy little
raindrops shining through.
Ok so your ears should have aclimated by now and this sounds like a pretty decent recording
of rain outside.
Now we can remove more sound, more noise that's unnecessary, let's go ahead and turn this
eq off all at once and you can be judge just how much bass frequency, low end frequency
presence there was in this recording that really didn't need to be in there, Here we
go.
And again with the EQ.
Ok you can actually here the sound of the rain kind of washed out in the background
as it falls all over the place.
And you can hear those tiny little raindrops up front, couldn't really hear that before.
Now why do we choose this sound and how is this supposed to translate into more bass
in your projects ? Just imagine, and after this lesson you won't
have to imagine, you can go find out for yourself, you can listen to any sound you like and prove
it for yourself.
Just imagine if almost, one hundred percent, of the sounds that you use in your music projects
are not bass instruments, have bass frequencies, that means, they have activity in these lower
frequency ranges, in the same exact places where your bass instruments or your bass elements,
are most active, then every other sound should have those frequencies removed to make, or
at least attenuate it a bit, to make room for those bass instruments to really pop and
if you don't, that's where the conflicts start and that's where muddiness starts to occur.
The same things happen in these mid range areas especially in music with multiple stringed
instruments and vocals happening at the same time right around this five hundred mark or
so, is a pretty typical culpurit, bass music with a lot of kick and snare and several layered
synths as well as heavy bass instruments you're usually going to find some muddiness down
around two fifty area or so as well.
Now those can be pretty tricky because you know obviously there are some drum sounds
around two fifty that that's the main focal for a lot of those sounds.
Same is true with vocals around five hundred so you know just apply that same thought to
like a bass guitar or a bass synth, you know, if that's really rocking around here, around
seventy five hertz or a hundred hertz something like that then you certainly don't want anything
else in your mix touching those areas, just like you want to roll off everything, you
know, below fifty or maybe sixty hertz, just to protect this area that you can then place
sub bass into, that you can then control and add some serious sonic impact to your mix.
but that's it.
I know it's a bit of a lengthy explanation but hopefully this super simplified example
of just what environmental noise exists around us at all times and that that can be correlated
or translated into any sound that you encounter there is going to some frequency activity
that is simply not necessary, its not essential to that sound and you want to remove as much
of that as possible, without altering the sound itself much at all, if at all, you can
still make a ton of room for the other sounds in your mix, so that's it.
One simple step, apply this to every single sound in your mix, even some of your bass
elements, some of your bass sounds will need some of this high pass filtering.
And here's why, bass frequencies, those low frequencies, the lower the frequency is, the
harder it is to move those frequencies through the air, the more energy it takes to move
them through the air, so it makes sense that if we cut those unnecessary frequencies out
of all the other instruments, that bass is going to come flying out of those speakers
as soon as it hits, ok , that one bass instrument that's really, you know, that focal point
you want, that's what's going to happen.
Alright so again, that's it, high pass filter, it's that simple, just remember high pass
filter.
Also called a low cut filter and it's the far left on your EQ.
Hope this helps, hope you enjoy some cleaner mixes and some easier mixing sessions from
here on out.
thanks again for stopping by and we will see you again soon.
Cheers.