In this video, I'll be talking about several different ways of using a reference track
as a comparison whenever you're trying to finish up one of your own mixes.
The basic idea of a reference track is you're gonna take your final mix and compare that
to something that you consider to be a reference or a standard that's a high quality mix and
recording in a particular style of music that you're working on. Now, sometimes when you
listen to your mix compared to the reference right off the bat you're gonna notice some
things that you need to change or improve. In my experience though, a lot of times when
I compare my entire mix to the entire mix of my reference, it's very difficult to pinpoint
and focus on the exact areas I need to fix and improve. For this reason, my suggestion
is to use the tools that are at your disposal inside of your digital audio workstation to
break down the reference track and focus on several different areas and answer some questions
about how did the engineer decide to place and balance all the different instruments.
One thing that you can use is a multiband processor. In this case I'm using the Waves
C6. I'm not actually gonna use it for any kind of compression, what I'm gonna do is
use it to break up the signal into a couple different important frequency regions. So
let me go ahead and play you back a reference track and show you how I'm gonna use it.
[reference track mix]
So this is kinda just a pop/rock song. You've got heavy drums, heavy guitar and bass and
vocals coming in. One important question to ask is, well, how are my instruments balanced
in the really low frequency region of my mix. So let me crank this up a little bit, you
might need to listen on headphones or with a subwoofer, and we'll just focus on this
low frequency region below 75 Hz.
[reference track under 75 Hz]
So a question to ask is what instruments are down here, how are they balanced. In this
mix I hear a lot of the bass guitar but I don't hear a lot of the kick drum. What that
might tell me is I need to scoop out a little of my kick drum and let the bass guitar occupy
a lot of that low frequency region. Another thing to notice is what instruments are not
in this frequency region. So you don't hear any of the guitars, they've used a high pass
filter above this frequency region to get rid of all that really low muddy information
in the guitars. So that's something to think about, you know, what instruments are not
in these different frequency regions for what you need to take out and information you can
remove of these different instruments.
So let's then listen to the low-mids. This is an important frequency region to listen
to the balance between things like the vocals and the guitars.
[reference track + midrange vocals and guitars]
So here I'm focusing on, well, just in my low mids, how do my vocals compare to all
the other sounds. You know, do I need to boost my vocals on my actual mix that I'm working
on because on the reference track the vocals are a particular level compared to everything
else.
Same thing with the upper-mids. Listen to how things like the drums and the guitars
are balanced. How much do the vocals stick out. And finally then just listen to the high
frequency region. How do the guitars compare to things like the cymbals. As far as those
really high parts, you know, how is the engineer deciding to maybe shave off some of the high
end of my vocals or the guitars, make space for kind of the excitement in the cymbals.
And that kind of thing. Without trying to make things too harsh. So that's a good way
to compare these different frequency regions.
Also, the good thing about C6, is you can go in and sweep across the spectrum and listen
in these different frequency regions.
[reference mix + Waves C6 sweeping]
So if you just want to focus on things around 140 Hz or. Now if you don't have Waves C6,
another example that you can use or another plugin that you can use, just a tool, is a
basic you know, stock EQ plugin. So, in this case I'm using the low pass and high pass
filters with a 24 dB octave. And focus on different frequency regions: my low mids,
upper mids. So even if you don't have a multi-band processor like C6, there's other tools that
you can use that spectrally break down these full mixes.
Last thing I'll talk about then is using a plugin that has mid-side processing. Let me
switch to this last example. And the idea here is to use these kind of tools to take
out the information that's not in the center and take out the information that's not in
the sides, and listen for, alright, where is the engineer actually placing these instruments.
Is there, you know, guitars all the way out wide but do they show up a little bit in the
center. And think about how you want to pan things in your mix.
[reference mix + Waves Center mid-side processing]
So you got the information in the center. But you hear there's a lot of bass, a lot
of snare, vocals. Just listen to what's on the sides. Sounds like there's still some
vocals there but it's probably a lot of reverb and stereo effects that are being added to
it. So those are just a couple different ways that you can separate the information in a
mix whether it's breaking down the frequency regions of your mix or focusing on the stereo
field and thinking about where you want to place these different parts of your mix as
a way of, you know, matching your final mix to what's there in a reference.