Welcome to Sage Audio. Today we’re covering How to Make a Clean Mix
But first, if you have a mix that you need mastered send it to us at SageAudio.com
to receive a free mastered sample of it.
Check out the Low Mids
Although this seems a bit basic, take a serious look and listen to your low-mids if your mix
isn’t sounding clean. Odds are you have multiple instruments competing for limited
space in the low-frequency range, resulting in clashing and a muddy unbalanced sound.
The first step would be to check out your kick and
bass and attenuate areas that overlap - the move on to guitars and vocals.
Pick Saturation Types Carefully
If after equalizing your low mids you still have a muddy sound, take a look at which saturation
types you’re using - if you’re using a warm tube of transistor option, this may
be causing the issue. Since these create a strong second-order harmonic, this may create muddiness.
Instead, try tape or clean tube settings, or maybe an exciter, to create higher-order harmonics.
Kick and Bass Ducking
Again, kick and bass instrumentation overlap can be a problem - you can use an external side chain
setting to remedy this. Place a compressor on your bass track, and side-chain the kick - this
way whenever the kick hits the bass track is attenuated, carving out more room for both.
Try this in combination with other tips listed here for a clean low-frequency range.
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Try Harmonic-Based Equalization
Disharmonious notes can make your mix sound less clean - to fix this find the key of your mix
and subtly amplify in keynotes. For example,
if my mix is in the key of D major, I can boost all D notes with a preset we created.
This makes the fundamental and harmonics of the mix stick out a little more.
Gate Before
Low-Level Compression
Low-level compression is great but it can bring up unwanted noise - since it amplifies from the
noise floor up in most plugins. To fix this, first use a gate on the instrument you want to
upward compression, to attenuate the signal whenever it falls below a certain level.
After the gate, insert your low-level compressor to achieve the effect
without unwanted additional noise.
Balance Dynamics with Clip Gain
I’ve mentioned this a couple of times before but if your mix isn’t sounding clean,
do some much-needed edited via clip gain. For example, if your vocal’s dynamics are inconsistent
don’t compress heavily to make it all uniform - use clip gain and create a consistent performance.
Then introduce your processing. Since clip gain comes before all processing,
it's a great tool for establishing dynamic control.
Ensure In-Time Effects
In time effects can take a mix that sounds cacophonous and turn it into one that sounds
ordered and controlled. For example, if my BPM is 120 and my reverb time is say 620ms,
this length isn’t a note - 500ms is a quarter note, 1000ms is a half note.
But 620ms doesn’t fit. To find note-based times for your reverb, delay,
or even your compression, take 60000 and divide it by your BPM.
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Distort Mid, Amplify Side
This one may be more of a preference on my part, but I’ve noticed if I distort the
image’s mids but keep the sides clean, this creates a louder, but cleaner sounding mix.
Distortion on the sides seems to have too great of an impact on the image’s timbre.
Instead, I’ll just boost these with an EQ or other mid-side processor.
Avoid Delay-Based Stereo Imagers
I’ve stated this before, but I wanted to show it with some metering in this
example - in short, delay-based stereo images will affect your image’s phase
significantly. Mid-side processing lets you achieve a wider image
without excessive changes to your image’s phase, establishing a wider but in-phase signal.
With a correlation meter, we can observe our original signal,
our signal after delay-based imaging, and our signal after mid-side imaging.
Notice how the correlation meter is similar to the original and mid-size
but varies significantly when using the delay-based imager.
If you have a mix that you need mastered send it to us at SageAudio.com
to receive a free mastered sample of it.
Also, Join the channel for exclusive advanced
content, and additional future perks - thanks for watching!