When you are making a song, there are three basic stages that you must go through: Tracking, Mixing, and Mastering. What I'll be focusing on in this post is Mixing, but I'm going to give you guys a basic idea of all the three before I begin for real. I'll try as much as I can to explain it in layman's terms.
Tracking is essentially the recording of your instruments and vocals as individual tracks. Each bit is recorded individually in separate files. Meaning there'd be different files for lead guitar, drums, bass, etc. Once all desired instruments have been recorded and placed at their specific times the mixing process begins.
Mastering, once you know about it, might sound quite similar to mixing. And that's because it actually is. In fact, nowadays the two cross over each other so much and you won't realize where one ends and the other begins. But the basic difference is that mastering has a broader view to your music. It is done to all your songs in relation to each other, such that on your final album, everything sounds as good as it can be. Mastering will require you to adjust the dynamic ranges (volume levels) of your songs so that your tracks sound balanced and not erratic. Also, you will generally try and balance your tone with respect to the other songs, but again it's a rule of thumb, and you should do whatever you feel sounds good to you.
What this means is that if all the songs on an album have a crunchy, compressed distortion on the guitars, you'll want to avoid having one of the songs suddenly having brighter, heavier overdrive instead, because that would ring out and sound odd. Albums tend to have a specific 'sound' to them. For example, the album I Love You.(the one with Sweater Weather & Afraid) by The Neighborhood has a very wide atmospheric feel to it whereas Lady Gaga's 2009 album The Fame Monster (which has Poker Face and Bad Romance in it) has a sharper, more distorted synth-heavy, punchier feel to it.
Go listen to these two songs and you'll get what I'm talking about. Go on, I'll wait.
Lady Gaga - Poker Face
The Neighbourhood - Sweater Weather
Next time you listen to an album, try and gauge it's 'sound'. Also, listen to different genres and sub genres of music and you'll see that there's a particular sound to each of them as well. And that evolves through time. Mainstream rock, for example, had a very different soundscape in the 80's in comparison to the 90's. And by the time the 2000's came along, it had changed again.
The reasons for these changes vary widely and serves as a very interesting lesson about how politics, economics and world affairs contribute to the mentality of a generation. And that mentality is always brought out in its music very strongly. But that is a story for another time.
Now, we get to the actual topic.
Mixing.
Mixing basically involves using all those instrument and vocals tracks that you recorded, playing around with their levels, frequency ranges and editing them so that your final product sounds like a total bop. There's a lot that you can do here, so much that you might not even recognize your original tracks after you've dumped a bunch of effects on them. But that's not the objective. You want to enhance the overall output that you're getting, and you can do that in a couple of ways.
If you're going to be playing around with your levels, there are three very common things that you will end up using.
1. Compressors: this tool takes a track, and basically tapers off all the signals that are above a certain decibel level. In layman's terms, it controls your loudness. It does it with a set ratio. For example, if you have a 6:1 ratio on your compressor and if the signal you send through it goes 6 dB above the threshold you have set, that bit gets modified so that it is now playing just 1 dB over the threshold limit.
So if the the threshold you have set is 125 dB, and your signal is going up to 137 dB, those parts will be now played at 127 dB instead. The opposite also occurs, where lower levels will be increased if they go below a threshold. That process is called expansion. The effect of using the both of them is to give a more rounded and balanced sound. It fattens the tone as well, making your output seem fuller than it is.
2. Panning: Only possible in multi channel mixes, this tool is used to shift the placement of a track. It does this by differing the levels on either side if it's being in stereo format. The effect of this to your ears will be to make it seem like the tracks are are coming to you from different directions.
In my opinion it is an essential element to a song because it adds a sense of space to it.
Although, drums and bass are better left to the center (you might pan each drum slightly to simulate the effect of the drummer traveling around the kit, but the bass, snare and hi hats are what I'm mainly referring to here), because they provide the basic structure to your song and it's what the melody is built around.
If you think of your entire song as a tree, the drums and bass would be the trunk, and a tree with a trunk bent to the right or left would look weird, right? It's the same with music. But then again, it is dependent on the effect you want your song to have on the listener. It's not like there aren't song with drums/percussion or bass panned, and those songs are just as great, but it's not very common.
3. Faders: The most basic tool of them all, this plays with the general volume of your specific track. So you could make one instrument slightly softer than the others if you wanted to. Maybe the little guitar lick before the beginning of the chorus, or the crash cymbal at the beginning of the bridge that seems a bit too loud. Controlling the levels of the different tracks in your song will allow you to accentuate the sounds you want to be highlighted. Although a fairly simple process, it's effects are profound to the overall feel of the song.
Now we switch to frequencies. Just a small reminder for those of you who don't remember, frequency is the measure of waves per unit time, but you don't really need to know that. Just remember that all sound is made up of frequencies and low frequencies represent deeper sounds while high frequencies represent higher sounds.
1. EQ: With an EQ you can change the the levels of the different frequencies that a track will play. Visualize a bar graph and each bar is assigned a particular frequency. You can raise or lower the levels of each, and they will accordingly play differently. This graph you can divide into three generalized parts: lows, mids and highs.
You can see a live example of it too, open your music player on the phone, and go to your sound settings. There will ideally be an EQ or equalizer option. There will also be set presets for certain genres of music. Like jazz and RnB music has a wider and warmer soundscape and will most probably have a sort of v shaped EQ sound signature, with higher lows and highs than mids. Whereas metal music is harsher and requires higher mids.
Change up the presets while on the same song and see how they affect the way the song sounds, and then finally you can do some final touches and make a sound signature that sounds best to you. Correcting EQ is my favorite part of mixing, and I spend a lot of time playing with it even while listening to music to see if I can make a song sound as good as it can be to me. Check it out, it's addicting.
Now EQ, in my opinion should always be done first with the track in mind and what sounds good on it, and then again in relation with all the other tracks in mind. There's a reason for this.
You'll find out that a lot of the times you'll have to dumb down out the good parts of a track so that the whole collection of tracks sound cohesive. For example, a lead guitar solo might sound rad af with the mids pushed up way high (this gives any sound a punchier, in your face feel because it makes the sound harsher to the ears), but to make it fit in with all the backing instruments, you may have to lower the mids and maybe bring up the low ends a bit so that it resonates well.
EQ is a topic that has a whole lot more intricacies, but if I address them here it'll take several years. I'll leave it for a later post.
2. Filters: A filter does exactly what you think it does. It only lets certain frequencies pass. This is very useful when you're actually recording things. Like with mics. Say you've got the drums, right? The drums are a complex thing, because it's basically a hodgepodge of different instruments that when played properly together, sound pretty frickin cool. But each sound from the drum set is unique, from a low, wobbly, booming sound, to a hard, crashing, metallic sound and so they should be captured with their own mics because you just cant get everything the way it should sound with a single mic. Oh wait no, I'm drifting. I'll talk about drum miking some other time.
So yeah, filters. Filters can also be applied in such a way that only a certain set of frequencies (called a band) is affected. This means that if you've got a recorded sound and it's dirty, in the sense that there's recorded noise that isn't part of what you actually need, you can apply a band filter to it to clean it out.
For example, you could put a high pass filter (it will allow only high channels to play) over a hi hat channel to make it sound crisper and cleaner (hi hats are that tssk tssk thing that plays along with the bass and snare in a drum beat).
A pair of hi hat cymbals
You can sort of experience this phenomenon yourself. Say the sound 'tshhk' out loud. This is your raw source signal, okay? Now after a high pass filter that same sound would play out as 'tssk'. You see how the lower sounds aren't as pronounced? Yeah thats exactly how it works. If you want the opposite and want the high stuff to be dumbed down, a low pass filter can be used.
Finally, we've got time altering effects. The most basic and most important tool here is the Reverb. And that's what I'll be talking about here.
So when you're listening to a sound, you don't just hear it from its source. There's also all the hundreds of reflected sound waves that have hit the surfaces around the source and come back to you. In normal circumstances you don't realize the difference between the separate sounds because there are too many obstructions for a sound wave to travel a distance that is long enough to resound at a different time to that of the source. For example, in a room with a whole lot of furniture and other stuff you'll never get that echoing feeling. But in the same room without any furniture, you'll get it. This is because there are no random obstructions to throw off or absorb the sound waves. This effect is essentially what reverb is all about.
It involves the echoes of the sounds that are already being played. Without it your music will sound very dry and barren. Reverb changes according to the effect you want on your sound and you can control it by altering the time delay between the 'reflections' of the sound waves. Like if you want to emulate the effect of your sound being played in a large hall, there would be lots of reflections and echoes all at differing times. Hence, there would be a lot of echo-iness. Whereas for a small room, there would be little to no reverb and the sound would be crisper and sharper.
So yeahhhhhh...
These three general processes are what you use to work on a song and make it sound the way you want. I've just touched upon them and there's still a lot more to be said about each aspect. I shall delve deeper into them in future posts.
I wrote this piece over the past three days and I'd be lying to myself if I said I didn't enjoy it way more than what I write usually. I only hope you did too.
In writing this I've realized there's a lot that I'd love to talk about when it comes to music. So I think for the next year I'm going to focus a bit more on this series than I was before. Let's see where we go, eh?
Anyhow, this being the last post for the year, I'd like to thank all of you who read my random madness on Random Madness in 2019.
I love each and every one of you. <3 <3 <3
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