Three Tips for Professional Mixing

So you got seven tracks or so, all of which line up correctly, but it still sounds like it was recorded in your basement. It was, but you don't want anyone to know that. To become a professional mixer takes years of practice, but with these three quick tips, you can make all of your mixes just a little more professional.

1. Equalize

Nothing makes a track muddy like having to compete with other tracks with similar frequencies. At this point, the listener has trouble distinguishing the two tracks and they blend into each other, hence the muddiness. Try to put each track in its own frequency range, so that you will have as little interference as possible between tracks. It helps to know the frequency range of each track. If you have yet to understand the concept behind a fast fourier transform, you can Google the frequency range of your particular instrument. For example, a guitar in standard tuning has a frequency range of about 82 - 1319Hz. A bass guitar has a range of about 41 - 198Hz. If your bass is playing in the mid to upper range, and the guitar is playing straight power chords, you might have some conflict. Run a high-pass filter on the guitar with a cutoff of 200Hz and the clarity of the bass will improve dramatically.

2. Pan

But say you have two blatantly conflicting tracks, for example a tenor vocal track (130 - 523Hz) and a guitar in medium range (300 - 700Hz). How can you separate these tracks without losing one completely? Fortunately, modern convention has given us two speakers to work with. The history of stereo is definitely worth checking out. Anyway, panning is a very effective way of separating two tracks. You can offset a sound completely to the right, or completely to the left, but keep in mind that professional mixers rarely pan more than 40% in either direction. This subtlety keeps the track from sounding over-produced. Just don't pan bass sounds. Bass sounds are physically non-directional, so all panning will do is weaken the sound.

3. Compress

Are your tracks shy? Do they clip every time you try to get them to speak up? Dynamic Range Compression is the answer to all your problems. Essentially, what it does is to lower the volume of the loudest sounds, so that, after a normalization to -3Db, the quiet parts will be much louder. Compression dramatically improves track quality and makes volume mixing a breeze. I usually compress every track in every recording that I make. Some compressors are better than others. For example, the built-in compressor in Audacity is trash. It never does what you expect it to do, and often results in degraded signal quality. The one I use is an Audacity plugin called the Dyson Compressor, which I would highly recommend.



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