A beat maker has many responsibilities to get a finished product. When you’re like me and you don’t have a full time on staff mixing engineer at your disposal, one of the most important things you need to do is mix down your song. Mixing is the act of taking all your musical elements and placing them in a virtual space for your listener.
A well mixed song has some common properties about it. A song should have a wide range of frequencies represented and a decent mount of width and depth to sounds full and complete.
There are a couple of ways of fixing problems with the mix. In this article I’m going to talk about why it’s important to approach mixing in 3 dimensions.
In everyday life, the three dimensions you are most aware of is space and direction. Up/Down, Forward/Back and Left/Right are your 3 dimensions.
When mixing music, it’s the same except you are dealing with perception of sound. For example, a loud sound will be perceived to be more forward than a softer sound. So here’s what we can do to manipulate sound in 3 dimensions:
Forward/Back
The obvious controller here is volume. Louder means closer to the listener and softer volume means farther from the listener. The not so obvious controller is reverb. Reverb can be used to help make a sound appear farther back without as much reduction in volume. Think of a large room say a gym. Next you someone dribbles a basketball it sounds loud and crisp. Meanwhile someone at the far end of the gym also bounces a basketball. You hear the ball bounce at a lower volume and you hear the “reverberation” (or echoes) off the walls. Even if you couldn’t see the person dribbling across the gym, your brain would put two and two together and tell you it’s probably not that close. The downside to reverb is that the effect could add some “muddiness” and make the instrument less clear.
Left/Right
This one is simple to explain. It’s panning or balance of an instrument. In other words, you make an instrument play louder on the left stereo speaker and it sounds as though the person playing it is standing to your left. Easy right? Keeping on our basketball example from above, we can tell if the person is to our left our right when we hear the ball bouncing because the way we hear sound is in “stereo”. That is to say we have two ears and one ear will hear a louder sound than the other.
Up/Down
This one is easy to understand if you know about tones and pitch. When you play keys to the far right of a piano, for example, the sound of them are higher in pitch then the ones to the left. The far left piano keys are then much lower in pitch than the ones to the right. Almost all instruments occupy what we call a “register” which is a common range of pitch/tone that the instrument is known for. A flute occupies a higher register than a bass guitar for example. Knowing this and using our ears, we can then determine roughly where an instrument lives in the registers. Some instruments may occupy the same register and need to manipulated to sound good together.
Controlling your Dimensions.
Now here is the part you’ll need to really work on with your own mixes. Learn to identify the instruments that clash and use one or more of the dimensions to correct it.
Say you have a electric guitar and a vocal part. The guitar and vocals are often in the same or overlapping registers, so what do you do? Here are some examples:
- You can make the guitar lower in volume (Forward/Back).
- Maybe you can pan the guitar to one side (Left/Right).
- You can use some EQ to carve out the frequencies that might be causing the problem thereby changing the tone (Up/Down).
You don’t have to use every method, but generally you want to identify which of the clashing objects is the most important and concentrate on adjusting the other ones. If you had two competing guitars and a vocal, maybe you pan one guitar left, the other right and leave the vocals in the middle. Experiment and get creative.
Final Note
Beat Makers spent a lot of time picking out sounds and samples and we need to be aware of the big picture. Sometimes a killer sound has to be sacrificed for the sae of the overall mix. I have taken great string sections out of some of my songs just because they did not go well with the vocals. Be aware of this and be flexible enough to do this when it is required. And remember to have fun and don’t be afraid to experiment and break the rules sometimes.
Finally, if you want to learn a lot more about mixing, I highly recommend the following book called The Art of Mixing: A Visual Guide to Recording, Engineering, and Production by David Gibson
