Question on Mixing Heavy Rhythms and the stereo spectrum

[illimmigrant]

Hello all! I had been a member a long time ago, and finally joined back.
I wanted to know what you guys listen for, what you do, and what you use in order to create open sounding mixes where your rhythm guitars sound like they're pushed far out to the sides and the center of the spectrum left clear for kick, snare, and bass to punch right through in near perfect isolation. You can check my mix tests on the link in my signature.
I currently use an AxeFx II for guitars and bass into Cubase. On the more recent mixes I use two different rhythm tones hard panned Left and right. I High and Low pass guitars, with minor eq cuts around 3.5kH, maybe 800ish Hz and 250ish Hz to sit better in the mix. Multiband compress the low end so the palm mutes don't trigger my buss compressor when necessary. Rhythm bus goes into Slate VTM. I monitor through Adam A7x's in a completely untreated bedroom

So, let's share some tips and tricks and get these mixes to open up wide! I don't like that I can't get the guitars out wide, but maybe I need to look somewhere else.

All comments appreciated.

Thanks!

Carlos.

 

[bouldersoundguy]

Record the guitar part twice and pan those wide. That method is generally preferred over using a single guitar part processed differently.

 

[illimmigrant]

Yep. I already do that.

 

[DM60]

To add to the above comment. If you record twice and then pan, you get a better "fatter" sound. If you are not going to do this, then you can add a chorus or an ADT effect or something like that. But the recording it twice really does add a nice touch to the sound.

 

[miroslav]

To add to the above comment. If you record twice and then pan, you get a better "fatter" sound. If you are not going to do this, then you can add a chorus or an ADT effect or something like that. But the recording it twice really does add a nice touch to the sound.

I was just tracking some rhythm guitars over the weekend...did a pair of electric rhythm guitar tracks, and then doubled it with a pair of acoustic guitar tracks. Both panned hard L/R, and they sound good together, a nice broad sound with the combination of electric and acoustic guitars....though I may split the panning a bit differently between the electrics and acoustics when it's time to mix, maybe have one of the pairs not quite full L/R...not sure at this time.

Anyway...I recently got the Waves Abbey Road Reel ADT plug...which sounds great, and would be the best option in lieu of actually tracking guitars twice. I've not yet used it in mix situation, but it sounded really good when I messed around with it.

 

[Ripthorn]

One technique that I keep coming back to is I record it twice. Then I clone each of those, so I have four tracks. One copy of each is panned hard left and right, but with the levels adjusted down on opposing sides, meaning guitar 1 is higher on the right than on the left and guitar 2 is the opposite. Then I put a little delay on the side that is weaker, but just a tiny bit. Helps to provide a fuller image. As for clarity, eq'ing the two different parts differently certainly helps. Clarity is still a struggle for me, so I don't know just how much help I can offer there.

 

[ashcat_lt]

I don't ever do this, but I'm gonna open my fat mouth anyway.

I tend to think that just panning alone can't really accomplish the goal as stated. If you really want the center instruments (kick, snare...) to be in "almost complete isolation", then you need to arrange, choose sounds, and eventually probably EQ a bit to get them that space. Frequency spectrum-wise, double tracking and hard panning is exactly the same as running one guitar right up the middle. Even if you've EQd them to be different, they still usually add up to one guitar's worth of spray across the harmonic spectrum, and you need to find ways to get the kick and snare to speak through that.

This is one of the reasons that a lot of people talk about starting a mix in mono. Panning can give you a false sense of space right off the bat. If you first make sure that the kick and snare have space of their own in mono, then pan things out, I think you might get where you're trying to go faster.

 

[illimmigrant]

Thank you all for the input.
As a couple of you have already pointed out, I do track each side independently. I do not copy the same take and pan. All that does is add up to the center, which I what I'm trying to avoid. Quad tracking, or having 4 takes of the same part is cool for sludgier, chordier sounding bits where you want density, but it doesn't really work on tighter rhythm parts.
What I notice in my mixes vs pro mixes on this subject, is that while I will have two takes panned hard left an hard right, they won't sound nearly as wide as in a pro mix. By the same token, the center instruments like snare, kick and bass, will seem more isolated in a pro mix than on my better mixes. Almost like there's a barrier in the center pushing the main rhythm guitars out wide. Do you think it's just a matter of better eq decisions?

 

[Xcaliber]

To add onto the double tracking idea in addition to recording a "left" and a "right" track try changing something between the two. Change the guitar, the amp, the pickups, whatever. Someone explained it to me once like this: it's not having two tracks specifically that makes it sound more full, but the subtle differences in the two tracks that cause that great full sound. I thought that was a great way to describe why double tracking really works and why just duplicating a track and panning them doesn't give the same effect.

 

[Farview]

It helps if the guitar sound is crunchier instead of fuzzier. That leaves 'space' for everything else to be.

I normally use the same tone, performed twice and panned hard away from each other. If you get the tone right, you don't need much other processing.

If you are recording by miking a cabinet, go for a darker sound when recording, then add a high shelf at 6-8k during the mix. ( as much as necessary). A bright tone will distort the speakers differently than a dark one. The harshness that sometimes happens in the 3-5k range can be the speaker breakup. Having a darker sound will not make the speakrrs do that, so when you add the high shelf, it just sounds smooth and open instead of pinched and harsh.

Ymmv

 

[DM60]

Anyway...I recently got the Waves Abbey Road Reel ADT plug...which sounds great, and would be the best option in lieu of actually tracking guitars twice. I've not yet used it in mix situation, but it sounded really good when I messed around with it.

I have a ADT plugin, it was free and does a nice job (I had to do research on it to see what the hell it was, interesting how this all came about, thanks once again to The Beetles). I am sure the plug in you are using is much better and I think probably a better approach than just plain copy, but I could see the track copy being useful as well in situations.

 

[miroslav]

Do you think it's just a matter of better eq decisions?

Maybe a bit....but I would say it's in the mastering.
Possibly the use of some Mid/Side processing....which opens the door to what you are refering to.

 

[miroslav]

I have a ADT plugin, it was free and does a nice job (I had to do research on it to see what the hell it was, interesting how this all came about, thanks once again to The Beetles). I am sure the plug in you are using is much better and I think probably a better approach than just plain copy, but I could see the track copy being useful as well in situations.

I haven't used the Waves Reel ADT on anything yet, just messed around with it.....but it certainly does way more than just the basic copy/delay kind of stuff. There are random fluctuations (auto or manual) and LFO options that give you a very convincing double track...you can even put the copy ahead of the original....and treat them differently.

Another plug that is quite good is the Brainworx Stereomaker. You can get a convincing stereo track from a mono source, and unlike other "stereoizers"....it's 100% mono compatible, so it won't crap out when the mix is played in mono...it just goes back to being a solid mono signal.

I used it on an accent track where I was looking to get some width out of it, and also get it out of the center of the mage, without the whole double track/panning thing.
Sounds excellent...great plug!

Of course...often just recordng two tracks maybe be the obvious choice for a lot of situations.


Picking the right solution is really about the song, the mix and your production intent…

 

[illimmigrant]

Maybe a bit....but I would say it's in the mastering.
Possibly the use of some Mid/Side processing....which opens the door to what you are refering to.

I have not messed with mid/side EQ much. Since I "master" my own stuff, I don't do much other than slap on the fab filter pro-l to bring up the track's volume. Just Maybe some top end excitation for a bit of air and sparkle.
Any EQ stuff I try to take care of in the mix. I just think maybe I need to get better at identifying and treating frequencies that are still fighting each other in order to get better separation. I just haven't come across that "ah-ha!" moment when you realized what it was you needed to be listening for.

Thanks all for your input so far. Anything else?

 

[MusicWater]

Thank you all for the input.
As a couple of you have already pointed out, I do track each side independently. I do not copy the same take and pan. All that does is add up to the center, which I what I'm trying to avoid. Quad tracking, or having 4 takes of the same part is cool for sludgier, chordier sounding bits where you want density, but it doesn't really work on tighter rhythm parts.
What I notice in my mixes vs pro mixes on this subject, is that while I will have two takes panned hard left an hard right, they won't sound nearly as wide as in a pro mix. By the same token, the center instruments like snare, kick and bass, will seem more isolated in a pro mix than on my better mixes. Almost like there's a barrier in the center pushing the main rhythm guitars out wide. Do you think it's just a matter of better eq decisions?

In a way, but in my experience a number of other things are needed as well. What we are discussing is actually the MID-SIDE balance and certain stereo characteristics, such as spaciousness, openness, wideness, loudness, center clearity, frequency spread on each speaker etc. It's kind of a lot of things. As you know, the dBu/Voltage RMS curvature is cumulative, so most of the performance comes from processing the end of this spectrum efficiently, and this is something where pro mixes tend to stand out - you have multiple power conditioners, high dBu conversion, high dBu analog FET peak limiting/summing/monitoring and stuff like that. So yes, it is better handling of the frequencies, but to a great degree recorded and dialed in against a higher performance setup. Against this setup you then make all the mixing decisions and the what, how and why in regards to all of your mix balancing decisions will contribute to to what becomes possible. You do need hard panned guitars, but not the same guitar frequencies on both speakers, but rather different ones. That's the first thing.

The second thing is the volume * density of the lead instrument, such as the vocals. If you make the vocals too loud and dense, the guitars will sink into the vocal frequencies and the MID component will be more prominent in the MID-SIDE balance.

The third thing is electric guitar compression, which increases the density of these frequencies, letting other frequencies not get through in perception as easily, especially when you also add volume. So there are many things you can do. You should have a dedicated volume fader for MID and a dedicated volume fader for SIDE in your mix routing matrix, so that you can instantly do precisely this and nothing else, because everything impacts everything. Why you want to have those two faders separately is because you want to be able to adjust multiple effects with a single touch. For instance the SIDE fader should not only reduce the volume of the center panned sound sources but also reduce their density by lowering their compression wetness and maybe adding some effect like chorus on one of the sides. It is this kind of thing that actually dramatically clears things up in the mix.

I usually have the guitars hard panned and just increase the volume of them and at the same time lower the volume of the vocals and the bass guitar. When that clicks, that's done. Then I balance with the MID-SIDE faders, those have a bigger scope but can help further balance the two components. Then depending on what kind of characteristics that adds or removes, I might then compensate further which often yields an even better result.

So as you can imagine a whole range of things happen. In most of the cases it is the density and volume of the vocals that is the biggest cause of this. In my mix routing matrix I have a dedicated MID fader and a dedicated SIDE fader. These impact both volume and density. But I also have volume and density separated on individual volume faders on both the SIDE and MID. So a lot of my sound comes from the mix routing matrix. If I don't have these faders available, it's a totally different sound.

It helps a lot to figure out the impact of density * volume and this is a quite big topic in mixing. How you can best understand it is to grasp the concept of signal to background noise. When you have a sound source in the mix, the higher the density * volume of the other sound sources in the mix relative to it, the lower the signal to background noise is from the point of view of that sound source. So you can "improve" the sound of a sound source in the mix by increasing density * volume on it and/or decreasing density * volume of all other sound sources. How I have decided to deal with this in my mixing approach is partly like I said, I can control these things separately on MID and SIDE, which has a great impact, but I also work with these to create various characteristics. A high density * volume combo is not only dense, but what it really is in more creative terms is that it is more dominant. So I can create the dominance and "stand out" characteristics from this. Let's say I want the lead guitar solo to stand out and be dominant in the mix, then I increase the dominance fader of that and decrease the dominance fader of the other sound sources, but I do so using automation as well. This might seem complicated, but this is actually what you need to do and it is much easier to do it using just a few faders than not even having any faders available to do it.

So to sum it all up: I recommend that you create a dominance fader for all of the sound sources in the mix and balance these to make the side panned electric guitars stand out. Do this and ensure you do it against a high Voltage RMS solution, so that you can really hear when the mid range of the electric guitars cut through and so that you can really hear the details of all sound sources and so that the electric guitars don't cause any clipping.

 

[Farview]

After listening to your soundcloud stuff, I have a couple observations.

1. I think you are taking away too much of the low end from the guitars

2. You are EQing the bass to sound like the guitars.

Overall, you are processing the sounds more than I ever would, but that is just personal preference.

I like most of the sounds you are getting, nice amounts of midrange, not too much fuzzy distortion. But they sound kind of anemic. Like you took too much off the top and bottom and took away all the dynamics. That is what is giving it that one dimensional feel...it's too controlled.

It's very easy to try to reel something in a little and just go way too far. I think that's what is happening here.

About the bass: There seems to be a certain sound that you like to hear in the guitars. Even though there were many different guitar sounds on your page, they all had the same tone. If you looked at them on a spectrum analyzer, they would have the midrange emphasis around the same frequency and the same drop off points in the highs and lows.

The issue is your bass seems to have this same sort of thing going on. Try pumping up the 50hz on the low end, 800hz for the midrange and around 3k for the sparkle, then send that into a compressor to smooth it out. (not a multiband, just a normal wideband compressor)

That will fill out the low end and make the mix sound bigger and wider, because the bass won't sound so much like another guitar.

 

[illimmigrant]

After listening to your soundcloud stuff, I have a couple observations.

1. I think you are taking away too much of the low end from the guitars

2. You are EQing the bass to sound like the guitars.

Overall, you are processing the sounds more than I ever would, but that is just personal preference.

I like most of the sounds you are getting, nice amounts of midrange, not too much fuzzy distortion. But they sound kind of anemic. Like you took too much off the top and bottom and took away all the dynamics. That is what is giving it that one dimensional feel...it's too controlled.

It's very easy to try to reel something in a little and just go way too far. I think that's what is happening here.

About the bass: There seems to be a certain sound that you like to hear in the guitars. Even though there were many different guitar sounds on your page, they all had the same tone. If you looked at them on a spectrum analyzer, they would have the midrange emphasis around the same frequency and the same drop off points in the highs and lows.

The issue is your bass seems to have this same sort of thing going on. Try pumping up the 50hz on the low end, 800hz for the midrange and around 3k for the sparkle, then send that into a compressor to smooth it out. (not a multiband, just a normal wideband compressor)

That will fill out the low end and make the mix sound bigger and wider, because the bass won't sound so much like another guitar.

Thanks a bunch for your observations and tips, you hit several things spot on!
I am drawn to a certain kind of sound on guitars and bass. I got into the habit of low and high passing guitars quite a bit to make room for the meat of the bass on the low end and the cymbals on the high end of the spectrum, but yes, maybe I'm too aggressive.
As far as the bass goes, I split it into two channels. One channel has the clean low end, and the other channel has distorted mid/upper range. I like hearing the bass grit cutting through. However, if they are indeed too similar, then that could be a problem.

Thanks for listening and providing your observations.

I have a few things to try out this week, including the mid/side techniques that MusicWater pointed out above.

 

[Farview]

Distort the low end too. That will help keep the amount of low end even on all the notes.

From my point of view, you are trying too hard to have control over every aspect of each sound. Multiband compression and splitting the bass up into parts that you can treat separately makes you focus on the details in isolation from the rest of the instrument AND the rest of the mix.

For the bass, run the entire then through the distortion. Put an EQ in front of the distortion so you can manipulate how it distorts.

Treat each instrument as a whole, not as a collection of various parts of the spectrum. It will sound more natural that way.

Of course, if there is a problem with the sound, you might need to use some of those techniques. But I never have to do that unless someone sent me something horrific sounding to mix and I can't get them to re-track it. Since you are recording your own stuff, get the sound right in the first place, that way you don't have to shoehorn it into the mix with a sledgehammer.

 

[MusicWater]

I have a few things to try out this week, including the mid/side techniques that MusicWater pointed out above.

Great! When are you adding vocals and bass to your mix? I recommend that you first of all balance everything except vocals and bass. When you have this "body" of the mix in balance, you love the mid range of the guitars on the side and on the whole mix! That has multiple impacts. First of all, because the vocals and bass do not distract the balancing of the other frequencies, you achieve a better balance among these, in fact such a good balance that you love it. If you have never mixed like this you will see what I mean when you try it out. Now, the second impact of this is that because you have got used to this mix balance/clearity quality, you can add vocals and bass into the mix and instantly notice when these two sound sources remove the clearity quality you've created. In other words, by creating frequency awareness, you are able to more easily balance the vocals and bass into the rest of the mix, without them eating up the clearity/balance by being too loud and dense. If you find that the bass or the vocals at their desired volume and denseness forces the mid range to be harmed, then you should add high frequency air character into the mix, so that you are able to lower the volume and denseness of the bass/vocals. How you do this is by increasing the "high frequency air" fader on all channels except the bass. This means you essentially remove low frequencies and add high frequencies. How this is done is by doing upwards frequency shifting using an EQ effect, I usually use 700 Hz as the cutoff point, and then do a linear bell gain above that and a linear bell reduction to the left of it, with as low Q as possible. The bells I usually setup as 0.1 0.2 0.3 etc., but sometime it can turn out more extreme, like 0.5 1 1.5 etc. It's good though to fit this into an overall frequency shifting strategy.

An example would be to make both upwards and downwards frequency shifting to various degree/around various cutoff points on the sound sources in the center and also separately on the sound sources on the sides. This has the effect of spreading the frequencies among the sound sources, to reduce the overall frequency fighting. This can be handy when you have a lot of sound sources and you cannot mute any more sound sources to create enough air (air <> density). I have an overall air fader as well, that does a number of things like this, possible because of how I combine various effects into groups. For instance I have all compressors grouped to a single track, that then gets routed further. Stuff like this might sometimes be necessary to carve out the guitars on the side.

Dense mixes can be dense because they were inefficiently balanced and/or because you simply have too much frequencies in the mix. To help combat the problem with too much frequencies in the mix, remove unnecessary frequencies from non-dominant sound sources instead of making the dominant sound sources directly more dominant. A way to do this is to route the non-dominant sound sources to a dedicated volume fader and apply mute and/or volume automation on these across the song. This can be combined with e.g. low/high pass filters on these to further minimize the overall frequency denseness of the mix. The air mix characteristic is one of the more important ones in mixing. It is maybe the most important characteristic within the "pleasant" characteristics category. BTW. Air and detail are as characteristics kind of twins (natural goes in there as well), because when you add air you basically release more mix signal, allowing more signal to the sound sources in the mix. In my mix routing matrix I have separated these. Adding detail is in my approach done by gaining the whole mix and it is done in conjunction with adding air, because the air releases the signal so that more gain can be added before clipping. Please note how this is not the same thing as applying master bus limiting, in that approach the denseness actually increases, meaning you get more detail but within a more limited gain window, hence as a result you cannot add as much detail. And because of the denseness increase, it also means the stereo image to some degree collapses. So that's really something worth avoiding. The detail characteristic is one of the most important ones in the excitement characteristic category. In many ways the pleasant and exciting characteristic categories are working against each other. A powerful mix might remove some of the pleasant characteristics. For this reason I sum and balance those two as well.

In other words, great guitars on the side might mean a lot of gain/detail/dominance/compression on those, however at the cost of the pleasant mix characteristics. Therefore, it is important to not focus 100% only on those guitars, but also keep track on what happens to the mix as a whole when those guitars become more dominant in the mix, more specifically is the mix as a whole really turning more pleasant too or is it maybe actually turning a little less pleasant from having a little more noise hitting the ears on the side? This kind of stuff is the balancing thinking process that the engineer must go through in order to land at a balanced great sounding mix at the end.

I do recommend that you do not mix all of this in stereo, but that when you do this you also mix the L in stereo and the R in stereo (on mix scope) at loud volume in order to also keep the pleasant characteristics in balance with the exciting ones. In other words, by fixing this issue you potentially introduce a number of other ones. The MID-SIDE balance is another thing to keep an eye on...

I guess great mixing stems from hard balancing work...

 

[Greg_L]

Thank you all for the input.
As a couple of you have already pointed out, I do track each side independently. I do not copy the same take and pan.

Thank goodness the guy asking the questions is at least doing better than some of the responses. I don't know whether to praise him or damn some of the rest of you.