Farview
Well-known member
I think you are really making this harder than it needs to be. If you have to go through all of this, there is something wrong with the core sounds or the instrument arrangement of the song.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...
It is much easier/better to pick the tones that fit/work together and arrange the musical parts so they don't fight.
