Dense mixes

Tadpui

Tadpui

Well-known member
When putting together a song with only a few instruments, I've been able to get somewhat satisfactory results. An EQ notch here and there, panning, fader automation seem to be enough of a bag of tools to give everything enough room to be heard.

But what does a home recordist do when a project calls for a busier arrangement? Things get really complicated really quickly, in an almost exponential manner with each additional element added to the arrangement. I find that my EQ curves get more exaggerated in my attempts to give everything it's own slice of the frequency spectrum, panning gets more extreme, reverbs stack up and turn things to mush, and I run out of headroom pretty quickly because I keep finding things that don't shine through enough and instinctively turn that element up. Or I go and carve out more EQ of other elements to make room.

I'm not putting together orchestra scores or anything, but even a drum kit and a few guitars are pretty challenging for my amateur ability, while still allowing the vocals enough room to remain intelligible. Or "that one guitar part" that got buried somewhere along the way.

So what do you do when there are several parts or instruments all competing for the same frequency ranges? How do you decide what the most "important" frequencies are between a couple of guitars, for example? Or how to not neuter the sound of a snare but still let the vocals cooperate with it?

I've been experimenting a lot lately, but I've reached a point of aimless wandering and I figured that some guidance would be a good thing.
 
Don't track so hot and start with better sounds. Believe it or not, you don't have to go carving EQ like a thanksgiving turkey to make things fit together if you use the "right" sounds to begin with. Think of what you want to sound like for your end result, and create those sounds before you press record. Two, three, four guitar tracks? More? No problem. Make them different. Use different amp settings. Use a different guitar. Use a different mic. Mic a different speaker. Just little changes are enough to make things stand out on their own without needing a buttload of EQ. Reverbs don't need to "stack up" Just use one and send stuff to it. That way you'll have everything in the same kind of "space". That sounds way better to me than a bunch of different reverbs firing off everywhere. A bass is a bass, a guitar is a guitar, drums are drums, keys are keys, and vocals are vocals. They all have their own sound and they won't need a ton of work just to sit and be clear if you track good sounds to begin with.
 
Yes...the more tracks, the more work to get them all to gel and not fight each other.

Each song is different, so no single "do it this way" answer...but it's all about the level balance between the tracks, their panning, and EQ.....though at the very start, the arrangement can make that easier or much harder, so think about that first, and try think about each track you are recording and how it's fitting and going to fit with other tracks to come.
It's not too hard, since you should be listening to tracks you already recorded and starting to "pre-mix" them....if you see some areas where it's already getting too busy and the definition of the instruments is getting lost....don't right away start hacking at them with processing....instead, think about a different arrangement that will let the important tracks come through, and if you have to lose some or pull them way back, then go for that.

Also, on the arrangement...try not have 30 tracks all playing simultaneously from start to finish....IOW, break it up, make it more dynamic and interesting, that way if you have to punch it up with 30 tracks for the chorus, knock it down to just a few tracks for the verses...etc....and in that case the busy section won't be as much of a burden on the ears when they are contrasted with more spares sections that really let the key elements punch out.

So like....what kind of music are you doing?
Post up an example.
 
^ What Gerg said ^

You're overthinking the whole thing, or you tracked badly if you are having issues that you can define so well. A drum kit and 'a couple of guitars' should just slip into a mix, if done well. I'll often EQ a little of the low end out of electric guitars to get rid of any muddiness, but that's about it.
 
Greg_L said:
Reverbs don't need to "stack up" Just use one and send stuff to it.
Click to expand...


Yes....that too.

I'll use one maybe two reverbs, and usually it's the same or very similar flavor....or one short and other longer.

Delay without reverb on some tracks, pluse some 100% dry tracks and a couple of reverb tracks will stack up much better and give you contrast.
 
mjbphotos said:
A drum kit and 'a couple of guitars' should just slip into a mix, if done well.
Click to expand...

Yup. Exactly. Something like that will mix itself if you track properly to begin with. I mean, we're not talking about a 200 track Def Leppard song, right? A basic drums, bass, guitars, vocal song should just fall together, and they do if things are done right from the start.
 
Not a ton to add to the advice you've already received.

Greg gave you a good list of things to change (different guitars, amps, settings, mics, etc.). Another one is to play a guitar part at a different spot on the neck. So if one guitar is playing open A's, D's, and E's... Record a second guitar that's playing those chords barred. In conjunction with the other ideas you've received, this can sometimes help.
 
Good pieces of advice fellas, thank you very much. I'm taking notes and I'll put this advice to use on my next project.

So far, I haven't really created anything that most people would consider super-dense. I mainly do simple rock/pop/indie type stuff. Basically anything but metal. I just enjoy "decorating" songs with ornaments that I consider interesting. But for some guy in his basement, it doesn't take much to overload my current skill level. Even an acoustic, a couple of electrics, a drum kit, a bass, and couple of vocals has posed a challenge to me. Fortunately I do have a couple of choices when it comes to guitars and amps, and I've been making use of the variations in tone so I don't end up with 3 or 4 tracks with identical tone...it'd be like the clone wars army band. And any time I can, I use different chord inversions and locations on the neck. Still I tend to get a lot of frequency overlap between guitar parts and they get mushed together. I take it that my mic technique needs lots of work.

I've been playing with reverbs more lately, especially after the recent reverb thread here. I've settled on 3 reverbs for my last couple of projects: a subtle plate for the vocals, a hall for things I want to distance from the listener, and a drum room impulse to help make up for the fact that my studio space is an acoustical nightmare and everything is close-mic'd and I use fake drums. And it seems that day by day, I'm learning the "less is more" approach to reverb. I think that I was using it more to hide things I didn't like about the performance instead of using it to put elements into a space for the listener.
 
Yep, it's all about arrangement. Mix time is the worst time to be deciding which instruments fit in which frequency range, etc.

I would add to the above that in a really dense mix, not every instrument needs to "stand out" or "fit in its own space". You're not mixing orchestra scores, but if you take a listen to some orchestral music, or some big band jazz, or some of that Phil Specter "wall of sound" bullshit you may notice that while there is a whole lot of instruments stacked up on top of one another, they all add together to create the full impact. There will only be a couple of instruments that stand out at certain points for solos and the like.

Basically, if you are go cramming a bunch of stuff into one frequency spectrum, there will be some masking. That's not a bad thing. Maybe that piano part doesn't need to stand up and shout "I'm a piano!" Instead, maybe it just needs to bolster the rhythm guitar, and they will kind of meld together into a "guitano" that gets the job done in a way that neither could do on their own. There's that old Nashville trick of tracking an upright bass and doubling it with an electric bass or baritone guitar. You wouldn't go trying to carve those tracks up so that they each sound distinct and separate.

I'm too distracted by this damn day job to keep typing right now. Hope some of it helps.
 
I'm not one to do dense mixes.....there's a couple of songs off my band's recent albums that were a tiny bit thicker (3 guitars, piano, organ, bass guitar, drums, vox). Usually its just a matter of turning stuff down. You don't need to always hear everything. Sometimes having a really low guitar part is sort of like conservative reverb; you can't hear it, but when you mute it you can hear something is missing.
 
Couple quick thoughts to add:

1.) Careful with the reverb. Why do we use reverb? To add space, yes, but also to make things sound bigger. What's the problem with dense mixes? There's no space for anything. Go easy on the 'verb, and if you need ambience, try high-passing your verbs to at least keep the low end and midrange free.
2.) If you want a good dense mix, spend some time LISTENING to dense mixes. I'm a huge Devin Townsend fan; the guy does "wall of sound" like no other. Listen to something like "Canada," one of my favorite songs off his album Terria:

Devin Townsend - Canada - YouTube

Sounds huge, right? Now, take it apart. There's a couple guitar parts going on, but the "main" one is actually pretty bright and relatively clean. Notice that there's a ton of "ambience" but rather than reverb it's all tempo-timed delay. If the pictures in the liner notes are indicative, it's probably a singlecoil-equipped Strat. Listen to the kick drum - it's tiny, all click and attack, very little bass. Bright snare, too. Brass on the drums sounds aggressively high-passed, and overall the drums are pretty sparse (which leaves room for a busier guitar part). Vocals sound awesome, but don't have a lot of bass content, mostly edge and midrange. There's a ton of harmonies but again none of them sound very large, especially the softer breathier ones. Synth lines all tend to be mostly high pitched and very bright. Basically, everything is small, but fits together into something so big you could get lost in it.

As they say, if everything is big, nothing is.
 
My recent tracks have featured up to 8 electric guitars and 4 acoustic guitars, as well as drums, keyboards, bass and multi layered vocals... and getting them all to fit has generally just involved HPFing the low frequencies and LPFing the high frequencies (although not always), thinking about what the sound I'm recording is actually like and how it's intended to fit into the tune, and having them play different things, using different guitars and NOT overplaying - if it's not adding anything in this particular spot, don't play.

I thought it would be harder than it actually was. I haven't really had to do radical EQing anywhere apart from the filters... a bump here or notch there..

Think about the sound before you record it is my advice, and remember that particularly in a denser mix, that awesome guitar sound that sounds so excellent when played on its own, isn't necessarily going to sound so hot in the mix because you're bringing in a lot of high and low frequencies that are probably what are causing the issues you're dealing with...
 
The previous posts have pretty much answered your questions. I just want to remind you to not forget about LOW pass filters. Often overlooked, yet so useful for getting things to sit back in the mix.
 
I hate dense music. I'm not a very good denser. The only dense music song I like is Abba's "Densing Queen".
 
Took me most of the weekend to do the first mix on a new song, definite fits into the 'dense' category. 3 electric rhythm guitar parts in the chorus and bridge (1 in the verse), organ, acoustic guitar, 3 lead guitar parts (tag line, each one is playing a different octave), plus drums, bass, 3 lead vocal tracks (automated as single, left/right or layered) plus 6 backup vocal tracks. Not even counting the 6 string tracks I have in the intro!
Only EQ I have done was on the lead vocal tracks, to add some 'air', and a low-mid-scoop on the rhythm electric guitars to rid of some muddiness.
It's all about knowing what you want during the recording process. As I recorded each successive guitar part I listened to what had already been tracked, allowing me fit a new part in without just making more volume/noise.

**Not saying my first mix is perfect** ;) but I worked on hard on levels before I started panning stuff around and the EQs came from knowing the sound I wanted, rather than trying to 'fit' everything together.
 
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