Refining the Main Mix Levels

Monitoring levels and mix "balancing"

At this point, you should have a relatively excellent mix - certainly much better than you've ever heard the track before. However, it is likely that at certain points in the song, the mix of the instruments goes slightly off-balance. It's worth sitting back for a bit of a break now (more tea and biscuits anyone?) and listening back to the mix - perhaps on smaller speakers and at a much lower volume. Personally if I'm having a little tea-break like this, then I like to sit in a different part of the room (maybe the sofa at the back) and listen at a very, very quiet level, and try almost not to listen. Maybe even listen outside the control room with the door shut! (I'm not the only person who does this) - it gives you yet another perspective - and we are each of us, after all - quite used to how records sound coming from someone else's room with the door closed.

I then make notes either on paper or in my head as to what's going on.

Listening at low levels is always a real eye-opener (or should that be ear-opener?). For some reason - although you can't hear the detail of the individual sounds particularly well at low levels, you can certainly hear level imbalances with startling quality.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't listen on the "big" speakers if the studio has them. Main studio monitors are very expensive ($50,000 would not be an unusual price to pay for a pair of main monitors), and part of the reason is the quality and attention to detail in the sound that they reproduce, so main monitors are terrific for making sure you've really brought the "detail" out of the sound, and sorted out conflicting sound sources - especially in the low-mid to bass region. The bass end always sounds pretty much OK on small speakers, so make sure you listen on main monitors to hear the mess that's really going on underneath. It is particularly important if the record will be played in clubs and bars.

If you don't have main monitors available to you, then the best you can do is listen reasonably loudly in order to hear (and feel) the low end of the mix properly, and then return the monitors to a more reasonable level as soon as possible afterwards. Listening loudly for extended periods will quickly wear your ears out, as well as damaging you ears in the long term.

In most studios, don't bother listening to a mix quietly on the main studio monitors. They usually work very poorly at quiet levels, and they often don't come "alive" until you listen at moderate to loud levels. They are calibrated at a medium to high level anyway, and usually behave quite differently if under-driven. If you wish to listen quietly, then listen on the near field (small) monitors instead.

Using a selection of monitors at a selection of different volume allows you to "explore" the mix in different amounts of detail. Do you write documents, or create artwork on a computer much? Yes? If so, then think of listening quietly on small speakers as "Zooming out" of the mix to see the whole picture, and listening quite loudly on main monitors as "Zooming in" (to see the detail) on the mix. You need to see the mix from many different perspectives to get a highly polished result for playback in many different environments.

A summary of monitoring would be:

• Get the "Sounds" correct at moderate to high levels (using main monitors if you have them)
• Get the "Balance" correct at low levels (on medium to small speakers), making minor sound adjustments when necessary.

Interestingly, when you get the mix "balance" correct at very low listening levels, it rarely (never?) sounds wrong when you listen to the mix loudly later. The reverse is almost never true. If you've ever done a mix at high volume level, then I'm sure you've experienced the bitter disappointment that occurs when you listen to your mix quietly at a later date, and find that the levels are all over the place. Some of the mixes I've done at too high a level sound positively embarrassing when listened to at normal levels. Even if your music is designed to be listened to loudly (heavy metal music, or club music etc.), you should still do level balancing at a low volume, otherwise your mixes will sound pitifully weak when they're played on radio or in your car. Usually the only way to rescue a mix done poorly like this, is to heavily compress and EQ it when mastering, which not very desirable, as it has all kinds of unpleasant side-effects.

So, with that warning, let's get onto the fine art of level balancing in more detail.

Often, the first thing that inexperienced people do at this point, is to switch on the automation and start programming fader movements in. I resist this urge. I will turn on the automation and program the "mutes" though (for convenience) but I leave the faders on manual for the time being.

My personal favourite starting point is not to automate the faders, but instead to listen carefully to what the source of the problem really is. If it is that a certain instrument "jumps out" of the mix always at certain melodic points during the mix (or alternatively seems to disappear at certain melodic points during the mix), then there are two ways you can make this problem automatically correct itself without resulting to automation. Firstly, you can try experimenting with compression a bit more - see if you can get a compressor to sort out the problem for you automatically. Secondly, you can try equalising the offending part so that the EQ makes the sound automatically dip in level (or go up in level) at the relevant points in the instruments melodic range.

Note that this is not the same use of EQ that you have used so far in the mixing process. Up to this point, you will have been using the EQ either to remove unpleasant resonance's - which involves "notching" with a very small bandwidth at very specific frequency points - or you've used EQ to enhance the sound in a more general level - which usually involves playing with the subsonics of the sound (low-frequency EQ) or tweaking the upper harmonics of the sound at 3 kHz or above.

What we are talking about here, is playing with the EQ at very specific points in the middle of its melodic range - which involves fairly narrow bandwidth right in the middle of the note range of the instrument, and not in the upper harmonic range (which is the bit that EQ for sound enhancement is normally associated with).

This use of EQ and compression as a level balancing tool tends to be interactive between the two techniques -a change to one (either compression or EQ) affects to some degree the result achieved by the other - so you may have to perform a delicate balancing act between the two techniques to get the instrument to behave itself.

But why do this when you can automate the faders?

• Firstly, it's considerably quicker. Using this technique to get the balance right in one part of the song (carefully checking you've not screwed up the level in other parts of the song), usually means that the instrument will "sort itself out" for the entire length of the song. Although it is often possible in automatic mixing systems to copy specific fader movements from one part of the song to another, this is often a fiddly, time-consuming, and often so boring a process that many people prefer to program it by hand for the whole length of the song - which also takes time.
• Secondly, the other reason why using EQ and compression as an automatic mix level-balancing tool is a good idea, is that it tends to lead to a more musical result. Using fader automation to achieve the same ends usually involves making many very, very small fader movements that "ride the melody". EQ and compression can do this for you automatically if done well. If you do a good job of this, it is still quite likely that you will need to do some fader movements, however such movements tend to be more "general" in nature rather than fiddly little ones.
• Thirdly, using EQ and compression to balance levels makes life considerably easier if you have no automation system at all. People survived without automation for many years and still made great records. This is one of the ways in which they achieved that.

So, what if you have no automation at all?

If you don't have automated mixing (which is still very common in project studios with analog mixing desks), don't panic. All is not lost, and you can still get great results. This is how we did it in the days before automated mixing:

• Firstly, use EQ and compression to let the mix sort itself out as described above
• Secondly, for any sequencer generated parts recorded onto tape, you can run the parts "live" instead, and use the sequencer software to automate their mixing levels. Personally I usually record tracks from an external sequencer onto audio tracks separately rather than have the sequencer live, as it is less error prone, gives much better timing (less "MIDI-clogging") and you don't have to wait for the sequencer to sync up all the time, which makes it easier to work with - but when doing the final mix it is much less of an issue.
• Thirdly (my personal favourite, and much quicker than the above) re-record onto the audio tracks any sequencer-based parts, adjusting the recording levels by hand whilst re-recording them. This is much quicker than reprogramming the sequencer and means you can "drop in" on any fader movements you've messed up. It also means that you've got a much better quality multitrack should someone else want to remix it.
• Next, for the case where you have "live" (human-performed) instruments recorded and you have a "real" mixing desk with actual faders, you can find a couple of spare tracks and then mix the entire song down to them as you playback - "dropping in" to re-record over the separate mix sections where the levels are different. This gives many of the benefits of automated mixing - although you might need to get a friend to help you out with the fader movements if there are a lot of them at the same time - but hey!, that's a fun, interactive experience for you both! They don't even need to be any good at mixing - you can just tell them what faders to move where and when. Make some chinagraph pencil marks next to the faders as a guide to help them. This used to be one of the standard jobs for Assistant Engineers in the old days, and helped train them in the art of mixing. It is still the standard assistants job in the mixing of movie soundtracks, where there are usually many more trained staff available to help out with the process, making it much quicker and much more enjoyable than using a computer automation system.
• Finally - similar to the above, but in the case where you don't have a spare pair of tracks to mix down to , you can mix the entire track to separate sections on DAT, open-reel etc.., and then stick the whole lot together - using scissors and sticky tape if necessary (er.. - not on DAT - I mean on open reel for sticky-tape editing! :-) - in order to get the final mix edited together. Although this is time-consuming, and requires some work before the sections can be heard in context as an entire final mix, it is still an option and is the way that complex mixes have been achieved - without automation - for many years. The downside is that fixing mistakes is a laborious process, involving the peeling apart of edits, and carefully tracking different "edit sections" in a computer or on scraps of tape lying about the place. Many people - including me - have spent much time scrabbling about under an analog tape machine searching for a twenty second section of tape on the floor literally tangled up with other sections.

What are you trying to achieve, overall?

You are trying to achieve a mix where - for the entire duration of the song - the levels of all the different instruments sound like they are "in balance". This does not necessarily mean "consistent" (that would just be dull). If someone is getting a bit loud in the mix, don't assume that you need to immediately constrain them by pulling the fader back. Maybe it's OK for them to come up a bit at that point of the song? Listen carefully before you act. Maybe it's everyone else that needs to be pushed up in the mix at that point rather than constraining the one performer who dared to be bold at that point in the song.

How do you go about it?

As mentioned previously, the trick when level-balancing is to listen quietly - on the small speakers - when level-balancing. This is not the sort of thing you want to be doing at full-blast on the main monitors. It's fine to get the basic mix sounding good on the main monitors, but the subtleties of tiny fader movements can't be heard properly at such high listening levels, so try to perform level balancing at a level slightly below what listening level people would normally comfortably listen to on a home hi-fi system.

Is there anything to watch out for?

Yes! - The most common mistake people make, is to spend literally hours and hours mixing a song on automation, delicately riding every single fader in the entire mix, smoothing out even the most slightest of imperfections. People start to "loop" the playback - sometimes spending considerable time on just a ten or twenty second segment, moving seemingly everything around in a continuous "Mexican wave" of fader movements.

If you do that, then the entire automation system effectively just becomes an extremely complex compressor, destroying all sense of dynamics and musical movement in the mix. When you play it back later, the mix will not "excite" anyone anymore. A telltale sign of this, is when the size of the song mix file in bytes (if you can measure this) becomes enormous - thereby indicating that throughout the song almost every fader is on the move (albeit slightly) throughout the entire length of the song. There is "fader edit", on top of fader edit, on top of fader edit and so on. That surely can't be good can it? Often you are simply fighting against bad fader movements you previously made underneath and it may well be worth rewriting a fader movement from scratch rather than "trimming" it many times.

So over-reliance on automation can lead to extremely "bland" mixes with no dynamics or life left in them - so don't go crazy - do only what is necessary to keep the mix balance reasonably consistent, and do no more, otherwise you are wasting hours, killing the song by degrees as the day goes on. Unless the band is totally hopeless, try and leave dynamic "expression" to the musicians. It's what they're paid for.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 1031