Posts Tagged ‘Mixing’

How to make your vocals shine! (Part 1)

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

The importance of vocals

Except for instrumental music, vocals are the most prominent instrument of a mix. Some engineers say that if you’ve got the vocals right, you’ve got the mix right. Also, the term “song” would be inappropriate if the point wasn’t about “singing”. Interesting fact, the human ear is way more critical in about vocals than any other instrument. The reason is fairly simple, it’s the only instrument that everyone plays everyday. Futhermore, the human has a deeper feeling towards another human rather than any object. That’s the very same reason why they show human faces in product advertisements. Another interesting aspect of vocals is the lyrics. Currently, the vocals is still the only instrument that can put words on a song. This adds an other dimension to a song.

Enough talk, more tricks!

First thing first:

  1. Have a great song
  2. Have great lyrics
  3. Record it right: The performance must be flawless first.
Once you’ve got that, now we can talk about investing time in a proper mix. Every engineer has their own tricks, but this is a very good recipe: the optimal Vocal mixing algorithm.
  1. Cutting filters
  2. Compressor/De-esser
  3. Equalizer
  4. Exciter
  5. Spatial effects (Delays & Reverbs)

1. CUTTING FILTERS

Why ?

The best way to start is by removing unwanted frequencies and resonances. This will help to make the vocal track cut through the mix more easily. The idea here is to cut unwanted frequencies before the compressor and boosting others after. The reason why we are doing the equalization in two steps is simply to clean the signal in order to help the compressor doing it’s job.

How ?

First, start by removing everything under ~100 Hz and above ~20kHz (Of course, the cutting frequencies will depend of the singer, use you judgement). There are good chances you can also use a peak filter to cut around 700-800 Hz by few dB in order to remove nasal resonances. A good free equalizer to do this job would be the 1982art Gloria reviewed early on this very same blog.

1982Art – Gloria

That’s enough for this time. See you soon for the following…

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Posted in Education, Freeware Plugin Review, Mixing | No Comments »

Xenium Audio – X-tube (Review)

Wednesday, July 4th, 2012

x-tube

To be honest, I’ve never heard of Xenium audio before. Do that means that I was skeptical about this product ? Yes. Do that means it is a bad product ? Absolutely not ! Fortunately, I gave it a try and nowaday, I’m very happy to have this secret weapon in my vst rack !

Overview

It’s a 12AX7 tube emulation, 64 bit floating point internal processing, with possibility of oversampling up to 16 times at zero latency. It can be used to warm your stuff up a bit. The plugin is available both in 32 and 64 bit versions.

Hands on

I tested it on a master, nothing less ! Since I’m one of those who try to avoid A/D conversion when I can, if I can do everything in the box, I’ll do it. I tried the plugin while I was already running at 96kHz with the oversampling set to 4 times and it sounded really natural. I could have closed my eyes and it would have been difficult to tell if I was processing in the analog domain or not.  At such high sampling rate, the difference between digital and high end analog is difficult to differentiate.

Now, the result depends on the quality of the transfer function that has been used to model the original equipment. Personally, I’ve been using an Altec 436C (What a classic !) for about 10 years and this technology uses 12ax7 tubes. I’ve been able to recognize the similarities in the sound, but at the same time, the plugin seemed to sound clearer to me. I have to admit that my old 436C needs maintenance and is becoming very noisy. However, the fact that I found myself using it on many project is a good sign. That means that my subconscious mind found it efficient enough to use it has a go to “warmer”.

Unfortunately, for the moment, at least, no freeware plugin is perfect. On this one, a major drawback overcomes the advantages of using it. I might like it a lot, but this plugin crashes a lot too. It also make sense since it runs at 16 times oversampled without latency, but still, this is not an excuse. Also, it happened that I could not reload the plugin properly when I was opening a previous file. Other uncertainty, the plugin has sometimes weird effect in the stereo field.

In conclusion, this is a very nice sounding plugin that, unfortunately, still has bugs. However, the fact that you can oversample ridiculously make it sounds very analog and natural, especially when your base sampling rate is 96kHz. (Overall rating: 4.1/5)

PLUS:

  • Crazy oversampling
  • No latency
  • Smooth natural sounding
  • A lot of parameters tunable for a simple plugin
  • Very useful, simply…
MINUS:
  • Crashes sometimes
  • No Mac versions
  • Sometimes, weird effects happen in the stereo field.

 

Resources:

Download link on xenium audio website:

http://www.xeniumaudio.com/downloads.php#XTube

 

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What is mixing ? (part 3)

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012

The third part of this subject is based on stereo. Historically, the stereo recording has been invented in the 40s and I’ve been relatively rapidly applied to the music in the 50s. We probably all remember crazy recordings from the beatles (or whoever else of that time) in which the vocals are on a side and the rest of the band is on the other. Without falling into those extremistic approach, it is important to find an appropriate stereo balance that fits the song.

MONO VS STEREO

First, it is important to understand that it is not everything that has to be stereo wide. If stereo is atmospheric, don’t forget that mono is punchy. If you listen to hip hop/rap records, you will notice that most of the record is mono. It is simply because they want it to punch to its maximum. Something too wide will usually sound too soft or not enough focused. That’s why it is important to find a balance between those two extremes.

MONO LOWS and WIDE HIGHS LAW

Well, it is not a law. Let’s say that it is a very strong tendancy that consists to “mono” (yes, “to mono” as a verb!) the low frequency and wide the high frequencies. The way you make the transition between, if linearly or exponentially, is a question of taste, but that’s a good start. Let’s say that human hears like high frequencies to be wide spread and bass to be focused and loud. For the rest, it is yours to experiment and decide what fit most your music genre.

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What is mixing ? (part 2)

Saturday, June 30th, 2012

audio-compression

As mentioned in the previous topic about “What is mixing ? (part 1)”, we defined the mix as a three dimensional world :

  1. Frequency
  2. Dynamic
  3. Stereo

Of course, like in the real world, we can also take into account the time as the fourth dimension, which is absolutely right. But for now, let us focus mainly on the three first ones. Since the frequency dimension has already been covered in the previous section, let us now move on to the dynamic aspect of mixing.

For some of us, in mastering, dynamic is everything… But from a mixing perspective, what does that mean ? Well, it is fairly simple: Some instruments are more dense than others, so they need to be compressed in order to be “competitive” in the mix. Some people (a lot actually) just compress everything to the maximum in the hope that it will sound crazy loud. Well, if it sounds loud, don’t expect me to believe that it sounds right, or either close to be good.

Honestly, if you want it to sound loud, ask your mastering engineer. This blogpost will encourage you to focus on relative dynamic rather that absolute dynamic (or loudness). What I mean by that is that you should make sure that the dynamic between your instruments is making sense, no matter what the dynamic of the whole song is.

That said, as a rule of thumb, start by simply compressing elements that are not dense enough to compete with others. A convenient example of that is vocals compared to brass. The compressor has not been invented to kill the dynamic, but simply to blend the instruments together. Keep that in mind and your mixes will sound better, I promise.

 

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What is Mixing ? (part 1)

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

What is Mixing (part 1)

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Mixing is the process which consists to blend the different instruments together in a homogeneous song. While most of people don’t even know this process exists, the mixing step can arguably be the step that takes the most of your time. In order to explain properly the main concepts, we explore the sound mixing world in 3 parts, which are respectively: Frequency, Dynamics and Stereo.

The first dimension: Frequency

Except for classical music, if you try to blend the instruments together without any treatment, there are big chances that it will simply not work. The main reason is that the frequency ranges of each instrument are overlapping. To give you a better idea, let us compare figure 1 and 2.

 
/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/2.png

Figure 1: Song as recorded before mixing

 

 
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Figure 2: Song after mixing

As you can see, the first one is chaotic since instrument is present everywhere in the frequency range while the human ear can only hear one sound at each frequency at a time. In other words, it’s a mess.

But if you look at figure 2, you will see that every instrument has its place and play its role. The kick is not trying to replace the bass, and the snare, the lead guitar, like in a classical orchestra.

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Posted in Mixing | 1 Comment »