Mixdowns – NITELIFE Audio

These ‘PROTIPS’ have appeared across our socials over the last few months. We thought it might be helpful to have them collated into a single digestible article – so here’s part one, which consists of the first five. We’ll be continuing to release these regularly, providing tips, tricks, and valuable advice across a range of production, workflow, creative, mindset, and mix-related questions.

Whilst hi-hats add a lot of energy and groove, if proper consideration isn’t given to de-essing and minimising resonant frequencies, they will end up sounding overly harsh when your record is played at high volumes and/or mastered. You can solve this problem in various ways:

1. Apply some generous subtractive EQ to remove un-needed high and low frequencies. Tape saturation also does a great job of smoothing the high end.

2. Play with the envelope of your hi-hats to create a tighter, more precise sound. Sometimes a transient shaper can be useful here, too. You don’t need as ‘much’ hi-hat as you think you do, especially on club systems.

3. Use a de-esser plugin, or preferably a specialist tool like Oeksound’s Soothe to control & dynamically suppress harsh, fatiguing resonances. Your mastering engineer, and your ears, will thank you.

It’s a problem that’s been around virtually as long as we’ve been mixing audio: how to get that coherent, pleasant-sounding low-end with a kick and bass that ‘sit’ together nicely. Here’s our advice:

1. It might sound obvious, but choosing the right sounds to begin with is going to make your life a lot easier. If you have a kick drum that’s got the sub-heavy, low-end characteristics of an 808, then you’re going to struggle to get a coherent, pleasant balance with almost any other kind of bass sound that plays at the same time. You can navigate this by a) not having a bassline and making the kick even heavier (common in a lot of techno productions) or b) programming/playing the bass to be in spaces where the kick isn’t. However, keep in kind that offbeat basslines which are too busy or too sparse may not best suit the genre you’re making.

2. If you’re happy that you’ve got the best possible sounds, the next step is to tidy up what you have. Be diligent with your EQ, being sure to make a low-cut as high as you can go on every instrument and then on every bus channel too. It’s not uncommon in specific genres to go as high as 30/40/50hz with the kick drum to leave room for the bass. You should also remove any ‘flabbiness’ from both the kick and bass using the envelopes or a transient shaper to tighten up the notes and create space. Using something like a Subpac can help you to measure the interaction between the kick and bass, and also alert you to any other instruments which have rumbles that your ears can’t pick up.

3. Lastly, some good old-fashioned classic side-chaining may actually be all you need. We’ve placed it last as a recommendation because it shouldn’t take precedence over choosing the right sounds and tidying up your low-end elements – you should be doing those things anyway. Still, it’s a helpful method which not only can improve your mixes but also works as a stylistic sound design tool that you can apply to vocals, pads, textures or anything else to add a dimension of rhythm and movement. Productions by artists like Kaytranada and Disclosure are great examples of this.

Making records as an electronic artist or dance music producer is very often a solo pursuit, and after the initial burst of creativity and ‘fun’, we can spend many hours ‘in a loop’ feeling frustrated, doubting ourselves, and procrastinating over the arrangement and anything that we find tedious. Collaborating with somebody else can really help you in this situation because the other person is very likely to approach the music or stems that you send them in a refreshed way. They won’t be fatigued by repetition and they will be able to hear things that you’ve missed – both good and bad.

Finishing music is absolutely crucial but it’s also one of the processes that requires the most discipline. Try reaching out to someone you’re friends with, or on the same label, or perhaps have worked with before, and propose that you swap stems and finish each other’s ideas. This way, if all goes well, you’ll end up with 2 finished tracks which you can send to labels and you will have minimised the tedious bits that usually lead to time being wasted.

There are sure to be times when you’re not feeling quite as creative. Maybe you’re tired, or perhaps you don’t have the time on a particular day to get into making a full track. On these occasions, it’s important to remember that no session in the studio ever needs to be wasted. If, for instance, you’ve only got 2 hours to spare, you could use it to export stems and loops from existing projects, organise your sample folders, and save channel strips & synth patches. This makes sense on several levels – it’s likely that you’ve already spent a reasonable amount of time getting those sounds exactly how you want them, so why not call upon them again when you’re making that next record in the same style? They should slot in nicely with whatever you’re working on in terms of tone and processing, and reusing them also has the added benefit of helping to establish your ‘sound’ through repetition of certain signature elements or motifs. You can effectively think of this as your own ‘in-house’ sample library, which you can chop, flip and resample. If you’re diligent about it, it can really pay dividends in the future.

Another recommendation is to move your most inspiring samples into a dedicated folder so that when you need something with a bit of magic, you can simply heato the ‘inspiration’ folder to find it.

Finally, Save precious hard drive space (and your sanity) by deleting sounds you’ve had for years, but never used. We all have those sample graveyards that (even with the best of intentions) never get visited. It’s highly unlikely you’ll miss them if you delete them, and it’ll make finding those hidden gems that bit easier. Just because there’s an endless palette of drum sounds out in the world, it doesn’t mean that you should waste your time trying to acquire them all.

It might initially seem counterintuitive, but too many options can be stifling. It’s what’s commonly known as ‘analysis paralysis’. Before we had the computer processing power, choices and (almost endless) distractions we do today, the specific ways in which most hardware and software worked arguably helped us to focus far better. Limitations included: available memory, sampling time, mixing desk channels or just a general lack of equipment. Very often, there might only be single compressor / delay / reverb along with possibly 1 hardware synth or some type, a drum machine, and perhaps an 8-track recorder, in a smaller home or project studio. As a result, producers and musicians had to find creative workarounds to bring their ideas to life.

You can apply these principles to your own music by setting boundaries. Why not try and make a record with only 5 elements, but make those elements evolve by continuously automating them to keep things interesting? Or if you usually use live instruments like Rhodes, guitars, and bass, try writing a track with entirely synthesised elements. These self-imposed restrictions should speed up your decision making.

Another fun approach, if you’re able to, is to use a standalone groovebox like an MPC or Maschine to construct a track. In the heyday of house and hip hop, many beats would have been composed entirely on an MPC or SP1200, and the ‘on-the-fly’ performance recorded to a 4-track or DAT or tape machine, including breakdowns, effects, and main sections. You could then choose the best parts and edit a 12 minute recording down to 6 or 7 minutes. Many producers still employ this method today.

Working with samples brings its own particular challenges. In this 2-part, beginners-guide article, we’re going to look at some of the bass-related problems that can arise when using samples in your productions, and how to fix them. Read Part 2 here.

The bass is one of the defining features of any dance track. The low end of the frequency spectrum is where the majority of the energy is going to be coming from when your track gets played on a club sound system, and how well it translates can make or break the reaction to the tune – so getting it right is essential. Whether you’re using analogue synths, VST’s or samples in your work, regardless of the source you’ll need to pay close attention to the bass.

How Low Can You Go?

One of the great things about sampling is the instant mangling that you can do – just a couple of tweaks on a pitch shifter and a big dollop of reverb and you can turn a syrupy soul vocal into the dark satanic ghost of Barry White. Extreme pitch effects on vocals, making them either high-pitched ‘chipmunks’ or spooky rumbling monsters have been used for years in dance music, and to great effect – but any samples that have been substantially pitched down can be tricky for the home producer to handle. Perfect human hearing generally only goes down to 20Hz and your home monitors – unless you have a subwoofer – are probably only going to respond down to about 50Hz. A club sound system, however, will respond to bass frequencies lower than the range of human hearing.

If it isn’t a bassline or a kick drum, then applying a high pass filter is a wise move – a simple roll off of everything between (approx.) 80-120Hz might be effective as there are often unintended low-end frequencies hanging out in other elements of your track too. Our advice is to go as high as you can without noticeably impacting the sound. Whenever you’re making adjustments to EQ or levels, it’s how things sound in the context of the entire track that’s important, not how they sound in isolation. A part that you’ve filtered the low end out of may sound a little thin and weedy on its own but fit just right within the context of the overall mix. You’ll also want to make sure that the kick and bass are in mono since having them in stereo can cause all sorts of phase issues and pretty much all club systems are in mono too. You can check this using various free imaging plugins and/or a mid/side processor.

If you’re having problems getting your kick and bassline to work together, consider making a cut on the kick drum, starting around 25hz and gradually increasing it. Unless you’re making very tough techno, you actually need much less of the kick than you think. You can also experiment with notching out frequencies around the 80/100hz mark which can help to tame some of the thud and thump. For example, In modern drum and bass, there’s a fetish for tightly controlled, punchy (but not heavy) kick drums. This allows so much more room for the bass to come through and provide the weight. As a second option, it’s often really useful to work on the rest of the parts first. Placing an EQ on all of the channels in your DAW and rolling off unwanted low-frequencies with a high pass filter on every channel except the kick and the bass is a good habit to get into, ensuring that there is nothing at all in the mix to interfere with the low end.

The Single Most Important Tool

When it comes to getting that low end right in your mixes, experience and your ears are the best tools and it’s worth taking the time to ‘train’ your ears, by listening to your own productions and comparing them to those of your favourite producers. How do the kick and bass interact? What’s the balance between them? Which of the 2 can you ‘feel’more? Do they happen together or does the bass play off the kick? This can really shed light on the relative levels of the different parts in a track, and help you to understand the balance and energy that’s needed – something that new producers often struggle with.

One the best pieces of advice that you’ll hear again and again throughout your production career is to check your mixes in as many places as you can: on small computer speakers, studio monitors, headphones, the cheap mp3 player in the kitchen and of course the classic ‘car test’. All of these locations will give you different feedback on how effective your low end is, not to mention the rest of your mix. If you get it sounding good in all those places, there’s a good chance it will translate well anywhere. The big test, of course, is a club system, so if you can, try and find someone who’ll let you road-test your stuff on a big rig; you may be amazed at how different it sounds to how it sounded in your studio.

What Does Your Room Sound Like?

Stepping away from the screen for a moment, room acoustics are essential to decision-making within the production process and to accurate bass mixing too. Whilst you may not be able to professionally acoustically treat your room at home, you can at least always ensure that you and your monitors are all sitting at the corners of an equilateral triangle, which will assist substantially with hearing the ‘true’ sound coming out of the monitors. Soft furnishing and wall hangings can help dampen unhelpful sound reflections too, but it’s learning how your room actually behaves that is the most crucial thing here. If you have a good idea of how the shape and nature of your room affects what your music sounds like, then this will be a huge help when producing and making critical decisions. Again, this information is learned by listening and comparing in other environments, and then going back and adjusting your mix accordingly.

Another low-end issue that can affect samples is this: you scour your Dad’s old records and finally find a cool snippet of audio – it’s got drums, it’s got bass but most importantly it’s got a superb groove. So far, we’re winning. So you sample it, chop it, edit it and loop it and it’s sounding great – until you compare it to a contemporary song when you realise that older tracks often lack the power and impact of modern recordings: they simply don’t have the huge, precision-engineered low end that we’re used to, and so it sounds thin in comparison. You can encounter a similar issue if you pitch a sample up: you start to lose bass information and it starts to sound thin and weak. In this situation, before you start reaching for the bass EQ, you could try a couple of other things:

If it’s a bassline or full track groove that you’ve sampled, you could try playing a sub-bass underneath it – this will increase the low-end impact without affecting the character of the sample – although you’ll need to play it very tightly to make it work. The second, and easier option might be to try using a bass-enhancer plugin – most DAWs come with bass enhancers and of course, there are plenty of external plugins available that will do the same job of generating lower end harmonics to beef up your bass.

There’s More To Bass Than Meets The Ear

Another thing that is useful to remember is that bass and kick drum samples don’t just contain bass frequencies, they are often rich in harmonics and aside from their fundamental frequency will often have lots of other sonic information present as well, including plenty of mid-range and sometimes even some top end too. Experiment with gentle, narrow mid-range EQ boosts to see if that gives your bass sound that extra impact you’re looking for. Alternatively, you could apply some distortion, overdrive or saturation which can introduce some higher frequency content to help the sound cut through the mix. Logic’s stock overdrive is great for this, and generally speaking, tape emulation plugins such as U-he Satin, or UA’s Studer A800 do an excellent job at adding some harmonics.

Getting the low end right is essential if you want to make tunes that seriously bang in the club. There’s no one easy trick, it’s a combination of a number of small techniques that add up to great sounding bass. We have only briefly touched on EQ which we’ll delve deeper into in part 2. Meanwhile, if you’re just starting out in your production career, we recommend that you: start to train your ears, listen to your work on lots of different speakers, and compare your tracks to those by your favourite producers. Do these three things and you’ll definitely be on the right track.

Click here to read part 2…

1. Start With The Most Important Elements

Decide what the most important elements of your track should be, and begin with those. This way you can start to build a hierarchy that will help you make decisions about what should have prominence – and how much of the ‘landscape’ it should take up. This might sound obvious, but it’s amazing how much we’re generally drawn to the drums as an automatic starting point. Whilst this works for drum & bass and most house or techno, drums are clearly not the focal point in pop, jazz or ambient records and so it really makes no sense to start your mixing process with those. If your song is a pop song, then almost all of the time the vocal will need to be the most prominent element of the mix – if it’s a jazz record, then it’s likely you’ll want to hear the keyboard or the piano as the most dominant instrument. Decide, and then mix accordingly, bringing in each element in order of importance.

2. Write Drunk, Mix Sober

We’ve all been there – you’re feeling inspired during a late one in the studio, perhaps after a great gig or life-changing night out, but I’d strongly caution against making critical mixing decisions during these sessions. As the old literary saying goes, “write drunk, edit sober”, and I think it’s sound advice for a few reasons:

Many drugs, especially alcohol, create a false sense of confidence in us, and this extends to our decision making. It’s also been found that (time for the science), alcohol actually changes our hearing response and the linked study notes that “that alcohol impairs the processing of tones, frequency change and novel sounds at different phases of auditory processing similarly in both hemispheres”. Beginning the writing process with the help of intoxicants can be beneficial as we tend to be less inhibited, more in the ‘flow’ state and initially this can help us to be more inventive, more child-like and creative, reducing the insecurity that often plagues us once we start to over-analyse what we’re doing.

So mixing when intoxicated might be fun, but in my experience, from a critical and technical perspective, it rarely yields good results. Everybody is different, of course, and people react to intoxicants in different ways. You genuinely might do your best work under these conditions and I find it to be true that the more experienced you are, the better you’ll be whatever the conditions. Most of the great music of the ’60s and ’70s (and many other times) was recorded and/or mixed by musicians and engineers high on all sorts of substances. Music and drug culture are inextricably linked and there’s no getting away from that – so if you choose to indulge, please do it in a safe way that minimises the harm to yourself and others. That being said, my advice is always to do final mixes after a good night’s sleep, with fresh ears and a clear head, especially if it’s an area you’re still trying to master and understand.

3. Less Is More – Refine Your Arrangement.

The mixdown process is also a great opportunity to refine your arrangement. My first bit of advice here would be to try and avoid being strictly wedded to a certain arrangement if it hinders your ability to mix the record well. For instance, If you’re having trouble getting a fairly harsh-sounding synth solo to sit with a lead vocal part, whilst you could try eq’ing some of the harshness or lowering the volume of one of the tracks, it might be a better solution to consider moving the synth solo so that it comes in once the lead vocal stops and leaves a more natural space for it. Making these types of creative decisions can save you hours of frustration trying to get 2 parts to play together in a cohesive way. In addition, Once you start to add processing to channels or groups, you may notice that certain parts of the mix now have more energy or an emphasised tonality and should take on a more (or less!) significant role in the overall musical idea. Very often I find that elements that I was set on at the start of the creation process and that I felt would be crucial and basically indispensable to the record can now be removed completely without negatively affecting the overall feel, energy and vibe of the track. If you’re making club-focused music, this is especially important since the more elements you have, the more information has to be translated (and is likely to get lost) over a loud club system. You’re far better off having the minimum number of excellently produced and mixed elements as you can get by with.

4. Take Breaks, And Rest Your Ears Often.

Taking regular breaks is important, especially when mixing. Not only does it prevent ear fatigue and reduce potential longer-term ear damage when listening at high volumes for long periods, but it acts as a kind of ‘ear reset’ so that once you go back to the mix, you should be able to hear different elements pop out at you. I’d recommend something like a 5 or 10-minute break after each hour of mixing. Keeping the volume at a reasonable level will assist you too. If your mix doesn’t sound right at a low volume, turning it up won’t help you. You might think it sounds better, but that’s a flaw in the way our brains process audio. I cannot stress the importance of keeping the volume at a comfortable level. It’s fine to kick it up at certain points to check for energy, or impact or clarity, but do this sparingly. Your ears, and neighbours, will thank you.

5. Reach For The Reference Tracks.

Reference tracks have become an integral part of my mixing process. I personally buy all my music as AIFF files so that these same tracks can double as high-quality reference tracks, as well as being used in my DJ sets. Sometimes I’ll feel great when I’m A/B’ing a reference master that I really like, and I can hear that my track sounds pretty close to it, and sometimes it has the total opposite effect if I can hear that my mix isn’t sounding anything like it. It’s important to volume balance because of course, a mastered track is always going to be louder than the one you’re currently working on (unless you’ve got lots of processing on your master output). Sometimes I’ll use a compressor and a limiter to achieve a somewhat comparable volume while I’m mixing but for the most part I prefer to mix without these. 2 plugins I would recommend here are ADAPTR Metric AB and Perception, and although both are perhaps aimed more at the mastering stage than the mixing stage, they’re really useful pieces of software that I utilise – both are easy to set up and both have the benefit of level matching your audio first so that you can hear if you’re actually improving your track, rather than just making it louder.

6. Get To Know Your Room.

If you haven’t already realised, your mixing environment will lie to you. Unless you’re fortunate enough to be working in a purpose-built, perfectly treated and acoustically tuned space then your room will be interacting with and affecting the sound once it leaves the speakers. Simply put, sound waves travel from your monitors through the room, and then behave in a particular way depending on which surfaces they hit. Without getting deep into acoustics (a subject which is way beyond the scope of this article), this is something that you need to be aware of because the decisions you make when mixing will be based on the (most likely skewed) frequency response and behaviour of your mixing environment. This can lead to all sorts of issues in relation to bass levels, stereo width, comb filtering and so on.

There are several ways that you can try to reduce the negative effects of the space you’re working in, and I’d recommend spending a little bit of time on this, especially as many people now are using spare bedrooms and basements, etc as project/home studios. If you’re starting out making music it’s highly unlikely that you’ll have given anywhere near as much thought to your mixing environment as you have to what monitors or interface you’d like to buy. You can ‘get away’ with not having a perfect room as long as you understand what’s going on with your room. So here’s my advice:

- Reference tracks – whilst sitting in your mix position, listen to lots of music, preferably in WAV or AIFF format from the same or similar genres and start to get a feel for how they sound in your room.
- Consider purchasing a cheap measurement mic and running some sweeps using Fuzzmeasure or Sonarworks. The software is fairly pricey, but for both of these applications, there’s a free trial that you can use to give you an idea of the issues your room might be hiding. Even if you choose not to purchase, the measurements you get can still be helpful in knowing exactly where you stand in terms of frequency response. Sonarworks also do headphone calibration as well, which enables you to work on headphones much more confidently and achieve a result that’s much closer to what it would be if you were working on monitors.

- A Subpac is a great solution for judging the low-end of your track. Whilst they’re not perfect (you’ll need to get the volume right by using reference tracks) and can be a little rattly when pushed too hard, they are useful for honing in on how your kick and bass are interacting and for giving you an idea of just how much low-end is below the frequency range that your monitors can pick up. ‘Feeling’ the music more closely to how you’d experience it in a club can also help you in getting a vibe from what you’re working on.
- Lastly, having a great working relationship with a mastering engineer that you trust and can talk to openly about any mistakes you might be making or any improvements you can make, can be very helpful. I use Tank Edwards at Warm Audio Mastering who I speak to on a regular basis and who’s honest enough to tell me when there’s something I can fix in the mix to enable him to deliver a better master. In addition, he’s been to my studio so he has an understanding of my mixing environment and why I’m making the choices I am during mix sessions.

7. Observe The landscape.

‘Landscape’ is a term which I love to use as an analogy to mixing audio, because in the same way that you view a photo or painting when you listen to a sound recording you are hearing an audio landscape. Some parts of the recording might be close and upfront, and draw your focus (like vocals, or lead guitars), some may be panned left or right in the stereo field, and some may be way back in the distance (such as washed-out vocals, or subtle sound fx), and many of the sounds you hear will likely have been processed with the specific intention of making them ‘sit’ in a particular space in that picture. When we talk about ‘presence’ or ‘clarity’ or ‘stereo field’ what we really mean is ‘the space this element should occupy in relation to other elements’. Not every element of our mix can be upfront and draw our focus. Not every instrument in our mix can occupy the same space, sonically. Creating a sense of space and depth can be achieved by thinking of your audio in this way and I personally find that it actually makes things easier when you accept that not everything can be the focus, and doesn’t need to occupy a dominant space in your mix.

8. Find The Sweet Spot.

I believe that every instrument/channel in your mix has a ‘sweet spot’. A sweet spot from a mixing perspective is defined as being neither too loud nor too quiet – in other words, the optimal volume as it relates to its place in your audio landscape. A good way to find this sweet spot is to come up with a range for each track in your mix. You can do this slowly turning the channel down in volume until it feels too quiet, and you’re struggling to hear it. Make a note of that volume, because you know it’s not going to be any lower than that. Then, reset the channel back to where you initially had it, and turn it up, 1db at a time. Pretty quickly you’ll reach a point where it’s very obviously too loud. Make a note of this volume, because you know it won’t be any higher than that. Your ‘sweet spot’ for each channel or instrument is somewhere between these 2 points. You may also benefit from some subtractive eq when trying to get 2 parts to work together.

9. Create A Separate ‘Mixdown’ Project File.

When starting the mixing process, I’d recommend creating a ‘Mixdown’ version of your project file as an alternative so that if you wish to go back to the original and start over, then you have that option. I have been guilty of the overzealous processing of channels more times than I’d like to admit, and this has led to the track sounding unnatural, lifeless and too far away from the original feel and sound that I intended for the record. Having the original version and being able to ‘go back to the drawing board’ as it were, has been a lifesaver on many occasions.

10. Soothe Your (Resonant) Troubles Away.

Soothe 2 by Oeksound has been an absolute gamechanger for me. I cannot recommend this plugin highly enough. It’s one of those plugins, much like a couple I have from DMGAudio, that just make you go “Wow. How did I ever get by without this?” Oeksound describe it as a ‘dynamic resonance suppressor, which identifies problematic resonances on the fly and applies matching reduction automatically.’ In simple terms, it reduces harshness and sibilance, especially on hi-hats and vocals, and it does it in a way that’s constantly adjusting to the incoming audio (dynamic). It tames pianos and plucky instruments and can be used even as a creative sound design tool if pushed to its limits. Tip 10 is dedicated just to this plugin, it’s that good.

And Finally: Perfect Doesn’t Exist, So Stop Chasing It.

Mixing, in it’s most simplistic form, is about actively listening to the audio coming from the speakers and then making decisions based on what you’re hearing. It’s about balancing the individual elements in a way that maximises the potential and emotion that you (or the producer of the record) intended. Like anything else, the more of this you do, the better at it you’ll become. It’s very easy to get lured in by the belief that spending more time on something will make it better, and very often this isn’t the case. There’s a famous story that Bruce Swedien tells about mixing Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean 91 times, before eventually going back to mix 2, which was the version released on the ‘Thriller’ album and is the one that we all know and love.

My point here is that even a record which we think of as perfect, probably isn’t to the people that made it, and they likely went through the same process of self-doubt that you are. The longer you spend on something, and the more you tweak it, the more you run the risk of losing perspective (and your sanity). For every record I’ve ever made, I could pick out 2 or 3 things which stick out to me as being ‘wrong’, or that I would have done differently, or that I feel could be improved. At some point, we have to commit to a mix being finished and let go of the fear of judgment that might come when we say “this is done. It’s finished.”