Its hard to visualise sometimes when in the sound mixing stage of sound production how you are supposed to construct or piece together a piece of music. Its like a puzzle that you have been given all of the pieces to and have to put them together into some sort of cohesive order and layout.
I like to use a wall of sound approach when piecing together a song initially.
The Grid
You have to use all of the tools at your disposal when mixing sound and basically you have a horizontal plane that you can use to place sound on and a vertical plane of frequencies that you can manipulate to make sure all the right frequencies are being used and the wrong ones are not.
The Horizontal Plane (PAN)
Using the pan function of your DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) or analogue controller you can control where on the horizontal plane each instrument sits. This allows you to create stereo balance, or even out the audio weight across the stereo picture. It also allows you to create a feeling of distance between instruments and clarity. Panning is one step in reducing “mud”. Mud is the awful sound of instruments/vocals etc overlapping one another and competing for audio space resulting in a cluttered, messy sound. During panning we allocate a position on the horizontal plane to each instrument, voice or other sound within the song.
Easy enough right? Well if there is only a few sounds then yes I suppose that could still sound ok. But what happens when you add drums and vocals?
As we can see this will create “mud” as the instruments compete for the same space on the frequency spectrum and some are in the same position on the PAN.
In this situation panning is not going to be enough to create clarity and evenness of sound. This is where frequency filtering comes into play.
High and low pass filters
High and low pass filters filter out unwanted frequencies from selected tracks. The high pass filter allows you to eliminate any frequencies above a certain threshold and the low pass filter allows you to eliminate frequencies below a certain threshold. I use both of these filters even if its only subtle.
By using only the intended audible frequencies only and eliminating “noise” this will help you to not only have the individual instrument or other track sound better and clearer but also help your puzzle piece slot into the “Wall of sound” and improve the overall picture.
By using filters you are essentially arranging your puzzle pieces vertically. Once you start using these filters you will notice a cleaner and more professional sounding mix almost immediately.
I will go into further detail with a detailed post about filters in future posts but the basic usage is to apply the filter with the solo track playing and reduce the frequency range (usually the filter inserts will have a handle slider) gradually until you can hear it affecting the instrument sound and stop before it cuts into the frequencies you want to hear.
There are a lot of unneeded frequencies on tracks and removing them will clean up your sound dramatically. Giving each track a place on the horizontal plane will achieve stereo balance and also assist in clarity and clean mixes.
Visually this is represented in the grid below. By giving each track a place on the horizontal plane (PAN) and in the vertical plane using frequency filtering, we start to create a clean and balanced “wall of sound” where each track or instrument is not fighting another for audibility and the left and right stereo picture is balanced.
Hopefully this guide on PAN and filters has helped your understanding of creating a clear and balanced sound on your next project. Please leave a comment or question below and keep the discussion going. I will be back with more posts soon.