Instruments that are likely to cause problems in the lower-mids area such as guitars are often panned to the extreme left and right. This is more of an enhancement at this stage — hopefully by this point you will have dealt with most of the muddiness already when you were mixing in mono. Your room that you are mixing in could be the cause of some of your muddiness problems.
The same can be said for the speakers that you are listening on. Your environment and equipment could be adding or removing bass and lower mid frequencies, not giving you a true representation of the sound of the mix. This could lead to a tendency to increase or decrease these frequencies too much, resulting in either a boomy or thin sounding mix. You could be getting your mix to sound great on your system, but once you listen to it on another system in the car, kitchen stereo, living room hi-fi, etc , suddenly you are hearing a muffled or brittle mix.
I highly recommend you read my guide on the best place to record at home. This should help you decide on which room to record in if there is a choice, and how to set-up and make the most of your room for the very best results.
You might have a mix that is inconsistent e. This is usually an indication that one or more tracks would benefit from some compression. Compression evens out the sound, making quieter sections of a track louder and louder parts quieter. Listen carefully for the problem instruments. Hopefully by this stage you have identified the tracks that were causing the muddiness, and may have applied some EQ to them.
Compression can add the final touch, making that EQ stay consistent throughout the whole song. Although the mix no longer sounds muffled, it just sounds a little bit flat or lifeless. This may be a time to consider boosting the high-end of one or more of the higher instruments. Be careful here though; it is easy to overdo it and end up with a mix that is too bright or even hissy.
Here is some of my favorite home studio gear … Thanks for reading this article. So right around from to maybe , we have this little valley, and then things seem fairly smooth from there on. So I have a little bit of a hole here.
But this is really helpful information, right? The best way to do it is to go back to the mix itself and try to figure out how to fill in that hole using the tracks that you have in your mix. So this might mean going back to a track where you might have cut some of that area out and maybe backing off on that cut a little bit. Now the last resort is to go to the mix bus and fix it there. But you really want to try to fix these problems whenever possible within the mix itself.
The mix is also extremely important here. Of course, you want some sounds to stand out - the hooks, lead vocals and so on - but it can be jarring when other sounds that make up the arrangement are so poorly mixed that they end up taking over we've heard tinny percussion loops that take your head off, and sub-basses that blow your speaker cones… we could go on and on!
At the risk of stating the obvious, one of the main problems with your average demo is that it's just that: average. It lacks that certain something that will grab the listener's ear and make the track stand out from the crowd. And as that crowd is getting increasingly, well, crowded, as more and more people discover the joys of at-home music making, nowadays any tune worth its salt needs some kind of hook to make it instantly noticeable and enduringly memorable.
A great hook can potentially be pretty much anything - it can consist of a bass sound or part, a melody, an effect or a vocal trick. Quite often, though, just one will do - one amazing effect or riff that makes the listener want to listen again as soon as the track is finished, and has them humming it for the rest of the day. Get this right and you've won half the battle. Getting the right 'feel' on a track is probably the single most important consideration when composing and mixing.
Getting the groove wrong will destroy the heart and soul of a dance track, and even an ambient, grooveless piece of music needs to have feel. Part of producing great tracks is capturing the feel and enhancing the groove. If you want something a bit more laidback, slow things down and add a bit of swing.
Beyond that, there are myriad subtle techniques you can use to define your beats and make them match the overall feel of your track. Learn them and apply them. Beats define your groove, but you should be aware that they can also destroy it. While time-tested sounds and tricks have their place and can sometimes be exactly what a track needs, many producers unthinkingly borrow the obvious bits of a genre and just throw them in willy-nilly.
This advice extends to how you use your DAW. Beware of throwing something into an arrangement simply because it fits, or automatically letting your software stretch a part to the right tempo just because you can. And then, of course, we have synth presets - yes, they can sound great, but if you're using a preset because it sounds out of this world, you can bet that it'll be instantly recognisable to everyone else who owns that synth, and that they will shake their heads disapprovingly. This kind of preset snobbery is wrong in many ways - presets are created to be used, after all - but the more 'out there' a sound is, the more obvious its source will be, so at least tweak it a little to make it your own.
There's really no excuse for dodgy tuning, but out-of-key vocals, clashing melodies and unintentionally obvious pitch correction are still common demo demons that simply make us angry. To all culprits, we say: there are two flaps of gristle on the sides of your head called 'ears' - use 'em!
In sculpting the lower midrange I think simply focusing on trying to retain as much as possible, rather than cut away as much as possible, will fix a thin mix as it is happening. The visual existence of a strange looking EQ curve can really get in the way of an honest assessment of what needs to happen. Sometimes an arrangement is just thin.
In this case, we have a few other tools at our disposal. We can fill out the sound through the use of reverb and delay. Traditionally, these effects are used to create a sense of space and depth. However, any time we are putting something like reverb into a mix, we are actually generating a new sound.
And with that sound comes rhythm, tone, and sonic content. If we are thoughtful in our approach, we can construct ambiences that not only provide dimensionality to the mix but also aid in filling out an otherwise thin arrangement.
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