REMEMBER: You can use different parameters at different points in the song. In the end, mess around with panning and tuning and EQing until it works with the other instruments. Then dial it back until it sounds like one big thick vocal sound instead of two distinctly different vocals. Do this so you can clearly differentiate the two tracks. At first set one vocal track 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 semi-tones higher or lower as the original vocal track. Instead of hard left and hard right, 3/4s left and 3/4s right.Īnd TUNE one of the two vocal tracks so it is not exactly the same as the other copy. Experiment with how far to go in each direction. Copy the vocal track and pan one track to the left and one to the right. It's hard to tell in the car, but if you listen to say Led Zeppelin with headphones on you'll hear Jimmy's guitar is coming from a particular spot when playing at the same time as vocals.Īlso, try thickening your vocals. Listen to music you like with headphones on and you'll notice that the guitar sound is coming from X-direction, the bass is Y-direction, etc. In addition to EQ, you can and should pan the instruments to their own space in the mix. Wash, rinse, repeat for about two weeks, and you'll have something passable. Then go back and fix the things you heard in the mix that time. Go get in the car and drive around and listen to it on the car stereo or in your headphones after talking a walk and letting your ears rest. Keep working with it.įinally, know that you can only mix and adjust the EQ and all that for about 45 minutes to an hour before your ears become "tired" and stop relaying information to your brain correctly.Įxport your mix. EQ is as much black magic as it is art and science, and you will spend the next 137 years trying to figure it out, and never feel you have it quite "right". but to get the bass to sit right in the mix, you may have to cut a LOT of the bass and boost the low-mids! It seems counter-intuitive, but if the bass frequencies are being occupied by the kick drum and the keyboard player's left hand, to make the bass cut through and sound good you may need to make it sound weirdly "honky" and mid-rangey. Because when you solo the bass guitar (my personal instrument) you may have a fantastic boomy bass tone. If the midrange is cranked up on everything, it is going to sound muddy. Sonically, each instrument needs to sit in its own natural frequencies. Make that snare sound like it is in a big room, the guitar like it is in a small room, and the vocals right up close with little reverb and delay. Something with more reverb is heard to be farther away than something with less reverb. So pan the guitars and bass a little bit (20%) left and right, keep the drums and bass in the middle.ĭepth is defined by reverb. the guitarist is over there on the right, and the bass player is on the left, the drummer and singer are in the middle. Space is defined horizontally by what is panned to the left and right. This is done with panning, EQ, and reverb. Give each instrument its own "sonic space" to live in. It's amazing how quickly your ear will notice when something is balanced properly, if you START FROM ZERO DB. Slowly increase the volume, track by track, until it "sounds right". Turn the volume down to 0 on every track.
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