The Low EndSo, part 1 was a little intro and a reminder that the
bare minimum of taking the time to set the levels and panning can do wonders for the sound of your track.
Now, everyone has a different approach but high on your list of things to do should be to address the low end. By that I mean anything around 100hz or below. This would be Bass guitar, Kick drum or anything playing around that range (piano an octave or so below middle C and down, tuba, Upright Bass, etc etc).
This area is difficult to deal with for a number of reasons - the ears are less sensitive to it, small speakers cannot accurately reproduce it, it is heavily affected by room acoustics etc etc.
For these reasons, it's important to have everything going on down there as clear as possible and also to limit the amount of tracks contributing to the low end.
To do this, we make EQ cuts.
EQ'ing'Equalizing' is the process of boosting or cutting specific frequencies in a track. Every single DAW/Recording software I can think of has, at the bare minimum, a very simple EQ plugin. For the next task I'm just using Cubase's standard parametric EQ.
I've decided I want to leave the low end all for the kick drum and bass guitar. So starting with the drums (leaving out the kick), I make cuts or apply 'high pass filters' on everything, having the cutoff point around 100hz.
Note: for each instrument, the point at which their isn't any interesting/musical sound coming from it varies. E.G on the toms the resonant frequencies were around 130Hz, so I applied my cutoff points here. Everything below was just rumble-y sounds.You should experiment to find the best places to cut on each thing. Applying these filters can also have the effect that the high end is now more clear - your ear no longer has to listen past all this low frequency noise and rumble to make out other details. You may even find that you want to bring down the volume of other things such as cymbals after making all these EQ cuts.
Here is a clip of the drums before any EQ'ing:
http://snd.sc/rs5vVjHere is a clip after EQ'ing and applying any new volume changes:
http://snd.sc/mQTCHCI've also applied a fairly broad cut around 2.5Khz in the whole drum track. I want the drums to sound in the background compared to the rest of the song and the ears are more sensitive around this frequency. So it, stands to reason that anything with a lot going on around there will sound more 'in your face'.
Pretty subtle changes, right? But then apply this across the whole mix - I'm gonna put cuts on every instrument except the bass.
Automation Ok, I'm going to leave the low end there for now. There are plenty more things you can do to improve it, but I wanna keep these tips simple and quick to implement.
Ok, so next, I'm gonna apply a bit of automation. Automation refers to the process of changing the volume of a track throughout the song. A fade out is a form of automation. Automation can be applied to many more things (EQ, the level of different effects, etc etc). I'm not good enough to really feel confident doing much more than volume automation.
Again, all recording software I know of has pretty advanced systems for implementing automation. At it's 'lowest' form, it is simply moving the volume fader up and down as the track progresses.
You may have noticed that in the chorus section of the song (that begins 'In the darkest of forests' around 2:15) that the vocal is fairly hard to make out - it comes and goes. We need to automate the volume! So, I've gone into to cubase's automation panel and brought up the volume on words that are too quiet, or put it back down on louder parts. Here's a screenshot of the result:
The upper orange track is the waveform and the lower track shows the volume changes throughout. They are of the order of 1-3db. In the context of the rest of the music, these kind of changes are very hard to actually pick out individually, but the overall vocal is much clearer for it.
Now, what I'm going to do is go away and apply automation to all the vocal tracks I think is necessary. For this amount of vocals, it will probably take around an hour, but is quite worth it.
Automation is also useful for places where there are no vocals or not much is going on - for example at the end of a phrase the vocals might drop out, but the drums might do a cool little fill which is buried in the rest of the music. I'd bring up the volume of that little fill to add a little more excitement to the track.
In the next part, I'll see what difference all this automation has made, then go over more EQ'ing and compression - 2 standard but often confusing techniques for new recordists