Some of the easiest ways to improve your recordings are also the cheapest. In fact, the most effective techniques require no money at all.
Here’s a collection of tips you might find helpful the next time a pricey piece of gear stands between you and great recordings.
Help from others
Have a friend perform: Home recording, especially for singer/songwriters and electronic musicians, often involves a single musician writing and recording all the music. But artists in this situation can find themselves too close to the song, at mix time, to make decisions critically.
Working with other musicians might initially complicate recording and mixing. However, creating a great mix depends, in part, on your ability to remove unnecessary details, and most of us are more comfortable objectively critiquing someone else’s work. So asking a friend (or some professionals) to perform a track or two will ultimately make mixing easier, and more effective.
Get more ears on the mix: With any task requiring attention to detail, it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees. And so it goes with mixing. A second or third opinion can draw your attention back to details you’ve glossed over.
And outside opinions needn’t come from other musicians and engineers. (Although the homerecording.com MP3 mixing clinic is a great source for free advice.) Often, regular listeners give the best feedback because they don’t think in technical terms about the production, and instead form their thoughts on how the song makes them feel. And some of the best mix feedback I’ve gotten has come from children, who are unconditioned by musical convention.
Listen on multiple systems: Hearing a mix through different speakers is a little like getting a second opinion. And professional mixing engineers rely on this technique. Chris Lord Alge, for example, keeps a portable radio near his console for checking mixes:
[E]very client who comes in here wants to hear their mixes on it. If it doesn’t sound good through 2-inch speakers on your little boom box, what’s the point? It’s got to sound big on a small speaker.
Simplify …
Avoid dogma: Our hobby (or profession, if you’re lucky) is plagued with religious arguments, like “tube gear sounds better,” and “analog sounds warmer than digital.” Regardless of each argument’s merit, these dogmatic issues over-complicate the recording process, and distract us from the importance of technique – which, of course, costs nothing!
Cut. Ruthlessly: As musicians, our egos push us to put everything we’ve got into every part we record. But virtuoso performances and great recordings don’t necessarily go together. The whole, as they say, is often greater than the sum of the parts.
In most song arrangements, over-instrumentation usually just leads to clutter. And along with being more difficult to mix, clutter rarely sounds good.
Make every part do work: Ensure that every part competing for the listener’s attention is supposed to compete for the listener’s attention.
Practice
Practice your performance before hitting record: The benefits of practice should be obvious to all musicians, but home recording fosters a “write as you record” approach to song creation.
Practice takes time. But it needn’t hamper the creative process; and in most cases it will ultimately save time. Though the tracks may take longer to record, it’s far easier – and quicker – to mix a set of well-performed, polished performances.
Not only do the performances themselves benefit from practice, but the final mix will sound more professional.
Use reference CDs: No single technique will do more to improve the quality of your mixes. Working with a reference mix is, in some ways, like getting a free lesson on mixing from a professional engineer.
Practice mixing when you’re not in the studio: Every mixing engineer should spend time listening critically to professional mixes. Set aside some time every day, say 10 minutes, to immerse yourself in a mix someone else has done. Consider the panning, which instruments take your focus, and how the focus changes as the song evolves. Try to determine the effects in use, and why they were chosen. In modern pop and rock mixes, the interplay between the lead vocal and the snare drum is particularly important, as is the bass guitar/kick drum relationship, so spend some time analyzing these parts in detail.
See Also: Create more professional home recordings
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Tags: arrangement, mixing, professional-engineers
88 comments
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I’ve always paid attention to the kick/bass relationship, but hadn’t consciously thought of the snare and lead vocal as a “critical pair” before.
Hope to see more frequent posts soon! :)
Thanks Keith. I’m doing my darnedest to up the posting frequency again.
> hadn’t consciously thought of the snare and lead vocal as a “critical pair”
Ya, mostly in modern pop/rock mixes, where the backbeat drives the song. (Not so much of an issue in jazz, and older vocal-driven music.)
There’s also a recent tendency toward a mid-range-heavy hi-hat sound (think The Strokes, and Mute Math) which makes the snare/hi-hat relationship more critical, at least in that style of music.
Hey, this post was a common sense reminder for a lot of us. Thanks very much to Hometracked for saying what many of us needed to hear: don’t get so caught up in all the wonderful potential of modern recording that you forget that basics of good sound. I loved it. Thanks for this great website.
Thanks for the kind words, Mort.
The reference cd is the big one in my opinion. Getting a killer mix on your monitors is one thing. Getting a killer mix that still sounds killer next to X amazing sounding cd is a totally different thing.
Brandon
Man. I’m very glad I found this blog. I’ve spent the last two hours reading back posts. I am recording most of my stuff in the studio right now, but I’ve done all the pre-pro on my own first, and I wish had found this site about 6 months ago. Would have save a massive amount of frustration and time.
Thanks
I’m using a trick to reveal the quality on vocals :
Put the song on a headphone, leave it on a desk , and listen to it.
If the songs till touches you, it’s really good !
Or ?
Cheers, Steve
I’ve been telling my friends to get a second opinion on their mixes for years! I’ll be sending them this way… vindication!
also, what mixes do you use for reference mixes? I’d be curious to hear
Here’s an answer for Jim Roberts’ question… first, I try to listen to great-sounding recordings in whatever style I’m planning to record in (i.e. guitar-and-vocal sounds different from, say, metal). But here are some reference points for me, albums I listen to specifically for recording and production quality:
Fleetwood Mac: Rumours, Tusk
The Carpenters: Gold (seriously!)
Wilco: Summerteeth, YHT, Sky Blue Sky
Flaming Lips: The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi vs the Pink Robots
Radiohead: OK Computer
Eagles: Hotel California
David Bowie: Scary Monsters
Neil Young: Harvest
Neko Case: Blacklisted
Nick Drake: Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, Pink Moon
Pink Floyd: Animals, DSOTM
Queens of the Stone Age: Songs for the Deaf
Richard and Linda Thompson: I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight
Sandy Denny: The Northstar Grassmen and the Ravens
Son Volt: Trace
Steve Tibbetts: Exploded View, Safe Journey
Tom Waits: Rain Dogs
(the semi-alphabetical order suggests a surf through my iPod)
All of these albums, besides being great albums in their own right, are masterpieces of recording and production in some way or another, and I touch on them all for ideas about how things should sound.
Cool Songs, dave ! Production sounds dated for me though …
I prefer the more contemporary sounds. … maroon5 or so, they’re louder and more kick ass !!!! ;-)
I have read the tips and they are very useful and I have seen a major improvement in my songs and mixes in general because I am a bit more organised in practising before I record and the biggest tip I like you have mentioned is to try the song in different environments like on a car stereo. cheap old casette recorder. I also find the tip using a reference cd useful idea.
What happened to this blog ? Where is everybody !!! ?
Seriously, I love this blog. What’s going on?
I’ve found proper microphone placement is the first step in producing great recordings. This saves huge amounts of time during mixing. The next step is using a reference CD during EQ if you are a beginner. All said, you have to experiment to find what sounds the best.
Matt just beat me to the punch, but I was just about to say the same thing…mic placement is crucial. I also dig the suggestion of listening on separate sources. Naturally, you’ll be listening to your mix on your studio reference monitors, but also give it a listen with headphones. I normally check a mix on my home theatre system, a junky boombox, and even mix it down to a 96k mp3, just to see how the mix might sound after ruthless bitrate compressions.
Man…is my fav blog dead? I hope not…real shame.
I guess the practice part is the one that almost everybody out there misses. It’s crucial to get some practice on anything to get really good at it.
Hey Des,
You can’t emphasize enough how important “practice” is. Mixing is very much a physical exercise. You are using your senses just as much, if not more than working the numbers. A very artful dance, which is why I love it. So practice is so important.
-Hakim
Great recording blog. I hope you start posting again soon!
Malcome Gladwell claims that it taks 10000 hours to become an expert at anything, so practice away folks.
We had a similar question asked at RecordingQuestions.com some time back, but I really like the gorilla feeling behind this.
Great little checklist for self recording artists and new producers. Great blog you have going here.
Excellent blog with great comments too.
Playing a mix in your car and a cheap boom box certainly is a good test. Walking away after a few hours mixing and coming back after your ears have rested – even a day or so later can help you get a better picture too. Also a final headphone check to see if there are any other issues – such as a momentary drop in one channel (I have had this happen) which the monitors didn’t reveal.
Keep this blog going, des!! I just stumbled upon it and have found something useful in EVERY post!! GREAT stuff, this is EXACTLY what I need!
Great post. Spec ially reference CD’s. Sometimes you get so into your song that you lose perspective. Listening to something else will re-tune your ears real quick.
Avoid Dogma…. right on.
Great post.
HEY! i love this blog! it didn’t dawn on me that this last entry was dated so, um, UN-recently. but there’s a crapbag of great info here. i owe everything i know about acoustically treating a small room to your blog and the amazing adventures in link-following that has resulted. thanks, and i hope you’re well and decide to write more.–mark
My top tip for mixing is, once the mix is sounding pretty good on your monitors, have a laptop available.
Take a mix output from you mixer, into the line input of the laptop and mix using the laptop speakers for at least 15 minutes (take care not to make too many bass judgements whilst in these speakers).
Pay special attention to how the vocals and guitars/mid range elements are balancing against each other.
If you are subtle, when you put your main monitors back on you will be amazed at how well the vocals sit in the mix!
Just my two penneth worth…..
Joel
Univibe Audio
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