How to get a clearer mix!

R

RuSty1

New member
I've been learning the basics of making electronic music so I'm just a beginner. I mixed and mastered about 3 songs. I know how to achieve louder mixes but I can't find any info on making a mix clearer. My newest project is here


To me it just doesn't sound clear. The instruments just don't stand out as much. They don't pop. The percussion just isn't punchy.

With this project I've basically have this on the master chain (In Ableton): OTT Multiband compressor (33% dry/wet) -> EQ 8 -> Mix Gel Compressor -> Limiter(Not very hard at all)

Any tips on creating a better clearer mix would be appreciated!
 
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RuSty1 said:
I've been learning the basics of making electronic music so I'm just a beginner. I mixed and mastered about 3 songs. I know how to achieve louder mixes but I can't find any info on making a mix clearer. My newest project is here


To me it just doesn't sound clear. The instruments just don't stand out as much. They don't pop. The percussion just isn't punchy.

With this project I've basically have this on the master chain (In Ableton): OTT Multiband compressor (33% dry/wet) -> EQ 8 -> Mix Gel Compressor -> Limiter(Not very hard at all)

Any tips on creating a better clearer mix would be appreciated!
Click to expand...

Clearity is a lot about defining what sound sources need to cut through and by how much. When you evaluate a mix and the evaluation shows that the elements that are expected to cut through the mix by the degree you are expecting don't do so, then many times you might understand the mix to lack clearity. Furthermore, an rms dense mix - one that has a lot of sound sources with low peak to rms ratios sitting on top of each other - add to the issue. Beyond this you can on top of this have a number of wrong balances in regards to depth, width, height, warmth. It all sums up to an unclear sounding mix.

To combat the issue, you need to handle both the rms and the peaks of the tracks. For instance in order for drums to cut through they need to duck the peaks of the other sound sources. The vocals need to duck the remaining sound sources and so on. This given that your definition of clearity is that the drums cut through the mix the most, meaning that they are totally "free" in their dynamics within the mix. Drums can sound very nice when they are totally "free" inside of the mix (from a dynamic perspective), which is why it many times sounds great not to run them through the master bus brickwall peak limiter.

Clear sounding mixes also have the right EQ filtering in the lows, mids and highs, hi-passing the low frequencies being one of the more important filtering moves for clearity.

In your case I would say that side chaining the drums against the rest and bypassing them from master bus brickwall peak limiting will bring an additional amount of clearity into your mix. Please do so and post the result. This will prove my point.

Also keep in mind that clearity is to a great degree achieved through gain staging. When the mix is in balance and you place the mix in the resonance peak, then typically the rms levels will be high enough to move the sound sources far enough from one another, this depending on the arrangement of course. If your audio interface won't allow the voltage level of that signal, then that clearity will be impossible to achieve. (although you might have a lot of other master ingredients that to some degree compensate for this)

But from here, the right compressor side chaining moves will definitely move you to the front seat....

On a side note. Very clear sounding mixes often turn into hits because they last in the very long term. For mixes to have such a long term quality about them, you need to have various sound sources in unique resonance states inside of the mix rather than relying only on the overall mix resonance. When you play such mixes, at first you might not notice anything special, but it is as if the memory of the song is much sharper and it bugs you if you after some time don't get to hear the song again. This is optimal. For this to be possible you need to focus on achieving resonance with entirely separate signal chains on each element inside of the mix, when possible even mix them at various locations and separate internal states of being. What this does is that it makes the frequencies within the arrangement blend much better, because they are more unique inside of the mix. Hence the result is clearity. So the more uniquely creative you are about each element in the mix and each part of the song, the better. Focus on the chorus the most though, then when you know that is at a hit level in terms of its quality, you can expand your creativity from there.

And the reason for the long term value about mixes with this quality, is that it becomes too much for the brain to process on a single play. You need a lot of plays to process and integrate all of the unique resonances. Hence why it is so beautiful and why you want to play it over such a long time period.
 
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DarkRed said:
Also keep in mind that clearity is to a great degree achieved through gain staging. When the mix is in balance and you place the mix in the resonance peak, then typically the rms levels will be high enough to move the sound sources far enough from one another, this depending on the arrangement of course. If your audio interface won't allow the voltage level of that signal, then that clearity will be impossible to achieve. (although you might have a lot of other master ingredients that to some degree compensate for this)

On a side note. Very clear sounding mixes often turn into hits because they last in the very long term. For mixes to have such a long term quality about them, you need to have various sound sources in unique resonance states inside of the mix rather than relying only on the overall mix resonance. When you play such mixes, at first you might not notice anything special, but it is as if the memory of the song is much sharper and it bugs you if you after some time don't get to hear the song again. This is optimal. For this to be possible you need to focus on achieving resonance with entirely separate signal chains on each element inside of the mix, when possible even mix them at various locations and separate internal states of being. What this does is that it makes the frequencies within the arrangement blend much better, because they are more unique inside of the mix. Hence the result is clearity. So the more uniquely creative you are about each element in the mix and each part of the song, the better. Focus on the chorus the most though, then when you know that is at a hit level in terms of its quality, you can expand your creativity from there.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your help. I don't fully understand these two paragraphs above. Do you have a link or something I could look at to get a better idea of what you speaking about here?

Also I'm not quite sure how to bypass my percussion elements from the brick wall limiter in Ableton!
 
RuSty1 said:
Thanks for your help. I don't fully understand these two paragraphs above. Do you have a link or something I could look at to get a better idea of what you speaking about here?

Also I'm not quite sure how to bypass my percussion elements from the brick wall limiter in Ableton!
Click to expand...

This information I'm sharing is commercially too valuable to be available out there, so don't expect to find anything like this anywhere else out there.

Resonance is a big topic. On a very high level all objects with energy have a frequency. Slightly above that frequency you find the resonance of that frequency. The process of taking the object from its natural frequency state into its resonance state is a process of adding energy, in doing so the frequency of the object will gradually shift closer to its resonance state, which is a different frequency that represents the original frequency however in its true/pure/geometrically perfect state relative to the current density within which it currently exists. Skilled engineers "play" with this, knowing what's going on, what is required to achieve certain resonances, how to boost the perception of it, what resonances people like and so on. Most are doing it based on experience by heart, then there are engineers like me who have digged into the science behind it.

I'm a Pro Tools user so I cannot comment on the Ableton issue, but please read the manual available here:

https://cdn2-resources.ableton.com/...tatic/manual/pdf/L9Manual_EN.0f97a0bd6041.pdf
 
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DarkRed said:
Clearity is a lot about defining what sound sources need to cut through and by how much. When you evaluate a mix and the evaluation shows that the elements that are expected to cut through the mix by the degree you are expecting don't do so, then many times you might understand the mix to lack clearity. Furthermore, an rms dense mix - one that has a lot of sound sources with low peak to rms ratios sitting on top of each other - add to the issue. Beyond this you can on top of this have a number of wrong balances in regards to depth, width, height, warmth. It all sums up to an unclear sounding mix.

To combat the issue, you need to handle both the rms and the peaks of the tracks. For instance in order for drums to cut through they need to duck the peaks of the other sound sources. The vocals need to duck the remaining sound sources and so on. This given that your definition of clearity is that the drums cut through the mix the most, meaning that they are totally "free" in their dynamics within the mix. Drums can sound very nice when they are totally "free" inside of the mix (from a dynamic perspective), which is why it many times sounds great not to run them through the master bus brickwall peak limiter.

Clear sounding mixes also have the right EQ filtering in the lows, mids and highs, hi-passing the low frequencies being one of the more important filtering moves for clearity.

In your case I would say that side chaining the drums against the rest and bypassing them from master bus brickwall peak limiting will bring an additional amount of clearity into your mix. Please do so and post the result. This will prove my point.

Also keep in mind that clearity is to a great degree achieved through gain staging. When the mix is in balance and you place the mix in the resonance peak, then typically the rms levels will be high enough to move the sound sources far enough from one another, this depending on the arrangement of course. If your audio interface won't allow the voltage level of that signal, then that clearity will be impossible to achieve. (although you might have a lot of other master ingredients that to some degree compensate for this)

But from here, the right compressor side chaining moves will definitely move you to the front seat....

On a side note. Very clear sounding mixes often turn into hits because they last in the very long term. For mixes to have such a long term quality about them, you need to have various sound sources in unique resonance states inside of the mix rather than relying only on the overall mix resonance. When you play such mixes, at first you might not notice anything special, but it is as if the memory of the song is much sharper and it bugs you if you after some time don't get to hear the song again. This is optimal. For this to be possible you need to focus on achieving resonance with entirely separate signal chains on each element inside of the mix, when possible even mix them at various locations and separate internal states of being. What this does is that it makes the frequencies within the arrangement blend much better, because they are more unique inside of the mix. Hence the result is clearity. So the more uniquely creative you are about each element in the mix and each part of the song, the better. Focus on the chorus the most though, then when you know that is at a hit level in terms of its quality, you can expand your creativity from there.

And the reason for the long term value about mixes with this quality, is that it becomes too much for the brain to process on a single play. You need a lot of plays to process and integrate all of the unique resonances. Hence why it is so beautiful and why you want to play it over such a long time period.
Click to expand...

i was going to reply something about volumes, compressors / buscompressors and eq's, but it seems i've got a lot to learn from this post myself :P
 
Something that jumps out at me immediately is there are a lot of transients on top of each other, and I don't think there helping each other. Your chord synth has a very sharp transient that steps on the kick around 0:48. You can either roll the attack off that, or sidechain compress it with the kick as the trigger. I would vote for sidechaining, as that's common for your genre. But you can think about this with a lot of things. It's a pet peeve of mine when hats or synths are sort of "Interrupting" kick transients. You don't need those things to be as punchy as the kick, and when you duck them out of the way, you give the kick room to hit. You need that contrast.

This will also sound weird, but sidechain compression can actually make things sound more cohesive. It's weird to think about it that way, because sidechain compression is used to duck things out of the way, but sometimes a kick just has no correlation at all with another instrument. Like a pad. It's just sort of sitting on top of it. So not only will it have room to hit with sidechain compression, but you've now created a new dynamic between the kick and the pad, and the song sounds more together.

I like the energy of the track though.
 
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Thank you for listening to the track and your feedback.

I have actually side-chained the kick to the synth chords but I have all my percussive elements in one group in ableton then I side-chained the synth chords to that group. Should I up the ratio or change the threshold to bring the kick out? Should I change the way I have set up my side-chaining?

Also I've been trying to up my energy in my tracks good to see its finally getting there.
 
RuSty1 said:
Thank you for listening to the track and your feedback.

I have actually side-chained the kick to the synth chords but I have all my percussive elements in one group in ableton then I side-chained the synth chords to that group. Should I up the ratio or change the threshold to bring the kick out? Should I change the way I have set up my side-chaining?

Also I've been trying to up my energy in my tracks good to see its finally getting there.
Click to expand...

i personally don't think there's anything wrong with the ratio or threshold on your compressors, but crimsonhawk has a good point in his last reply.
try playing with the attack on your compressors, you'll see that when the kick hits, the other instruments don't really need that punch,
since the kick is providing it. anything else triggering at the same moment with it doesn't really need it, right?
to me it actually sounds pretty well balanced, considering the genre of music you're working with.
it sounds clear to me, but also loud. but i think that's what a lot of modern producers are going for.
 
maybe you have to use another effecs as chorus , multiband dynamics , and reverb in low rate. but you know ... your composition is really fine , i didn't find such a problem to listen to it. continue and good luck :)

Sitrya
 
RuSty1 said:
Thank you for listening to the track and your feedback.

I have actually side-chained the kick to the synth chords but I have all my percussive elements in one group in ableton then I side-chained the synth chords to that group. Should I up the ratio or change the threshold to bring the kick out? Should I change the way I have set up my side-chaining?

Also I've been trying to up my energy in my tracks good to see its finally getting there.
Click to expand...

I actually do agree with Jackie. The clarity isn't that bad, it's more about the way everything sounds. I can hear everything fine as it is, but I want more out of the kick for sure. I would maybe lower the sidechain threshold on the stab chords. They feel very in the way of the kick to me. But it might be the kick sample to itself.

Clarity is a little weird because people have different ideas about it. Because clarity can mean hearing a sound in isolation, and trying to make that sound as clearly heard in the context of a mix. But really, that's often a losing battle. Songs are about the sum of their parts. Clarity can mean making a sound easier to pick out, like distorting a bass sound to add harmonics. I think clarity for a lot of people is psychoacoustics, which we use to trick listeners. For instance, a kick hitting with a bass sound often makes the kick sound bigger. That is a common example.

Another example is compressing transients of a sound and bringing the tail up to make it sound louder than it actually is, since we interpret sounds from average volume. That is, we view a sustained sound as a lot louder than a quick peak. Plus, when a sound is loud but quick, our ears actually protect themselves as much as they can, and without getting into the medical side of it, we artificially stretch out the loud quick sound to be more sustained. So when we make a sound more sustained in the studio, we are mimicking what our ears already do when something is loud. This is how gunshots are handled in ALL of television. If you've ever heard a real gunshot on video, it's always incredibly lame. It's these tiny pops. That's not the mic they are using, that's just how gunshots sound when they're at sane listening volumes. In real life, they are loud as hell. And since we don't want to blow consumers ears off, people compress the shit out of gunshots to stretch them out. They dress them in reverb and do crazy eqing to make it sound nice and big.

Another psychoacoustic trick, which you can try, has to do with sounds that have already been introduced in a song. This could definitely help you with clarity. Say you have 9 instruments in a song, but in the beginning all you have is a pad. The pads playing some chords for 4 bars, and then every other instrument comes in. Kick, Snare, Bass, Piano, etc. The listener has been listening to that pad long enough that you can actually automate the volume of it down a fair amount and they won't even notice it. Their ears have already caught it, so they sort of fill in the blanks if you were to turn it down. Pretty amazing. I forgot what this is called, but I read it a long time ago and it's very helpful.
 
Thanks guys for all the replies, this has actually gone into a lot of depth which is really good.

I tried messing with the threshold and ratio and I didn't do anything good.

My kick is actually a sample, I created my own kick in massive with just a sine wave and put a bit of brown noise in there for some high end. I don't think the kick has enough high end to it even though I have eq it (cut some lows out and boosted the highs).

I also realized that reverb that is not eq'd is adding some unwanted frequencies in there and messing up the clarity a bit.
 
well, i didn't even hear that you made your kick yourself :P it sounds great.
a reverb is a marvelous tool, it can really do miracles to your headroom.
but using too much reverb does mess with the information. try to get your track well balanced before you add reverb.
this way you can even give a lot of space to a low volume stem. for example, if you want more high end on your kick,
you should realise that maybe another instrument is interfering with it. if this instrument doesn't need those frequencies,
you should cut them out there to make room for your kick.
i always try not to do too much boosting in the mixing process, instead i shape my instruments seperately to make sure
they sound good (still practising tho :P). after that, in the mixing process, i may add a little bit of reverb, but not too much.
just to give it some space.
a good technique is also to send the reverb to a seperate channel, and eq it there.
another good technique is to make use of panning to create a spacial effect.
 
If you have a transparent sounding reverb like the Bricasti and especially if you are running at 192 kHz, you can apply it on group level too, reduces some latency (relatively speaking), just ensure that when you set the wetness on it, first in solo, then in the context of the group and then in the context of the mix, never add wetness, just keep lowering the wetness until the sound source that the reverb adds most mud to is completely mud free in solo, in the group and in the mix context. In this way you know that it adds minimal amount of mud. When you do this on the chorus on high monitoring volume it will be crystal clear at normal volume even though multiple sound sources are running through it. This you can do as a step to add resonance to the mix, just ensure the righ groupings, because you are removing separation between the sound sources that share the same group.
 
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RuSty1 said:
Thanks guys for all the replies, this has actually gone into a lot of depth which is really good.

I tried messing with the threshold and ratio and I didn't do anything good.

My kick is actually a sample, I created my own kick in massive with just a sine wave and put a bit of brown noise in there for some high end. I don't think the kick has enough high end to it even though I have eq it (cut some lows out and boosted the highs).

I also realized that reverb that is not eq'd is adding some unwanted frequencies in there and messing up the clarity a bit.
Click to expand...

You should also see if you can get away with mono reverbs. They clear up a lot of space and can still add a sense of depth to your song.
 
Thanks guys for all the tips with mixing and using reverb probably wouldn't have found these tips anywhere else so I really appreciate it!
 
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