Pro mixing tutorial for size

DarkRed

New member
In this tutorial I am going to share some ideas on how to make a mix sound bigger.

Preserve Peak Information

When you take a dry recording and leave all of the pan knobs at 100%L 100%R (dual mono/stereo) or C (mono) and push the signal through a brickwall peak limiter very hard, you will notice that the sound of the mix might narrow down in its width. This is because the ears locate the sounds within stereo field based on the peak information. So when the brickwall peak limiter smooths out the peaks of the tracks active on the side, you also lose some of perception of the width. This means that an effective way of losing the size of a mix, is by running all tracks through hard brickwall peak limiting. Hence, in order to make a mix sound big, you need to maintain enough peak information on the sounds that have been panned towards the side. If you for instance have a mix that ends with a karaoke track and a vocals track, separate so that you are able to brickwall peak limit the center panned karaoke tracks separately from the side panned karaoke tracks. It can also help to bypass the reverb so that it does not get brickwall peak limited, hence allowing some of the peak information to remain. If you want to smooth out the peaks of the side panned tracks, do so primarily on the first stage of dynamics processing.

Make The Mix Sing

Both compressors and reverbs can increase the perceived size of sound sources by prolonging the perception of each tone as it decays. If you set the compressor release time and the reverb decay/pre-delay times too long, the mix becomes smeared because all tones start to overlap each other in the mix. But what you can do to enhance the perceived size of the sound sources in the mix, is to track the sound source with a hundred or so milliseconds of room and then place a compressor afterwards with the release time set to zoom in a little on this natural decay of the room. If you get a set of very dry tracks to mix with minimal room, then you can add for instance a Bricasti reverb set to 200 ms and adjust the pre-delay so that the reverb is perceived on sound sources that hit at the same time. This reverb causes minimal frequency overlap but adds perceived size. The more signal capacity you have available during tracking, the less you need to focus on this technique. The less signal capacity you have during tracking, the more you need to focus on this technique. This is because it is the decay portion of the timbre that takes a hit when tracking with weak gear, the recording "sings" less. The issue might become worse when dithering.

Know Your Perceived Mix Loudness Precisely

In order to precisely know the perceived loudness of your mix, you need to be aware of all of these measurements:

Mid integrated LUFS
Mid RMS
Mid average frequency
Side integrated LUFS
Side RMS
Side average frequency
Stereo true peak

These combined values tell the actual perceived loudness of your mix. The perceived size of a mix comes to a great degree from having certain frequencies pereceived at specific loudness levels at specific locations in the stereo field.

Maximize Perceived Information Density

While the peak information to a great degree contributes to being able to locate sound sources in the stereo field, the perceived information density of each sound source contributes to being able to separate the sound sources in the perception of the mix. This means that in order to be able to create a big sounding mix, you need to capture the sound sources so that you get as much of the sound source information captured as possible, but not only do you need to capture as much information about all of the sound sources, but you need to do so in such a way that the frequencies in the context complement each other, so that it is the perceived information density that is maximized rather than only the actual information density of each sound source. This is essentially the art of recording.
 
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