Hi All!
For people who've read the Mix Engineers Handbook by Bobby Oswinski.
In the first section it looks at 'Balance'. It says songs are made up of 5 elements. The 5 elements are Foundation, Pad, Rhythm, Lead and Fills.
So this is a more rock / pop approach it's looking at here. How would this section translate to dance music?
Could I substitute this section of the book with an another approach maybe on another website or in another book? Or could anyone explain how I could relate to the dance music approach?
Thanks!
I think the 5 elements foundation, pad, rhythm, lead and fills are a bit too general in practice. I think a more practical grouping would be:
- Background
-- Bass guitar
-- Clean electric guitar
-- Acoustic guitar
-- Synth
-- Pad
-- Piano/whurly/rhodes
-- Organ
-- Strings
-- Background vocals
-- Non-ambience FX
- Noise
-- Distorted electric guitar
-- Kick
-- Snare
-- Hi-hat
-- Cymbals
-- Overhead
-- Room
-- Perc
-- Sample FXs
-- Ambience FX
- Lead
The reason for this is that you want to balance that which harmonizes the mix, against that which distorts the mix. The 'noise' group creates attitude, the 'background' group creates emotion. You want to then balance the mix towards an emotion-attitude sweet spot, with the lead vocals contributing to both. When you follow the 5 mix elements model according to Mixing Engineer's Handbook, the emotional aspect of the mix is made less important. Instead you have to start thinking of "frequency blocks", which is a less musical approach in my opinion.
BTW. Background + Noise groups can be routed to a single group called 'Karaoke'. So at the end you can balance the vocals against the rest, which I find is a logical approach. A mix that does not sound great in karaoke mode, is not finished.
Keep in mind that when you balance the mix at this level, let's say for instance that you want more emotion, when you then turn down the volume of the 'noise' to make the 'emotion' group more dominant in the mix, you are automatically introducing 'mud' to the mix as a whole, so you need to compensate with upwards frequency shifting on the 'noise' group. Do that on fairly loud monitoring volume, else you will over compensate. When you add emotion to the mix the density of the mix should decrease, which it also does when you add emotion in this way. A very dense mix is one that lacks emotion.
Another important thing is that the emotion tracks must translate into warmth in order to be emotional. If you have a bunch of background tracks that are all cold, it's not going to be very emotional. So treat the background group from a warmth perspective. Basically what that means is that the sum of those frequencies should yield a warm frequency response.
Now, just because you've found the lead - background - noise balance sweet spot, it does not automatically mean you have great emotion and attitude, it is only great relative to the frequencies currently in the mix. It is what frequencies you have in the mix when you've reached the lead - background - noise balance sweet spot, which is going to determine how sweet the mix really is. So it's just a way of dialing in the potential.
