>Step by step
Getting a professional, polished mixdown using free plugins
1 You’ll find WAV stems of a short sketch among this month’s Tutorial Files. While the sounds work fairly well together, everything’s just loosely sketched out and frankly sounds messy and lifeless. Our aim today is to craft a good modern mixdown without spending a penny on plugins. Before we get going, let’s set up a couple of send effects to help us with the mix.
2 First up is Acon Digital’s Multiply – one of the greatest ever chorus plugins. The default preset is lovely, but we’ll have to deactivate the Dry signal. I’d also like to turn the Amplitude Modulation up to 100% and the Voice count up to 6. This is one of my favourite Multiply settings – rich and thick.
3 Now let’s duplicate that Multiply setting onto another send effect channel and follow it up with Acon Digital’s CM Verb. This way, any signal sent to our second send effect channel will be chorused before it hits the reverb, delineating the signal. Set CM Verb’s Dry and Wet signals as above.
4 Let’s have a listen to our drum mix, piece by piece. The kick sounds alright – let’s leave that alone. When we add the Lower Snare, though, it’s very weak and doesn’t gel well with the kick. Sidechain compression would be nice on the snare. Open Melda-Production’s MTremolo, set the Depth to 100%, deactivate Invert Tremolo Phase, and set the Phase to 0%.
5 Now we’ll mimic the typical sidechain compression ducking shape, as if our kick were triggering the compression. Turn Smoothness and Custom Shape both up to 100% and click the custom shape Edit button. Copy my shape, or create one that suits your taste. We’ll have to boost the channel by around 6dB to compensate for the overall loss of volume.
6 The same MTremolo setting can be applied to the High Snare, and, in fact, the hi-hat tracks. We’re nearly clipping the master, so let’s apply Melda-Production’s MLimiter with its Threshold set to -1.50dB and Even Harmonics set to 0%. This is more like saturation than limiting, but it gives a very modern sound. Next, how about some master bus compression?
7 Let’s insert TDR’s Kotelnikov before MLimiter on the master bus and pull its Threshold down to -8dB to get some pulsating gain reduction. Now we don’t need to worry too much about the master getting too hot. The Stereo Clap and Tambourine tracks sound okay, but let’s copy MTremolo onto the Tambourine, before sending both to the Chorus bus.
8 Let’s copy MTremolo over to our send effect channels, too, and also send a bit of the Tambourine to the reverb bus. Adding the Synth Bass ruins the mix, but applying a slightly longer-lasting ducking effect to it using MTremolo helps tremendously. Using TDR’s Nova, we can also scoop out about 9dB at 300Hz to sweeten the bass tone.
9 The Low Synth slots in nicely with the more gentle MTremolo setting copied from the drums, but let’s precede that with an instance of Xfer Records’ OTT multiband compressor. With a Depth of about 75% and the H and L bands turned off, we can adjust the compression on just the mid band by pulling the Thresholds to the left, slightly.
10 A similar approach will work on the Mid Synth. It’s sensible to copy over MTremolo first, then load up OTT before it. This time we’ll push the Depth up to 75% and balance the sound just using the thresholds of the three bands. Certainly the H band is too strong and the L band needs to come down even more. We could make the synth much warmer, though.
11 Using the dynamic bands on TDR Nova, we can reduce the energy at about 450Hz and above roughly 17.5kHz. This sounds much tighter and sweeter. For the High Synth we can repeat our previous strategy with OTT, now following up with Klanghelm’s MJUC Jnr, with Compress set to around 30, Make-up at around 6, and Time Constants at Slow.
12 We can copy our more moderate pumping MTremolo onto the few remaining mix elements, and use the chorus send for the arps and lead. By now the mixdown strategy should be fairly predictable, although you can check out the Pro Tips for a deeper explanation of why these choices work the way they do.