STUDIO STRATEGIES
Achieving a loud mix from the ground up
Get your tunes sounding loud right from the start
1 In this tutorial we’ll explore various techniques that you can use to make your music louder. To begin with, we have a simple mix with several flaws. The volume levels aren’t balanced, the sounds haven’t been cleaned up and the dynamics are all over the place. The crest factor is too high and the mix is very quiet. 2 First, we’ll achieve the right mix balance by simply adjusting the channel volume faders. The biggest problem in our example mix is that the sub bass is too loud. This is a very common issue in many home setups as it’s difficult to gauge the true level of sub bass. A spectrum analyser can help you see what’s going on. 3 Sub bass takes up a lot of energy in the mix. As soon as the excessive sub is brought down, we get several dB more headroom on the master fader, allowing us to make everything else louder. This is not a ‘set and forget’ type of adjustment – you’ll need to keep an eye on the balance and fine-tune as the mix progresses. 4 With the initial balance set, now’s the time to make EQ adjustments. The aim at this point is to remove everything that isn’t needed. I’m using the free TDR Nova plugin to remove unnecessary low end from the Bass Stab, Conga, Atmo and Vox tracks. I’m also making other small adjustments, removing boominess and excessive brightness where necessary. 5 By removing everything that’s not essential, we’re not only making the mix sound more clean and defined, but are also freeing up yet more headroom on the master fader, making it possible to push the individual channel levels up a little bit more. In essence, the idea is to remove poorly spent energy from the mix. 6 Now that we have the basic levels and EQ sorted, it’s time to start working on the density. Saturation is a great tool for this. We’re using Sonimus Satson CM to slightly saturate the Drum Break, Conga and Bass Stab channels. We’re only looking for small gains in density, not full-blown distortion.
7 Satson CM doesn’t have output level adjustment, so I’m compensating for the added volume by bringing down the channel faders. There are massive differences between saturation types. Experiment with different plugins and source materials to learn them – good
Plugins for this include Satson CM, WaveShaper CM and Valve Filter CM. 8 Now we turn our attention to eliminating excessive peaks. This allows us to push yet more RMS energy into the master fader without clipping it. We want to bring our crest factor under steady control, which can be done with all manner of plugins. I’m going for the free Limiter no6 plugin, which has sections for compression, limiting and clipping. 9 Depending on the material, you’ll want to apply different methods to restrict the dynamics and shave off excessive transient spikes. We don’t want to go overboard with the processing –it’s all about 0.5dB here, 2dB there. Once you start doing this across the entire mix, you’ll quickly notice how these small changes start to add up. 10 This is a very destructive technique with the potential to screw up your music completely if done wrong, so listen carefully and use the bypass buttons to A/B as you work. Pay attention to the dynamics of the source material. Snip off excess peaks without affecting the tonal character and punch too much – and nothing more. 11 So far, we’ve only been working on the individual tracks. Now let’s expand the concept by creating three submix buses ( Bus Drums, Bus Bass and Bus Other) and routing the tracks through them. This gives us an extra stage of processing to apply the aforementioned techniques. We’ll also place some compression (but no limiting or clipping) on the mix bus. 12 We now have three discrete stages to work with: the individual tracks, the submix buses and the mix bus. We’ve balanced levels, removed unneeded frequencies and done a little bit of dynamics work in each stage, and the end result is a mix that has more clarity and is way louder, denser and more energetic but still packs the desired punch.