Let's Make Better Music ... Together! - Mixing Part 1: EQ( and some panning)

Hello my steemian friends with tendencies to spend time in front of screens producing music!

Today I bring to you the first installment of me turning old and unpolished music into something you can actually listen to without wanting to poke your ears out.

"What is this mystical process?", you ask. "Can I too, make my turds into shining shitposts?"
well, the answer is yes, with the power of

Mixing is the glue that holds your song together, like a surprise pregnancy in a declining relationship. So what is mixing exactly?

Mixing is the art of giving all of the sounds in your song the amount of space and freedom that they deserve. It's about being able to hear every element of a song the way you want it to be heard. To help explain mixing, I've found a song I made from before I figured out how to put things into a mixer track:

Currently, this sounds more like an idea than a song, even though melodically, it's at least passable. We want this sounding beautiful and in order to do that we need stop the sounds from interfering with each other. So, before we get started, here's a few general tips.

• Keep your ears fresh. Make sure to not overhear your track and if you feel tired, take a break and come back to it. You don't want to get too used to the sound, because you'll be less objective in your cleaning process.
• Close your eyes when you're concentrating with your ears. This might be a personal thing, but I think that your eyes take up a lot of the attention you have to give and closing them helps me focus on the sound rather than the visual representations of it.
• Reduce outside noise. Try to move into a quiet room and use headphones. You don't want random things or outside noise to skew your perception of the mix.
• If you don't know what a word means, look it up! I believe that unknown words are the #1 reason for not learning things properly. If you come across I word you don't know and I don't happen to explain it, please look it up!

Let's Get into It!

First things first, I like to organize my mixer track, so that I have a more efficient view of what I'm doing.

The Drums and Instruments sections are routed to premaster. The individual drums are all routed to drums. Leads and Melody Things, Chords and Bass all route to Instruments and the things to the right of these buses, are the lead, chord and bass instruments used in the song respectively.
This Tutorial will be mostly about EQ and Panning.

EQ and panning are the 2 tools I use the most to give things their own place in the mix. If you don't know what EQ is, I made a tutorial about it here.

EQ allows us to give the sounds their own spaces in the frequency range and panning can separate things that might need to occupy similar spaces.

I've looped a section of my song that has a lot of instruments playing so that I can easily access multiple ones at the same time. Here are the guitar chords with nothing on them:

I want to use an EQ to clean the sound up. I like to start by just generally taking out frequencies that sound off. To do this, I'll form an EQ that looks like this:

and drag the '2' horizontally, listening for the unpleasing frequencies. With this instrument, I've found a weird sounding artifact around 2khz.

Note that you still here the rest of the sound, because the EQ has only turned the rest of the frequencies quiet.

Now that I've found a frequency I dislike – not every sound will necessarily have one – I will reduce the frequency by a few db like so:

Continuing this process until I've reduced the frequencies I don't like, I come to an EQ like so:

This is the more detailed part of the EQing process, but that doesn't mean you should let up your attention in the next EQ either. Now I'll put another EQ on that guitar, although you can do it in one, which is just a high/low pass filter. I'll move the low pass down until just before the sounds seems to change and then move the high pass up under the same criteria. This might take some time, try to find the spot just before it sounds like it's missing something. For this sound, I ended up with something like this:

With the 2 EQ's together we now get this sound:

Now in all honesty I know that the difference between the 2 is quite small, but it is noticeable and cleaning up all of the instruments like this makes a big difference. Now I went through and did this to all of the instruments and also recategorized a sound which felt like it wasn't in the right category – in this example just the square bass; it's more of a lead.

I also took this opportunity to turn down some of the sounds that were obviously to loud. ( I'm lookin' at you string section)

So now that I'm done with this stage of EQing, I'd like to write up a little chart for what sound goes where:

So on the left we have the sounds that we use in the song and on the right we have the frequency ranges that it occupies. The point is to use panning and some slight EQ changes to get the sounds to occupy more or less their own space. We can take Kick, Snap, and Snare out of the equation, because I'll be using those to sidechain meaning they will get the space they need later on anyways.

So first things first, I see now that there is a rather big issue in this mix as is – the square bass now turned lead has a frequency at around 100hz. Also the Strum instrument and the Gbass and the 808. Bass frequencies are much more delicate in terms of mixing. They absolutely need their own little nook to work properly, so I need to find a solution to separate these a bit. Here's the 808 and the Gbass playing together so you can hear what I mean with delicate:

Hear that wobble out. It's not very clean and doesn't exist when each instrument is playing separately. I can't just cut out those frequencies in the guitar, because sometimes it plays alone and in those times, I need the bass frequency it provides.

To fix this, I'm gonna still need an EQ that puts them apart, so I threw one on the Gbass that cuts off frequencies below 200( separated from the 808). Then I put a peak controller on the 808 and hooked the Gbass's 200 and below EQ up to the 808's peak controller.

Sounds complicated, but it really isn't. What happens now is that the 808 plays which sends the peak signal through to the peak controller. The peak controller sends that to the mix level of the high pass filter on the Gbass. Now the mix level is turned up when the 808 plays and turned down when it doesn't, meaning that they won't interfere with each other, but the guitar still has the bass when it needs it.

Sounds much better already! The Strum Chords sounded pretty good cut at 200hz so I went with that, but the square lead needs a treatment similair to the Gbass 808 combo. Luckily, I've set up a 'Bass' bus and nothing else needs to be etched around it, so I'll just link the square up with the bass bus.

Now that we've taken care of the bass, it's time to define what the main sounds in the song are.
For this project, the main sounds are the Kick, the 808 and Gbass, the Sax and the Strum Chords and the Strings. This is important for the panning side of things, because we don't want to pan these sounds whatsoever. Now I like to take out sounds in pairs and pan them away from each other to my liking. This step takes some experience, it's hard to tell how much panning is a good amount of panning. I generally start at around 60% to one side, because I think it's a good spitball range. I decided to split the hat up into 2 hats each panned fully to the left and right like I explained in this tutorial. I also panned the snap and the snare away from each other slightly.

This is the end of part 1 of this mixing tutorial series. Here is what we have so far:

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments and if you learned something feel free to follow, as I will be posting more of this series in the future. Next one will be on Multi-band Sidechaining or Leveling, not sure yet.

Anyways, hope you have a great day and until next time

LET'S MAKE SOME AWESOME MUSIC

• Do you make Music Tutorials? I'm curating a Music Tutorial Contest called 'Educator Showdown' over here: https://steemit.com/educatorshowdown/@novili/educator-showdown-or-round-1-sponsored-by-steemit-music-alliance