Ah yes, the big elephant in the room. All over the fabulous interwebs and various youtube channels you can see all sorts of home studio myths, and in some cases bad advice being bandied about – very often on websites and channels geared towards beginners. And while the people who post that stuff may mean well, some of it is just plain WRONG and sometimes will hurt your mixes. In this post I will try to clear up some of the confusion and misinformation out there. Bear in mind, I’m not an expert by any stretch, but these are some that I find can be problematic long term for beginners and to some degree intermediates.
THE HIGHPASSING DEBACLE
From what I’ve been able to tell, this all started with one video posted on youtube a couple of years ago. And much like the tuning to 432 Hz vs 440 «debate» it’s pure, unadultered NONSENSE. Tin foil hat fodder and people being too clever for their own good. Worst thing is it’s spread since then and quite a few actually believe this stuff, and as a result mastering engineers get sent mixes that are near impossible to work with.
The general idea behind this nonsense is that the EQ causes a phase shift and you get a bump at the corner frequency (where you set your highpass to start working). Well, DUH, of course it does.
Unless you’re exclusively using linear phase EQs, EVERY EQ causes phase shifts whenever you do anything. And here’s the big lesson: don’t mix with your eyes!
Btw, to minimize that corner frequency bump, use a broader Q and set the frequency a bit higher. Sorted.
Professional engineers have been using high/lowpassing for ages, and somehow their mixes sound perfectly fine. Because that’s really what matters – not what your waveforms look like. Unless you’re highpassing on the way in on whatever microhone or mic preamp you’re using (which btw works exactly the same as a highpass on an EQ plugin), it’s necessary to do on every track that needs it. Well, if you don’t enjoy poor mixes and blowing up speakers that is.
Try a mix without filtering the low end and then play it through a big PA with some powerful subs. You’ll be horrified of the mess down there.
While on the subject, here’s something I see/hear a lot:
«highpass everything at 100 Hz except the kick and bass»
NONONONO. Wrong again. And here’s why:
A specific default frequency (or default anything really) doesn’t work for every mix. Again, use your ears. Quite often where you need to highpass depends on how it was recorded, the source sound, how much stuff you’re trying to cram into the mix and a whole bunch of other stuff. On some instruments you sometimes have to go much higher than 100 Hz, and in some cases lower. There is no perfect answer.
And, quite often it is necessary to highpass the kick drum and bass guitar as well for reasons mentioned higher up. Amazingly when done right, you’ll notice you get more clarity and things actually get louder when you get rid of the unnecessary rumble – without even touching the volume fader. Same thing tends to happen when you get rid of low mid mud as well.
Tip: engage the highpass and then sweep upwards until it starts taking away the good stuff you like, and then back it down a bit. What you get is clarity and room for other instruments.
INDUSTRY STANDARDS
Over time quite a few pieces of equipment and software have become what people call «industry standards», and beginners in particular get fed the line that you need so and so to be able to craft good sounding music. This is prevalent in one online audio forum in particular (you know which one I’m talking about). And it’s just bull**t consistently repeated by gear snobs again and again who have spent pathetic amounts of money on their own gear and just need to justify it.
If you were to believe some of those people, we all need a Pro Tools HD rig, the biggest and baddest Mac, a huge SSL or Neve desk, an original 50s Neumann, a couple of 57s obviously and at least 2 huge racks of outboard gear.
To be fair, really good gear is awesome and often helps you get to where you want to be faster, but it really isn’t mandatory.
There’s never been a better time for recording and mixing than now. The quality of equipment under the 1k USD mark is so good these days you can easily get great sounding songs – the hard thing is learning to record properly. And most often the drawback home recordists have is we don’t have that fantastic sounding studio room to record in.
With a budget of 1-1.5k you can have a great recording rig. And no, most of us don’t Pro Tools. Use whatever DAW that suits your workflow and has the features you need.
Learn the stuff you have properly and then eventually upgrade to better stuff later – if/when you need to.
Myself I’ve been using Samplitude on a PC for almost 15 years and I have no need for switching, I don’t have 57s, Neumanns or huge mixing desks, and I’ve done a few mixes I can say I’m happy with. It’s not really about the gear, it’s how you use it.
Forget about industry standards for now, go out there and make good music.
SUBTLETY
Another thing I very often see aimed towards beginners and inexperienced home studio guys is the preaching of subtlety. We’ve all heard those phrases. «Never boost or cut more than 2-3 dBs», «be careful not to overcompress», «if you can hear the reverb it’s too loud», stuff like that. And that’s probably the worst advice you can give to newbies. Screw that!
You see, what this does is make people afraid of doing what they should, and it results in dull, boring, forgettable and muddy mixes. Yet the people who preach this will call it «radio-ready» (a phrase I’m starting to seriously hate).
When people are starting out on this journey, they don’t have amazing rooms, world class gear and musicians to work with, and thus have to fix things to get it sounding good. And to do that properly you need to get drastic every once in a while. With some room nodes/resonances you might have to do a narrow 10 dB cut at a certain frequency – or sometimes a 12 dB high shelf might be necessary on a vocal. Then there’s the guitar player that doesn’t realize they have a bass player and crank the low end on their Marshall 4×12, which means you have to pull out an insane amount of low end to make the mix work.
When you’re new to this, it’s much better to do extreme stuff when you need to, sometimes fail, and eventually learn what’s too much, and what works. Not digging in properly every once in a while teaches you nothing.
Then there’s the creativity element. My best advice is doing something wrong every once in a while. By wrong I mean «not subtle». To get your stuff noticed and remembered, a good song alone isn’t necessarily enough. Doing something a bit different can sometimes be the key. A guitar straight into an overdriven Neve-style preamp (plenty of examples of this throughout rock history), weird effects on a vocal part, running background vocals through a Leslie (Pink Floyd anyone?), mangle an acoustic guitar beyond recognition. The possibilities are pretty endless, especially these days with all the vst plugins at our disposal.
Don’t just settle for what is genre appropriate. Screw the «rules».
Most of those old bands and artists we still love did that, and that’s a huge part of why they’re still remembered.
These days I will actively try to do something I’ve never done before on every mix I do, whether it be a certain technique or effect use or whatever it might be that day. Sometimes it will fail spectacularly, and sometimes it works great. Thing is, you’ll never know if you never try.
MONO TO STEREO
Let’s say you have only one mono guitar track, and you’d like another one so you can pan them out and then allow some more space for your vocals. One tip I often see is «copy/duplicate the track, pan them wide left and right and delay one of them by a few milliseconds». Easy and works, right? Eeh, not necessarily.
This is known as the Haas effect. A little Wiki snippet on what it is here:
«The Haas Effect, also sometimes called the precedence effect, is a psychoacoustic phenomenon that causes a listener to perceive a space and direction of a sound when there is a slight delay between stereo channels. The listener perceives that the sound takes place in the direction of the first, or preceding, channel–even if the delay between the two channels is only a few milliseconds.»
It’s a quick and easy to sort of get a stereo-ish guitar track. But it’s not without issues. It will be lopsided, meaning louder on one side, so you’ll have to tweak levels on one of them to get a fairly balanced sound. What it also does is introducing frequency based phase shift, depending on the delay time. This means that whatever you do, the guitar won’t sound right because some frequencies are out of phase and will cancel out. And in some cases it can be really uncomfortable to listen to. Anyone who has accidentally wired one of their speakers out of phase will know what I mean.
What I’d recommend is using this only as a last resort. Try to avoid it.
There are a couple of ways that are much better. One is having the guitar player record a second take, preferrably with a slightly different sound – or even better, a different guitar or amp. This is by far the best way to get a wide stereo guitar sound.
For wide stereo, the main contributor is the differences between the tracks, both in time and frequency.
The other way that works well is copying and pasting parts. Take a part from the second verse and paste it to the first and so on – the key is never having the exact same part running at the same time through both tracks. Takes a bit of time, but end result is much better than the Haas approach. For editing like this, it reallllyyy helps having recorded with a click, obviously. When done editing, EQ it differently than the first take, or run it through an amp modeller or something like that. DO NOT line this «new» track up perfectly to the other one. That will narrow the stereo width again.
Other things that can help are modulation effects. You don’t necessarily need much, just something to make it sound different from the original take.
If you are the guitar player and you’re mixing the thing, there’s no excuse for not recording a second take.
There’s only one real rule when it comes to recording and mixing. Don’t be lazy.
ALWAYS DO THIS…
This is a bad one. And EQ is a frequent theme. You’ll see these newbie tutorials saying «take away at 500 Hz to remove mud, boost at 2-3 kHz for clarity, boost at 10 for air/sizzle», and so on. And while frequencies like that may be in the right sort of area for some things, they’re never exactly right. Because no 2 songs or recordings are exactly the same. To a large part the arrangement of the song (the one thing that nobody ever talks about) dictates what processing you will have to do in the mix, nevermind the actual recording. Then there’s the source and the equipment used to record it.
When you find yourself cookie cutting, using presets and defaults for everything, stop. Stop, bypass everything and just listen for a while. Then start adding plugins to solve problems and eventually sweeten. NEVER do anything without a good reason for it. And certainly don’t do something just because you saw that’s what CLA or another big engineer does. Sure, try out some tricks, but they might not work for what you’re trying to do.
When doing a full albums worth of songs, I’ll often have some presets for the drums as that helps getting a consistent and fairly cohesive sound, but those are always just a starting point. Don’t be one of those guys who’ll promote themselves as being fast mixers just so they can cram in 3 or 4 mixes a day for the sake of money. Sooner or later that will always come back to bite them. Working quickly can be a good thing, but never at the expense of the music.
Prioritize QUALITY.
And…last one for this post…
COMPRESSION
Such a misunderstood element of mixing, and often under-utilized. We’re told it smoothens out a track, knocks down the peaks and brings up the quiet stuff. And yes, that is true. It does do that – if you want it to. But that’s only one part of it.
These days I’ll more often than not use compressors as tone/sound shapers, which is incredibly useful – especially for digital recording. Also predominantly compressors that have colour. For normal dynamic control, the stock compressors in a DAW is fine, but the coloured ones are the go-tos for when I want something exciting.
For aggressive, in your face sounds (drums, rock vocals) you rarely can go wrong with an 1176 or a Distressor. Smoother sounds an LA-2A is often the ticket. And for real vintage type colour you’ll want a tube compressor emulation (Fairchild is a classic for this). Great for vocals, drum overheads, virtual synths and similar. Tip: the Klanghelm MJUC is a fantastic plugin for those sort of sounds. And it’s dirt cheap at under 30 bucks!
This leads me to another false «truth» that many home studio teachers often repeat. «Distorted guitars are already compressed, so there’s no point in using a compressor on them in the mix». Well, yeah they are indeed compressed, but here’s where I disagree. Again, thinking of compressors as tone shapers. In a rock mix, you can use compressors to enhance the attack portion of the guitars (slow attack, fast release), bringing the attack forward and they’ll settle very nicely in the mix for the sustain part of the sound. For heavier rock, I’d say this is absolutely necessary to get a punchy powerful mix. Especially true if you’re using amp modelling plugins.
For guitars, I really recommend the Waves CLA-3A, API 2500 and Renaissance Compressor. All of those are great for rock guitars. Try it out when you find your guitars doesn’t sit quite right in your mix. It really does work.
In closing, try to get away from the thinking that compressors are just for dynamic control. On some of the vintage emulations, just passing the sound through them can add something magical without the compressor actually doing anything. In digital recording and mixing, adding drive, saturation and colour is a good thing.
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Anyways, that’s my personal take on some of the teachings out there. Lesson here is don’t take everything you read/hear online as gospel until you try stuff out. Hopefully you found some of this useful!
Kenneth/Crashwaggon Music