CharlyBeck
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Kurz und knackig. Ist meine private sammelstelle für kniffe die ich irgendwann gelernt, vergessen, verkehrt rekonstruiert, ernaut ausprobiert und zuletzt notiert habe. Halt auf Englisch..
lol und wie ich gerade sehe komme ich auf die magische anzahl von 40 tips ^^. Ich werd die liste aber dann ggf. erweitern weil da ständig was dazukommt.
Ich produdizere hauptsächlich Techno und dafür sind die tips ausgelegt, viele sind aber wohl auch universell anwendbar und zum verständniss ist es bestimmt nicht dumm die tips zu kennen
This tutorial is published under creative commens license share alike with attribution (Charly Beck) no commercial use.
A. LoEnd
1. Kick: Always be sure to be the kick tuned to the base tone of the track. (Or 2.)
2. Kick: If your kick tuned to the base tone is too low try tuning it 7 halftones above the base tone. +3 Fits for minor keys, +4 for major key. +7 fits for both. (standard note scale not one of these special note scales for jazz or indian music)
3. Kick/Bass/SubBass: Use a tiny bell eq of just -0.5 db at the base tone of the track where the most power is. This can make the bass not just in the face but smoother.
4. Kick + Bass: Lo cut at the frequency of the base tone of the track or just below. If your kick is tuned +7 HT (Tip 2.) try locutting at this frequency.
5. SubBass: As the name implies it may stay a bit under the base tone. To be specific exactly one octave below the bass. It could work to play harmonies with the sub bass and to make it > 1 octave below the base tone. But it seems to make not so much sense because at these low frequencies one can hardly identify a harmony. And of course 1 octave below it sounds more homogenous and has more power. So 1 octave below the base tone respectively the played bass tone seems to be the right decision for placing a sub bass. Just to let you follow my conclusions.
6. Kick/Bass/SubBass: Somewhere between 200-400 Hz often is some hum in the bass. To remove that and make the bass more technoid try a narrow deep bell or even a notch at that frequency. Very nice effects you get if it works on diffrent frequencies for bass, subbass and kick. At the kick the gain reducction bell could also be placed deeper i.e. 80-120 hz
7. Kick/SubBass/Bass: Very often a m/s eq on the bass makes sense to slightly lo cut the side signal below ~300 - 500 hz. Following 1. it's sometimes very spacy to leave a bit of the sidesignal there. If you reject 1. and 6. you often get a more dirty bass which very often starts blubbering.
8. Bass/Kick/SubBass: Phase optimization makes the phases of the tone go synchronously and not erase each other. You can even see in the peak meter how it slightly increases if you find the perfect phase offset/phase adjust.
9. Bass: Crispy basses with a short decay (where you may also try a delay effect) sound more transparent if you delay them by 2-4 ms. When you have a booming bass this effect is not so relevant. Nor on the subbass in most cases.
10. Kick/Bass: Adding a compression with long attack and short release is good. The long attack ensures that the Booming part is not affected by the compressor.The short release ensures that the compressor recovers before the next transient. API2500 is nice for that.
11. Following 4. to cut the bass at the base frequency you might insert a saturation after this. This again adds some subharmonics. In any case you should lo cut radically below 20 Hz afterwards.
12. Adding even and odd harmonics with saturation is nice. In bass area i like to use even harmonic distortion. Odd harmonics i like on the percussions.
13. Applying sidechaining on the bass to let it duck away of course is a very classic tip to reach the pumping effect.
14. As you may know it's always better to do it in the mix than in the master. But doing the m/s processing (Tip 7) and the final lo cut (Tip 11) makes sense to do addtionally in the master.
15. Often at the beginning of a kick thee is a high frequency “Klick”. It often sounds smoother when that click is played before the 1/4 note. In order to achievie this you may add a negative delay to the track of just about 2ms. Thats much more easy to handle than pushing the notes.
B. Mid/HiEnd
1. This comes from distorted guitar mixing tips. Try to gain at freq x - 3db on left channel and the opposite of +3db on the right channel. So that the frequency that is stronger on the one side is weak on the opposite site. With 3db you get a difference of 6 db. Try doing that on different frequencies. For example 2500, 3000 and 3500 hz, That’l make the sound wider which is very nice on heavy metal guitar riffs. It works also on some synth sounds. On other synth sounds it sounds anoying. Try figure out what kind of sound works good with this tip.
2. Another technique to make a strong stereo width is the haas effect. This is a delay of maybe 2-23 milliseconds on just one channel for example the left channel. There is a delay under which the human ear does not recognize the delayed signal as an individual sound. In any case stay under that delay of ~23 ms for the haas effect. Otherwise you will get a traditional delay effect where the human ear identifies the dry and the delayed signal as 2 different transients. Of course this relativivates a bit if the signal has no transients but at some point you will loose the widening haas effect.
3. When playing with stereo width be sure not to forget that some part of the signal should be also on the mid channel. Especially vocals sound flat and powerless if you forget about that. It’s a good choice to keep a totally dry vocal (without delay, reverb) etc on the mid channel. Respecting the mid channel will add a lot of punch and power for example to vocals.
4. When you split up tracks and process them individually on the right and left channel with an eq be sure to use a phase linear eq. Otherwise you will get phasing effects which may be unwanted. A more elegant way of course is to use a m/s eq but sometimes you maybe wanna add different effects on left and rightchannel using effects which do not support m/s processing.
5. Adding a little saturation sounds fine on hihats and high percussion. They will sound much louder without lifting the gain. However, do not add to much distortion and saturation. This will sound unpleasant especcially in digital field which is true for any online release.
6. Using reverbs with different settings can be used to move instruments to front/near field. Near field:
- Long Predelay
- Long early reflection time
- More details/ less diffusion
- More high frequencies
Far field:
- Short predelay
- Short early reflection time
- Less details / more diffusion
- Less high frequencies.
If often use 3 Reverbs for near, mid and far range. A fourth, long reverb i sometimes use for effects ounds. A fifth reverb is sometimes used for snare drum. So in total i usually don't get more than 5 different reverbs in a song.
7. Binaural panning can sound very fine and avoid that the signal looses power when panning heavily. Binaural panning has 2 aspects: a) instead of just reducing the gain on one side a shelf eq is used, to lower the high freuquencies on one side. Reducing the treebles on the left side will for example make make the signal appear more on the right side. The second effect a binaural pan can use is similar to a doubler effect: If the signal shall appear on the left side we put a little delay of 2-20 ms on the right side - visa versa. Note that this is a very simple binaural pan which is easy to rebuild. The patented mechanism works much more sophisticated with room calculation and cross feeding the signal.
8. Try compressing your rooms.
9. If a pad has different peaks on different frequency and time try eq-gaining these peaks on different stereo sides. You will get a smoothly panning pad.
10. Expanders work nice for shaker loops which are often very fat and dominant supplied on sample cds. Using an expander can make a shaker more decent in the mix.
C. Master
1. Try cutting the side signal slightly below 300-500 hz. This will avoid the bass to blubber and sound much cleaner and smoother.
2. For vinyl mastering be aware that the vinyl has less space in the inner area. You should place an eq which continuously guess uppers the high frequencies over the whole playtime of the vinyl. Otherwise your sound starts bright and ends up darker at the end of the vinyl. It’s a pain in the ass to figure out the correct upgain level and the right frequency and q for the shelf. But i guess there should be empirical detrmined values somewhere in the internet for various playtimes of the vinyl. Therefor normally one preview vinyl is included in the pressing order to adjust this eq. For vinyl you need to be carefull in the lo end. It would be a pitty if the needle jumps out of the rill when the bass hits.
3. Try to avoid too much compression in the mix. This is done better in the master. On the one hand, the signals will get much more clued together doing compression in the master which sounds more homogenous. On the other hand it’s hard to restore dynamic range in the master if the mix is punched totally flat.
4. Mastering is not there to make your wave look like a square.
5. Try different compressors with different eqs in between.
6. Especially in the master do not be greedy with your cpu performance. Use high quality eqs and other plugins. In the master you need much less plugins than in the mix and as most of you will master on the same machine as mixing you have enough cpu for good plugins in the master.
7. May absolute favorite compressor for the master is the elysia master comp. Shadow hills is also fine but as it does not support paralell compression and is much less sensitive i use it with shorter attack/release and only a little gain reduction to cut away the tiny peaks where the elysia can be set up to work much more aggressive especially therefor there is the feed forward mode which some compressors support even to toggle. Feed forward results in more aggressive compression. You should not use non-paralell compression with short attack times and high gain reduction. This would make your lo end very weak.
8. Compression is good but 100% wet will suffer in dynamic. Paralell compression is a good way of getting a good compromise of both.
9. For heavy lo end material be sure to use the lo-cut for the sidechain signal.
10. Radio compatibility claims to cut aggressively below 20 hz. <20 hz will take a lot of power making your song sound weak although it has a lot of bass.
11. A master chain that works good for me: EQ (20hz LoCut), Tape Recorder simualation, Comps and EQs, Maximizer, Sound shapers like bx Refinement, SPL Vitalizer etc, BrickwallLimiter. In any case you should place a brickwall limiter for the very last and be sure that the limiter does not gain reduct more than ~ -3 to max -5 db. Otherwise you get that annoying EDM lead sound with treebles sound harsh and destroyed by the limiter. The brickwall limiter will avoid any clipping peak.
12. Use multiband compression (MBC) only when it’s really necessary. One setting may work well for one part of the song but may sound awfull on antoher part. Automizing the time parameters of an a multiband compressor is quite tricky. Still automizing dry/wet is simple and effective to control the correction done with the MBC. Using a MBC for loudness war issues is problematic because of the mentioned good result at one scene of the song and a total messup of another scene. Then you may come to a point where you wanna automize the timing settings respectively use multiple mbc activated on different parts of the song.
13. During all your mixing and mastering work check for inter sample peaks between all the chains. There is SSL-X-ISM for free which detects inter sample peaks and they have a good description of what ISPs are on their web site. Be aware ISPs may not be recognized on good D/A converters but may sound unpleasont on cheap D/A converters. So your hi end studio soundcard is not a good reference for this. Trust your ISP-detector and simply lower the gain to avoid clipping /ISPs.
14. Some guys use high end DA-AD converters instead of limiters to do the brickwall limiting.
15. If the mix just sounds to dry and flat try adding a reverb to the sidechannel.
16. Not each multiband kompressor has a dry wet control for each band. If you don’t have such an multiband compressor and your mix tends to sound weak between 300-2500 hz like mine often do you can build your own multiband processing matrix by duplicating the master signal adding a phase linear (!) eq with lo and hi cut. Put a compressor after that eq. Mix that signal slightly to the main signal and your mix gets thicker in the band controlled by the eq.
17, When working with multiple bands like described in Tip 16. you could also use other effects than compressors like reverb after th eq of the multiband matrix. but be aware that some effects like often saturation are not phase linear which will result in phasing effects which are usually not desireable in the master. IF you add a non phase linear saturation for a band you should switch to 100% wet. Like all other effects that have a wet control. Because you are summing that fx signal to the original. So why you should add the same signal? You could do this more clearly with a gain control on the fx signal or the main signal. I hope this is clearly described.
18. As mentioned before the last element in a master chain should be a brickwall limiter. Be sure to reserve still a headroom of about 0.4 db. This is because of mp3 codecs which may get an overpeak after encoding even a properly limited track without inter sample peaks. You can easily see this when comparing the result with TR Dynamic Range Meter.
Finally i wanna thank everone who was open for discussingall the issues of sound engineering and provided valueable tips. More or less all of you are also creators of this tip collection.
lol und wie ich gerade sehe komme ich auf die magische anzahl von 40 tips ^^. Ich werd die liste aber dann ggf. erweitern weil da ständig was dazukommt.
Ich produdizere hauptsächlich Techno und dafür sind die tips ausgelegt, viele sind aber wohl auch universell anwendbar und zum verständniss ist es bestimmt nicht dumm die tips zu kennen
This tutorial is published under creative commens license share alike with attribution (Charly Beck) no commercial use.
A. LoEnd
1. Kick: Always be sure to be the kick tuned to the base tone of the track. (Or 2.)
2. Kick: If your kick tuned to the base tone is too low try tuning it 7 halftones above the base tone. +3 Fits for minor keys, +4 for major key. +7 fits for both. (standard note scale not one of these special note scales for jazz or indian music)
3. Kick/Bass/SubBass: Use a tiny bell eq of just -0.5 db at the base tone of the track where the most power is. This can make the bass not just in the face but smoother.
4. Kick + Bass: Lo cut at the frequency of the base tone of the track or just below. If your kick is tuned +7 HT (Tip 2.) try locutting at this frequency.
5. SubBass: As the name implies it may stay a bit under the base tone. To be specific exactly one octave below the bass. It could work to play harmonies with the sub bass and to make it > 1 octave below the base tone. But it seems to make not so much sense because at these low frequencies one can hardly identify a harmony. And of course 1 octave below it sounds more homogenous and has more power. So 1 octave below the base tone respectively the played bass tone seems to be the right decision for placing a sub bass. Just to let you follow my conclusions.
6. Kick/Bass/SubBass: Somewhere between 200-400 Hz often is some hum in the bass. To remove that and make the bass more technoid try a narrow deep bell or even a notch at that frequency. Very nice effects you get if it works on diffrent frequencies for bass, subbass and kick. At the kick the gain reducction bell could also be placed deeper i.e. 80-120 hz
7. Kick/SubBass/Bass: Very often a m/s eq on the bass makes sense to slightly lo cut the side signal below ~300 - 500 hz. Following 1. it's sometimes very spacy to leave a bit of the sidesignal there. If you reject 1. and 6. you often get a more dirty bass which very often starts blubbering.
8. Bass/Kick/SubBass: Phase optimization makes the phases of the tone go synchronously and not erase each other. You can even see in the peak meter how it slightly increases if you find the perfect phase offset/phase adjust.
9. Bass: Crispy basses with a short decay (where you may also try a delay effect) sound more transparent if you delay them by 2-4 ms. When you have a booming bass this effect is not so relevant. Nor on the subbass in most cases.
10. Kick/Bass: Adding a compression with long attack and short release is good. The long attack ensures that the Booming part is not affected by the compressor.The short release ensures that the compressor recovers before the next transient. API2500 is nice for that.
11. Following 4. to cut the bass at the base frequency you might insert a saturation after this. This again adds some subharmonics. In any case you should lo cut radically below 20 Hz afterwards.
12. Adding even and odd harmonics with saturation is nice. In bass area i like to use even harmonic distortion. Odd harmonics i like on the percussions.
13. Applying sidechaining on the bass to let it duck away of course is a very classic tip to reach the pumping effect.
14. As you may know it's always better to do it in the mix than in the master. But doing the m/s processing (Tip 7) and the final lo cut (Tip 11) makes sense to do addtionally in the master.
15. Often at the beginning of a kick thee is a high frequency “Klick”. It often sounds smoother when that click is played before the 1/4 note. In order to achievie this you may add a negative delay to the track of just about 2ms. Thats much more easy to handle than pushing the notes.
B. Mid/HiEnd
1. This comes from distorted guitar mixing tips. Try to gain at freq x - 3db on left channel and the opposite of +3db on the right channel. So that the frequency that is stronger on the one side is weak on the opposite site. With 3db you get a difference of 6 db. Try doing that on different frequencies. For example 2500, 3000 and 3500 hz, That’l make the sound wider which is very nice on heavy metal guitar riffs. It works also on some synth sounds. On other synth sounds it sounds anoying. Try figure out what kind of sound works good with this tip.
2. Another technique to make a strong stereo width is the haas effect. This is a delay of maybe 2-23 milliseconds on just one channel for example the left channel. There is a delay under which the human ear does not recognize the delayed signal as an individual sound. In any case stay under that delay of ~23 ms for the haas effect. Otherwise you will get a traditional delay effect where the human ear identifies the dry and the delayed signal as 2 different transients. Of course this relativivates a bit if the signal has no transients but at some point you will loose the widening haas effect.
3. When playing with stereo width be sure not to forget that some part of the signal should be also on the mid channel. Especially vocals sound flat and powerless if you forget about that. It’s a good choice to keep a totally dry vocal (without delay, reverb) etc on the mid channel. Respecting the mid channel will add a lot of punch and power for example to vocals.
4. When you split up tracks and process them individually on the right and left channel with an eq be sure to use a phase linear eq. Otherwise you will get phasing effects which may be unwanted. A more elegant way of course is to use a m/s eq but sometimes you maybe wanna add different effects on left and rightchannel using effects which do not support m/s processing.
5. Adding a little saturation sounds fine on hihats and high percussion. They will sound much louder without lifting the gain. However, do not add to much distortion and saturation. This will sound unpleasant especcially in digital field which is true for any online release.
6. Using reverbs with different settings can be used to move instruments to front/near field. Near field:
- Long Predelay
- Long early reflection time
- More details/ less diffusion
- More high frequencies
Far field:
- Short predelay
- Short early reflection time
- Less details / more diffusion
- Less high frequencies.
If often use 3 Reverbs for near, mid and far range. A fourth, long reverb i sometimes use for effects ounds. A fifth reverb is sometimes used for snare drum. So in total i usually don't get more than 5 different reverbs in a song.
7. Binaural panning can sound very fine and avoid that the signal looses power when panning heavily. Binaural panning has 2 aspects: a) instead of just reducing the gain on one side a shelf eq is used, to lower the high freuquencies on one side. Reducing the treebles on the left side will for example make make the signal appear more on the right side. The second effect a binaural pan can use is similar to a doubler effect: If the signal shall appear on the left side we put a little delay of 2-20 ms on the right side - visa versa. Note that this is a very simple binaural pan which is easy to rebuild. The patented mechanism works much more sophisticated with room calculation and cross feeding the signal.
8. Try compressing your rooms.
9. If a pad has different peaks on different frequency and time try eq-gaining these peaks on different stereo sides. You will get a smoothly panning pad.
10. Expanders work nice for shaker loops which are often very fat and dominant supplied on sample cds. Using an expander can make a shaker more decent in the mix.
C. Master
1. Try cutting the side signal slightly below 300-500 hz. This will avoid the bass to blubber and sound much cleaner and smoother.
2. For vinyl mastering be aware that the vinyl has less space in the inner area. You should place an eq which continuously guess uppers the high frequencies over the whole playtime of the vinyl. Otherwise your sound starts bright and ends up darker at the end of the vinyl. It’s a pain in the ass to figure out the correct upgain level and the right frequency and q for the shelf. But i guess there should be empirical detrmined values somewhere in the internet for various playtimes of the vinyl. Therefor normally one preview vinyl is included in the pressing order to adjust this eq. For vinyl you need to be carefull in the lo end. It would be a pitty if the needle jumps out of the rill when the bass hits.
3. Try to avoid too much compression in the mix. This is done better in the master. On the one hand, the signals will get much more clued together doing compression in the master which sounds more homogenous. On the other hand it’s hard to restore dynamic range in the master if the mix is punched totally flat.
4. Mastering is not there to make your wave look like a square.
5. Try different compressors with different eqs in between.
6. Especially in the master do not be greedy with your cpu performance. Use high quality eqs and other plugins. In the master you need much less plugins than in the mix and as most of you will master on the same machine as mixing you have enough cpu for good plugins in the master.
7. May absolute favorite compressor for the master is the elysia master comp. Shadow hills is also fine but as it does not support paralell compression and is much less sensitive i use it with shorter attack/release and only a little gain reduction to cut away the tiny peaks where the elysia can be set up to work much more aggressive especially therefor there is the feed forward mode which some compressors support even to toggle. Feed forward results in more aggressive compression. You should not use non-paralell compression with short attack times and high gain reduction. This would make your lo end very weak.
8. Compression is good but 100% wet will suffer in dynamic. Paralell compression is a good way of getting a good compromise of both.
9. For heavy lo end material be sure to use the lo-cut for the sidechain signal.
10. Radio compatibility claims to cut aggressively below 20 hz. <20 hz will take a lot of power making your song sound weak although it has a lot of bass.
11. A master chain that works good for me: EQ (20hz LoCut), Tape Recorder simualation, Comps and EQs, Maximizer, Sound shapers like bx Refinement, SPL Vitalizer etc, BrickwallLimiter. In any case you should place a brickwall limiter for the very last and be sure that the limiter does not gain reduct more than ~ -3 to max -5 db. Otherwise you get that annoying EDM lead sound with treebles sound harsh and destroyed by the limiter. The brickwall limiter will avoid any clipping peak.
12. Use multiband compression (MBC) only when it’s really necessary. One setting may work well for one part of the song but may sound awfull on antoher part. Automizing the time parameters of an a multiband compressor is quite tricky. Still automizing dry/wet is simple and effective to control the correction done with the MBC. Using a MBC for loudness war issues is problematic because of the mentioned good result at one scene of the song and a total messup of another scene. Then you may come to a point where you wanna automize the timing settings respectively use multiple mbc activated on different parts of the song.
13. During all your mixing and mastering work check for inter sample peaks between all the chains. There is SSL-X-ISM for free which detects inter sample peaks and they have a good description of what ISPs are on their web site. Be aware ISPs may not be recognized on good D/A converters but may sound unpleasont on cheap D/A converters. So your hi end studio soundcard is not a good reference for this. Trust your ISP-detector and simply lower the gain to avoid clipping /ISPs.
14. Some guys use high end DA-AD converters instead of limiters to do the brickwall limiting.
15. If the mix just sounds to dry and flat try adding a reverb to the sidechannel.
16. Not each multiband kompressor has a dry wet control for each band. If you don’t have such an multiband compressor and your mix tends to sound weak between 300-2500 hz like mine often do you can build your own multiband processing matrix by duplicating the master signal adding a phase linear (!) eq with lo and hi cut. Put a compressor after that eq. Mix that signal slightly to the main signal and your mix gets thicker in the band controlled by the eq.
17, When working with multiple bands like described in Tip 16. you could also use other effects than compressors like reverb after th eq of the multiband matrix. but be aware that some effects like often saturation are not phase linear which will result in phasing effects which are usually not desireable in the master. IF you add a non phase linear saturation for a band you should switch to 100% wet. Like all other effects that have a wet control. Because you are summing that fx signal to the original. So why you should add the same signal? You could do this more clearly with a gain control on the fx signal or the main signal. I hope this is clearly described.
18. As mentioned before the last element in a master chain should be a brickwall limiter. Be sure to reserve still a headroom of about 0.4 db. This is because of mp3 codecs which may get an overpeak after encoding even a properly limited track without inter sample peaks. You can easily see this when comparing the result with TR Dynamic Range Meter.
Finally i wanna thank everone who was open for discussingall the issues of sound engineering and provided valueable tips. More or less all of you are also creators of this tip collection.
