Tip #1

When using a reverb plu­gin, instead of insert­ing it directly on the chan­nel you want to mod­ify insert it rather on a stereo send chan­nel and route your sig­nal to this chan­nel pair.

There are sev­eral rea­sons you would want to do this. Reverb effects typ­i­cally are out­put in stereo, so when you stick reverb on a mono chan­nel the reverb is not being used to its full effect. In the plu­gin set­tings you can leave the mix all wet and then con­trol the wet/dry mix on the send chan­nel faders which is eas­ier to work with than con­stantly open­ing and adjust­ing plu­gin set­tings when you’re doing the mix­down. This also has the bonus of allow­ing you to auto­mate the chan­nel faders to selec­tively bring in reverb at dif­fer­ent parts of the song.

By hav­ing the a reverb effect on a send chan­nel you may also route sev­eral dry instru­ments to that one reverb insert to give a stronger sense of the instru­ments being in the same space. There is also the option of EQing the reverb itself to affect your sound. Finally you may also take advan­tage of pan con­trol to mod­ify the reverb. For instance: try plug­ging in an auto-panner and see how it sounds.

Tip #2

When record­ing gui­tar tracks in addi­tion to mik­ing the amp or using a DI box, aim a sec­ond micro­phone at the fret­board. Hav­ing a sec­ond track of finger-noise and plectrum-noise to mix in with the gui­tar brings more life and inter­est to the part. Addi­tion­ally the gui­tar part is more grounded in your mix for the listener.

Tip #3

To glue tracks from mul­ti­ple sources together bet­ter, record a track of room noise to add to your mix. Bring­ing this track in at a low level gives ambi­ence to the record­ing that would oth­er­wise be miss­ing from tracks that are DI’ed or are com­posed of vir­tual instruments.

Tip #4

You may have prob­lems get­ting instru­ments to sit well in the mix because they are tak­ing up the same fre­quency spec­trum caus­ing the mix to sound muddy. To sep­a­rate them, use your best EQ to roll off the fre­quen­cies that are below and above the range of each instru­ment. If you aren’t util­is­ing the full range of the instru­ment, you may nar­row the band­width even fur­ther. Use a spec­trum analyser to gauge how much you could safely roll off.

Tip #5

When mix­ing, don’t bother pan­ning instru­ments that are heavy on the bass. Low fre­quency sounds don’t have much direc­tion­al­ity so very lit­tle is to be gained from assign­ing these instru­ments to one side or the other. Addi­tion­ally it takes more energy to pro­duce lower fre­quen­cies with the same appar­ent vol­ume of higher fre­quen­cies, so it is bet­ter to have both speak­ers work­ing together than just one.

Tip #6

It is impor­tant to cap­ture tracks as cleanly as pos­si­ble to avoid headaches later. To help do this put a high-pass fil­ter on track as you record. Set the cut­off fre­quency to just below the low­est note fun­da­men­tal and give it a steep slope, around 12dB/octave. This will cut out energy rob­bing low fre­quen­cies giv­ing you more head­room in the track and cleaner sound.

Tip #7

If you’re going to be adding com­pres­sion to a track try to de-noise it as much as you can. Use gates or auto-leveling to duck down the noise dur­ing empty parts, and use EQ to roll off noise spec­trum dur­ing play­ing. The rea­son for doing this is that when you put com­pres­sion on the track, you are decreas­ing the dynamic range of the track. This low­ers the signal-to-noise ratio, and when the track is boosted after com­pres­sion, your noise will be boosted as well.

Tip #8

Don’t cut out breath noises, atten­u­ate them. While it’s tempt­ing to clean your vocal track of all the unwanted mouth and breath noises, doing so to the extreme will make the track sound quite unnat­ural. Peo­ple expect to hear cer­tain things in the record­ing of peo­ple, when it’s not there some­thing twigs in our brain. We notice these things. So you’ve gone in with your cut tool and sliced all the breath noises between phrases. Take them now and move them to a seper­ate track. Now you’re free to bring those noises in at a level you feel com­fort­able with, but most impor­tantly not elim­i­nat­ing them entirely.

Tip #9

Each com­po­nent in your chain will intro­duce noise into the sig­nal. As you suc­ces­sively amplify the sig­nal at var­i­ous places in your sig­nal chain, the noise floor gets raised. For best results use a high qual­ity pre-amp, set all the down­stream level con­trols to unity gain and do your level adjust as close to the source as pos­si­ble. This has the added ben­e­fit of keep­ing just one point of level con­trol. If you’re tweak­ing lev­els on the mixer’s mas­ter fader, the chan­nel fader, the chan­nel head gain, the mic pre-amp, and the instru­ment amps, it’s pretty easy to get lost bump­ing lev­els at all these dif­fer­ent places.

Tip #10

Try apply­ing a notch fil­ter to instru­ments that com­pete with the vocal range, rather than boost­ing EQ on the vocals. This will not only help to sep­a­rate the vocals, it will also save you head­room in the mix pre­vent­ing the need to over-compress to keep the instru­ments from being pushed down by the vocals.

Tip #11

If the vocals are a lit­tle pitchy and you either don’t have or don’t want to use an auto­tuner there is hope. Copy the track and apply a pitch shifter to each of the chan­nels. On one track nudge the pitch up a few cents, and on the other nudge it down. This has the effect of ‘smear­ing’ the pitch, mak­ing those minor slips less noticeable

Tip #12

When dou­bling vocals to achieve a fuller sound, don’t pan both tracks to the cen­ter. Hav­ing both tracks on cen­ter will make the vocals sit back more in the mix than if you sep­a­rated them a bit. It’s the slight tim­ing vari­a­tions in the two takes that makes the vocals sound more full. If they are both panned to the same spot those vari­a­tions are not as prominent.