The sound quality of the entire composition in pop and rock music depends largely on recording quality and acoustic drum processing. The same is typical of electronic music mixing in which beat and drums often play a key role and demand a lot from mixing and mastering techniques level and creativity. To make the best impression on listener, a number of tips related to corrective and creative equalization of programmed drums will come useful for audio engineers.
Here they are:
1. Get rid of boxiness
Kicks often have boxy side-tone due to plenty of harmonics in the range of 300–500 Hz what adds some looseness to them. But it is absolutely unacceptable in electronic music mixing. In fact, exactly a bass drum is often the base of the whole song. To get rid of this mud, online studio engineer can cut excessive things with bell EQ, and kick gets a lot more solid. So that it won’t get lost in a mix which is quite rich in instruments, mixing engineer might boost high-mid and/or treble zone. As a first step he can dramatically emphasize “click” in the 2 kHz region and, if necessary, boost the effect by a complementary small rise in the 10 kHz region.
2. Fat means Saturated
By contrast with natural sounds, the mere synthesized ones can sound sort of poor but it can be easily corrected by mixing engineers with saturation. For example, electronic claps will be by far fatter by adding saturation and even distortion; online studio engineer should only keep in mind that this kind of processing adds a lot of extra bass and low-mid frequencies to the sound. So saturation is often used together with EQ to clean the processed sound off mud.
3. Tricky treble
Treble is a little tricky frequency range in mixing music online. When it is added to instruments, the illusion of overall rise in brightness of a song can appear, in fact, a music studio engineer often runs the risk of diluting the sound and making it thinner, killing its “body” as well. That is why during processing high sounding percussion (tambourines and shakers) you’d better turn them down with a high shelf cut and then compensate the loss of brightness in highs area with a rise (also with a shelf EQ) in upper-mids, therefore, the processed percussion gets by far better mixed in entire sounding of a track and adds high frequency harmonics to it without making common frequencies balance thinner.
4. Darker first
There are a number of approaches to song structure building. According to one of them engineer should start creating future track with the base – groove – and only after that, when the need arises, one should add some bright elements.
5. Cut carefully
Another standard technique in mixing is cutting unnecessary sub frequencies in percussion. It’s particularly topical when studio works with busy mixes. But be careful and do not try high-pass everything and anything whereby depriving instruments of energy and base. In spite of the basic spectrum placed in high-mids area even hi-hats turn into rambling babbling when they are deprived of lows.
6. Dry is not good
In spite of the “just-in-face” rule, which is common in electronic music tracks, nevertheless, it isn’t worth leaving snare or clap totally dry. A bit of well-shaped reverberation will be enough to fit in the best possible way in the common sound. It’ll give a song even more character without damaging its purity. For help with your actual or up coming projects please learn our prices for mixing mastering services.