benvesco.com

A great drum track is at the core of most modern popular music. Other mix recipes have covered the snare drum and kick drum, and now it is time to talk about toms. The toms can be used to add texture to particular drum fills and section transitions or they can drive an entire song. No matter which role they are filling in your track, it is important to get a sound that will allow them to cut through the mix and be noticed. Here are some helpful mix recipes to get you started with EQ and compression on your tom tracks. Get mix recipes for toms

Here is another stereo mixing trick to go along with the Haas, cross, and panned delay tricks. This technique creates a stereo sound that fills the room and appears to come from all sides of the listener’s head at the same time. The basic idea is to start with a mono track panned dead center and invert the phase one one of the channels. Your digital home recording setup is quite likely already equipped to perform this trick. Show me how to set it up

Here is another trick for using a delay to create a bit of a stereo effect on a mono track. The basic idea is to pan the mono track slightly to one side (one to three o’clock should do it) and add a delay that is panned about the same amount to the other side (nine to eleven o’clock). Adjust the delay time to produce a sound you like for your mix, and there you have it! It is a fairly simple technique that can be used to push something like a supporting keyboard track out of the center of a mix but allows you to still keep it turned up in volume. Following is a description of how to do this trick in REAPER and more details on what kinds of delay settings I think sound good. See the details

Reverse reverb is an interesting technique that can give some extra power to well chosen song sections. In the days of reel-to-reel or cassette recording the effect was somewhat involved, requiring flipping the tape and careful calculation of which track you would record to in order to avoid overwriting another important track. In the days of the modern home recording studio we are a bit more spoiled with our computer powered DAW and software plugins. To illustrate this effect, I’ll show you how to apply it to make a simple 4/4 drum part sound much more dramatic. Show me the reverse trick

Mixing is certainly a specialized craft but I believe in learning all I can about my craft. Much of my time is occupied by reading about mixing, talking about mixing, thinking about mixing, and actually mixing. This page is intended to serve as a resource for finding some interesting mixing related material to help you hone your own craft. Our home studio is our playground and there are many books available to help us learn the ropes. Show me some mixing books »

Cross delay is a trick that can be used on a track having different information on the left and right channels to enhance the lushness of the stereo image. You can use this trick on drum overheads, chorused guitar sounds, stereo keyboard patches, or any other non-mono audio track in your home recording. Here is how to make it work. Show me

The bass guitar is an important element of every contemporary mix even though it rarely plays a prominent role. Sometimes the bass is felt rather than heard while other mixes have the bass in a much more audible sonic space. Your home recording studio is well equipped to shape your bass tracks as long as you have a basic equalizer and compressor. Show me how

There are a lot of little noises that can sneak in between phrases. These extra noises are not noticed while the vocalist is singing but you don’t want to hear bleed from headphones, rustling paper, or any other distractions in between. It is quite common in the home recording studio world to put a noise gate on vocal tracks to eliminate these types of problems. Tuning a noise gate to correct this can be a time consuming process which is prone to creating one or two unnatural sounding words here and there. I prefer a more natural sounding approach. Show me how to do it »

A high pass filter is a type of equalizer that eliminates frequencies below a specified cutoff point. Since it is low frequencies that are removed, only high frequencies may pass (thus the name). You might also hear high pass filters (HPF) referred to as low cut filters which is a bit ambiguous. High pass filters have a few very important roles to play in the mixing process. Your home studio recordings can benefit greatly from wise use of the powerful eq techniques outlined below. Teach me about HPF »

We’ve all heard stories of the mystically powerful pro audio engineers who can listen to a mix and happily announce, “the guitars have too much 1k on them.” Or perhaps a nonchalant declaration, “the snare would really come alive with a little boost in the 3k range.” This is great if you have the golden ear or the years of experience to identify specific frequencies by sound. What about the rest of us? If you spend your days at the office and are lucky to get a few hours a week in your home studio then you might never log the hours necessary to develop this skill. Fear not, there is a solution. Sweeping an eq is the process of manipulating a frequency band as a tool to help you identify a sweet spot or problem frequency. All you need is a parametric eq and about thirty seconds of time. Show me how to sweep an eq »