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RECCOMENDED EQUALIZATION FREQUENCIES

RECCOMENDED EQUALIZATION FREQUENCIES

Mix Mistakes We explore some of the most common causes of mix failure we've tackled in our monthly Mix Rescue column. Banish these demons and you're most of the way to a devilishly good mix! Mike Senior Over the years, I've listened to piles and piles of amateur mixes from home studios, including thousands of productions submitted by SOS readers to Mix Rescue, Studio SOS, Demo Doctor (the predecessor of the current Playback column), and the My Sound Files section of the SOS forum. What really crystalised this opinion for me recently was listening to over 100 mixes of the same raw multitrack files in order to adjudicate a recent 'mix‑off' contest. The purpose of this article, then, is to reveal the most common of these recurring mix nightmares — and thereby help you to avoid them in your own projects. 1: Dodgy Timing/Tuning Here's the waveform from a live drummer's kick‑drum mic. This is probably the single most common weakness of home‑brew mixes. 2: Mix Tonality Misjudgements 3: Phase Misalignment

Playing With Time In this quick tip, we are going to look at a few ways of playing with the timing of drum patterns to give the illusion that a standard drum ostinato is speeding up or slowing down in time. Rushing the Snare The first and easiest way of creating this illusion is to slightly rush or delay a certain drum element. Here, I have set up a basic ostinoto with a standard four to the floor rock/dance pattern. Now, if I nudge the second snare hit forward by a 192 division, it gives the portion of the bar between the first and second snare hits a subtly faster and more energetic feel. Here, I have added a bass to help emphasize the snare's timing against the rest of the loop. Hi-Hat Displacement One drastic trick that many jazz drummers use is to displace the constant hi-hat pattern to the 2 of the beat rather than the 3 for certain sections. The pattern with one bar of the displaced hi-hat. The Fabric of Time A good way of thinking about this concept is to think of music as a piece of fabric.

SONY ACID PRO: Route tracks to buses to create submixes Use buses to expand your mixing options OBJECTIVE: Route tracks to buses to create submixes. BACKGROUND: Buses are often used to route the audio from various channels to send effects, but they can also serve as submix buses so the bus’s level control could, for example, raise or lower the level of multiple tracks simultaneously. A default Acid Pro project routes all tracks to the master bus, so to create submixes, you need to assign track outputs to buses instead. Here’s how to do this. 1 In the toolbar at the top of the Mixing Console, click on the Insert Bus button. 2 In the Mixer View Pane, click on Audio Busses (outlined in red) to display buses in the console. 3 For tracks that you want to assign to a submix bus instead of directly to the master bus, ctrl-click on the track number in each track’s header. 4 Click on the Bus icon for any of the selected tracks, then choose the desired bus destination (in this example, Bus A). Tips • To add automation to a bus, go Views > Show Bus Tracks.

Acid Pro Native Instruments Massive Creative Volume Automation of Pads In the first example, we'll use volume automation to make a flexible sidechain effect, and in the second example, I'll show you how to use creative volume automation to give a track room to breathe. I'm using FL Studio, and these tips are useful for all DAWs. Step 1: Setup First, let's have a listen to what we have right now. If you'd like to learn how to make a sound like this, check out the Reverse Glass Tutorial. Next, create an automation clip controlling the volume level. Step 2: Design Now we have a volume envelope. Let's slice this bar and paint it across the playlist to save us the trouble of drawing this shape a lot of times. Now I'm going to adjust the curve of our fake sidechain. Step 3: Getting Creative One of the advantages of drawing a volume envelope rather than using sidechain compression or an LFO is that you have more freedom in adjusting the sound. In this next example I had a percussive shape on the first two beats and a sidechain shape on the second two beats.

Starting a Song by Beatboxing or Singing an Idea This article is about a quick and effective technique for capturing inspiration in a practical way that quickly translates into an actual song. This is one way to start a track with a vision you will want to finish. Step 1 First, set the tempo, and record yourself singing your idea into the closest microphone you can find. It doesn't have to be high-quality or anything spectacular, as we won't be using the audio in the final song. The goal is just to capture an idea that can be worked with. Step 2 Next, adjust the file so that it is synced with the track, slice the audio file and arrange it if you'd like. Step 3 Leaving the audio untouched, create a drum pattern that supports your sung idea. Step 4 Now it's time to start replacing that idea file. Power Tip Right now you may be wondering how strict you should adhere to your sung idea file. Step 6 Lastly, consider adding a couple more instruments to your track.

Making a Convincing Melody with Sampled Orchestral Strings When it comes to MIDI orchestration, the string section is probably the most difficult to emulate. That is because it, even though the strings are probably one of the most homogenous sections of the orchestra, it has some characteristics that are extremely hard to produce via samples. First of all, the strings are bowed instruments. This means that the musicians use a bow to produce the tones. As you have probably guessed, most of the work on MIDI orchestration goes for string melodies. So before we continue to the actual tutorial, I'd like to offer you some things that you should consider, observe and watch. Go to classical concerts. Step One: Creating the Melody Enough talking for now – let's head to the main part of the tutorial – creating a nice melody in strings that can sound realistic. This is the melody we will be using. We'll be making a legato line this time (in a previous quick tip I showed some ideas on using short articulations, like staccato or pizzicato). Good luck!

How To Make Epic Electronic Beats On the most part electronic beats are pretty straight forward. Most of the work lies in processing and programming variations. A lot of my students often ask how to make their beats sound more epic, so I thought I’d share a few useful mixing and editing tips with you. In this tutorial we’ll take a look at how to use routing and layering to add accent and impact to some Dubstep style snare hits. The aim of the game is to give each hit a unique sound and make the whole beat larger than life. I’m using Logic here and pre-programmed loops and samples to demonstrate the technique but you really can use any DAW or similar plug-ins here. Step 1 - Identifying The Hits To Process The first job is to identify the parts of your beat you want to enhance. The initial dry loop… unedited The untreated loop playing back If you are using an audio part like me then separating the chosen sections is simply a case of cutting the part up. The snares are trimmed Now make a few new audio channels.

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