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At this point, it can become tempting to go from dialing in maximum preamp gain to making every channel sound as loud as possible. After all, bigger, fatter, fuller sound is better; so, if every channel sounds its best, then the mix is guaranteed to sound amazing, right?
Nope.
The thing is, loudness isn’t the same as signal level. In fact, loudness is a matter of which frequencies stand out the most. Once you understand this, you can use it to your advantage, but loudness also puts a stumbling block in your way.
Unfortunately, if channels share the same accented frequency ranges, you can start to get serious balance issues in your mix. Want that kick to sound fuller? Crank up the low frequencies or, better yet, cut everything else, and you’ve got it! How about that bass guitar? Same thing! Mix them together and you get muddy low end eating up your headroom, and you can’t really hear either the bass or the kick.
The sonic blurring you get from trying to make each channel sound its best becomes particularly noticeable once you’re dealing with a dozen channels or more. If you’ve ever been to a show where the band is a wash of fuzz and cymbals and the vocalist sounds like Eddie Vedder singing into a pillow with too much reverb, then, chances are, this was the issue. That, or it was a mid-’90s shoegaze band.
What’s really cool is that you can apply this same principle to making your mixes sound as full and intelligible as possible. It’s simple. Both the kick and the bass want the general frequency range (low end), but they can’t share it. Or can they?
By running that thunderous bass through its channel’s highpass filter, suddenly all of those deep lows are free for the boom of the kick, and you’re left with the more percussive part of the bass. Since the percussive attack of the bass lives higher than the beater attack of the kick, both instruments have the bandwidth they need to punch through without getting in each other’s way. Bear this in mind as you mix the rest of the band, carving out a pocket for each channel as you go, and you’re all set.
This is all easy enough to understand in a vacuum, but what about at showtime, when the pressure is on and there doesn’t seem to be time during soundcheck? There are two answers to this. First, practice a lot. Really, this takes time to learn. Those live sound gurus who can walk up to the board, reach for a knob, and transform what sounds like a ball bearing bouncing off of a metal bucket into a proper snare tend to have years or decades of experience at this.
The other way to achieve a well-balanced mix quickly and easily is to have a digital mixer do all of the heavy lifting for you. Many digital mixers include presets for virtually every conceivable sound source, which carve out each channel and even bring out vital harmonics in common ranges. They can be really cool, but you probably want to learn to mix or at least to adjust presets by hand, or you could end up running into unexpected problems.
5 steps to become an awesome dude
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