Mixing
Collapsed Stereo Image
Suppose you’ve hard-panned a number of tracks, but your mix still doesn’t sound as wide as you’d like. What’s wrong with this psychoacoustic picture?
Your hard-panned tracks might have too much bottom end. Bass frequencies are inherently omnidirectional, meaning it’s hard for the human ear to determine where they originate. That’s because...
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Washy Sound with No Depth
Adding reverb to a mix is a great way to make it sound bigger. The larger the implied acoustic space, the more depth and width the production takes on. But running virtually everything through reverb in an attempt to make the mix sound huge is a common mistake of neophyte...
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The Chorus Doesn’t Climax
You had high hopes for your new power-pop ballad, but something is holding it back. Your tracks were all captured with plenty of dynamic range, the performances were killer, and the arrangement positively soars during the hook. Yet for some reason, the chorus just doesn’t deliver the big payoff it should...
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Too Much Compression
These days, many mixes are so overcompressed that they become irritating and fatiguing to listen to after only one or two minutes. Overcompression is like a plague contaminating our industry. Make no mistake — I love stereo-bus compression, and I like my mixes loud, but there’s a big difference between pumped-up, exciting...
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Not Enough Punch
A mix lacking detail will also often lack punch, or transient elements married to tightly focused bass-frequency content. When a mix’s spectral balance is already great, it can be a mistake to boost both bass and high frequencies to achieve more punch. The added highs might just make the mix sound glassy,...
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Insufficient Detail
When a mix is lacking in detail, boosting high-frequency EQ is often the wrong approach. When that just creates a glassy mix without solving the problem, try cutting the upper-bass and low-midrange frequencies instead. Too much energy in these bands can create a blanket of mud that obscures a mix’s underlying transients, so...
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Large Swings in Spectral Balance
Sometimes the timbre of specific elements of a mix (or of the whole enchilada) is a moving target. For example, the electric bass or acoustic guitar might sound boomy on some phrases yet be well balanced everywhere else in the song. The lead singer might have a shrill high register...
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No Sparkle and Bottom
Of course, sometimes EQ boost is needed to make a mix sound great. You can generally get away with boosting extreme bass and high frequencies more than you can boosting midrange frequencies. That’s because the human ear is less sensitive to phase shift at the extremes of the audible spectrum. Even...
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Edgy, Fatiguing Sound
Digital audio has a reputation for producing cold, brittle sound, but the problem often stems from poor engineering techniques. The most common factor contributing to an edgy, fatiguing mix is indiscriminate boosting of upper-midrange and high-frequency EQ on multiple tracks.
Here’s a typical scenario: hours of mixing at high sound-pressure levels (SPLs) progressively...
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Boomy or Thin-Sounding Mix
The most common problem I hear with mixes is uneven levels throughout the range of bass frequencies. This can present itself as either a thin-sounding mix or a boomy one. Some mixes sound alternately thin and boomy in different sections of the song.
The main culprit behind a skewed bottom end is...
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