Toontrack drums By: DAWsopenat7 No comments

I’ve been playing guitar since the age of 7, but song production is something i only began to pursue when i was in college and Toontrack drums have been with me since that point.

I’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to record live acoustic drums on many occasions and this has given me a great knowledge and understanding of the importance of microphone placement, drum tuning and the standard of the drummer. Unfortunately, as a home studio owner i don’t always have the facility to record real drums and neither do some of the clients I work with, but there was no reason for this to hinder my creativity and stop me releasing high quality mixes.

Enter Toontrack drums. I started off with EZ Drummer (Pop/Rock) with multiple choices on snare, kick, toms, hi hat, two crash cymbals and a ride cymbal. It was great to have such high quality sounding samples and be able to program them into a piano-roll or play them from a midi controller. This improved my productivity and also gave me a massive confidence boost when writing and producing songs because i knew i didn’t have to worry about the sound of the drums.

It wasn’t long before i upgraded to Superior Drummer 2.0 and from that point on, i have never looked back.

It was quite overwhelming at first because the amount of choice on the drums and cymbals is incredible and that’s before even looking at the configuration options in the built-in mixer. I’d like to mention that i have used this software from different angles – choosing drums, tweaking sounds and adding layers and sticking with a preset and simply programming drum patterns for a song. Spending time sculpting the drum sound was time well spent because I got to know the software, how to add layers (X-Drums), how to use the tune dial, how to adjust the ADSR, how to adjust the bleed on individual tracks and how to use the velocities to trigger different samples at different numeric values. Equally, time spent programming drum patterns to create a song was time well spent because I developed my ability to compose and nothing has improved this more than simply writing songs.

I spent a couple of weeks experimenting with Superior Drummer 2.0 before i started work on another song because i wanted to learn the software and create my own preset so that i could produce my own songs with ‘mix ready’ drums. Once i had this, my productivity increased to a level that i did not expect because i was able to focus on composing without leaving my studio and i was able to listen to a mix by the end of a session. Aside from programmed drums being a great convenience, it always gave me a sound that i could be proud of because i knew i could put out a mix without people questioning the quality of the drumming or the sound.

I’m not an official endorser of Toontrack but, i can’t speak highly enough of them because their products have given me a palette of endless high quality drums to chose from, all on a platform that encourages productivity and creativity, not to mention the inspiration it gives me when i’m starting something new.

If you haven’t used Toontrack software before or you are currently making up your mind, I strongly suggest you invest in either EZ Drummer 2 or Superior Drummer 2.0. If you are a home studio owner and a composer, Toontrack products are simply the best value in terms of the amount of drums you get for your money. As well as this, take into consideration the experience of the engineers that recorded all the samples using the highest quality microphones, preamps and mixing consoles all in some of the greatest sounding live rooms in the recording studio world. I can’t personally put a price on any of that.

Even if you aren’t interested in all of the drums sounds that are available, it could still be an invaluable tool in your home studio because it gives you a drum kit ready to go immediately in your DAW. It’s simply one less thing to worry about and you can just focus on doing what you love, creating music.

Overall, Toontrack have been one of the greatest benefits to me as a home studio owner and artist because they have given me quality drum sounds with a user friendly interface and endless configurability options enabling me to make music in the height of creativity. They also enable me to offer the same standards to clients that are also limited with their drum writing or recording facilities.

If you haven’t already done so, check them out at www.toontrack.com/drums

If you’re interested in editing, mixing or mastering services, head over to www.jwaudioproductions.co.uk and get in touch via the contact page.

Knowledge Wednesday By: DAWsopenat7 No comments

Weekly words of wisdom!

Remember to listen to your mix as a whole as well as soloing instruments.

When EQ’ing, it’s always good to play with high and low pass filters whilst listening to the entire mix so that you can hear the impact and more importantly, the benefit it is having to other instruments. Try applying a high pass filter EQ to your drum overheads whilst listening to the entire mix or just the drums as a group and listen to how much clearer the low end becomes as you cut out the unwanted frequencies. Try this with the drum room tracks as well.

It’s important to go between full mix and solo’d tracks particularly when learning about mixing as it’s quite easy to become disheartened with the sound of an instrument on it’s own as the EQ cuts you make don’t always sound that great in isolation, but remember the bigger picture – all the individual elements and decisions you make are contributing to a song.

How to achieve a big rhythm guitar sound By: DAWsopenat7 No comments

If you’re a guitarist like me then you take a lot of time and care to achieve the guitar tone you want. You’ll find that it sounds great in the room through your speaker cabinet and through your studio monitors, but when you’ve recorded a take and you play it back with yours drums and bass, it suddenly falls flat, it’s not a big as it sounded in your environment and it’s now fighting with other instruments.

The great news is that there is a simple solution to this problem and you can achieve it without using a single plugin. It is important to note that the solution starts at the recording process. Take the part that you have just recorded, mute it, create a new audio track and record the same part again. Once this is done, un-mute the other track, pan one hard left and the other hard right and listen to the results. I guarantee you’ll be pleased with the results! I remember the first time I implemented this technique and I was blown away so much so that i now make this my standard process for recording all rhythm guitars.

It’s important to keep your playing super tight when tracking and be sure to record with a click track. Don’t worry too much about slight differences between the two rhythm guitars as it will simply add to what is already a wider stereo image.

Please remember that copying and pasting takes and panning them left and right will not work and will only cause phase issues. To hear this for yourself, try copying a take and pan each of them to the left and right and you’ll hear them both in the middle and a bit louder (not stereo as they would be with multiple recorded takes). I won’t go into the properties of phase but the only way to achieve this effect is by tracking your rhythm guitars twice. The results are totally worth it!.

So if you’re looking for a simple way to get your rhythm guitars to sound bigger, try tracking them twice and pan them out wide. I promise this will do a lot more for your mix than a plugin ever will. It doesn’t have to stop with double tracking either, you can quadruple track your guitars and in my experience this is best done with the final pair of guitars being recorded with a slightly different tone. For example, I like to track two guitars with humbuckers and the other two with single coil pickups as I find these to add a little extra bite, particularly with distorted guitars. If you aren’t already double or quad tracking your guitars, try it out, you’ll never look back!

Know when to take a break By: DAWsopenat7 No comments

Whether you are new to mixing, an amateur, semi-pro or fully professional mixing engineer it is always important to take time away from a mix because it’s very easy to get in too deep with adding plugins, tweaking EQs and cycling reverb presets etc and before you know it, your productivity slows right down and your decisiveness suffers. As harsh a reality as that is, there is a way to fix it.

During a mix, take 5-10 minutes away from the session every hour. It’s really important to give your ears a rest as they can fatigue very easily and in the mixing world, there’s nothing more important than your ears. After mixing for a long period of time you will inevitably become biassed towards your own mix because you have simply gotten used to what you’re hearing and it can become very difficult to make objective decisions in terms of EQ and compression.  It’s good to give your mind a rest, it’s a time to regroup, gain some perspective and refresh before going back to work. Try to implement this as a standard whether you feel like you can keep going or you’ve hit a ‘wall’ and value the time away from the session as much as the work itself.

As well as breaking away during the mix, it’s also very helpful to take a day or two when you’ve completed a mix. This is particularly useful to do before you sign off the work as you will be completely fresh to the session and be able to make a clear cut decision on whether to approve the mix or not. I’m not suggesting that when you revisit your work after a break that you’ll find problems, in actual fact the time away may just give you the answer that you’re looking for and you can give your seal of approval there and then. For me, when I come back to mixes It’s often that I’m not 100% happy with the level of a vocal and I might add some automation, then I’m happy. Sometimes it’s simply the level of a wet reverb signal and I may have been overly generous or not made the effect prominent enough.

Never get yourself to a point within a mix where it becomes a stressful task, as soon as you start to feel this happening – walk away immediately, it’s time to take a break. Coming back to a mix with fresh ears is the best thing you can do as you’ll be able to EQ and hear compression more accurately and most importantly make decisions quicker. Remember to value the time away from a mix as much as the time spent on one because more often than not, it’ll be exactly what you need to move forward and finish the mix.

Knowledge Wednesday By: DAWsopenat7 No comments

Weekly words of Wisdom!

High Pass Filter – This tool allows you to attenuate/remove frequency content below the chosen frequency cut off, therefore allowing the higher frequencies to pass through. Try this with a parametric EQ plugin on your rhythm guitars to remove the unwanted low frequency content. Start by rolling off up to 80Hz to create space for the kick drum and bass guitar which will immediately have more clarity with this mix move and even increase as far as 120Hz if needed. This is a great trick to allow the bass guitar to sit nicely underneath the rhythm guitars. Below is generally what a high pass filter will look like.

Low Pass Filter – This tool allows you to attenuate/remove frequency content above the chosen frequency cut off, therefore allowing the lower frequencies to pass through. Try this with a parametric EQ plugin on your backing vocals to remove some of the unwanted high frequency content. Start by rolling off at 6-7KHz to put the backing vocals a little bit further back in the mix and allow the main vocal to be the dominant one. This is a great trick to easily create depth and space in a mix without using reverb. Below is generally what a low pass filter will look like.

Remember: Create space in the low end By: DAWsopenat7 No comments

Whether you are mixing 10 or 100 audio tracks you will certainly have multiple instruments fighting for their own space and also claiming unnecessary space. For the purpose of this post, i’m going to talk directly about the essential low frequency space.

Generally speaking, all frequencies can be problematic at some point but none more than the low end frequencies. The majority of your audio tracks will have low end content and in the context of a mix with multiple instruments, there simply isn’t room for all of it and you need to prioritise the sounds that you want to occupy that space. To keep things simple, i’ll say the bass guitar and kick drum are most likely going to be chosen to occupy the low end. This means the snare, hi hats, overheads, room mics, rhythm guitars, lead guitars and any other audio tracks need to make way for the kick drum and bass guitar and let them be heard and felt in the way they were intended to be.

The quickest and easiest way to deal with this is by grabbing an EQ, setting a high-pass filter and sweeping all the way up to 100-120Hz. You may not need to be quite this aggressive with all your audio tracks, but for the instruments i’ve mentioned above, you aren’t filtering out any of their important fundamental frequencies, you are allowing the fundamentals of the kick drum and bass guitar to occupy their own space without interference from any other sources.

If you’re a guitar player like me, when you first start mixing you will focus on this instrument first and it is very tempting to keep the low end of your rhythm guitars in a mix because lets face it, we all love the sound and feel that we get from a 4×12 cabinet on stage, but the reality is that in the context of a mix, the low end simply isn’t needed from guitars and they work much better by allowing other instruments their own space. You can look at it as a compromise or sacrifice but i can promise you that it’s a positive move to cut. Try your next mix with two versions, one version with cuts made to the low end to make space for the bass and kick and another version without and see which you like best. I’m very confident you’ll prefer the first version.

One important thing to take into consideration is that when you solo the instruments , they may not sound as good with the low end cut, but listen to the mix as a whole and appreciate the context because your goal should be to get all the sounds working together in balance.

The topic of low frequencies is much larger than the size of this post but i wanted to highlight the importance of creating space in the low end for two of the most common sources, the kick drum and bass guitar.

Importance of Perspective By: DAWsopenat7 No comments

When mixing on studio monitors whether it’s an affordable set of M-Audio’s or more expensive Genelec’s, it’s important to consider the formats that the audience will most likely be listening on. For example, laptops, phones, mp3 players, car stereos and home HI-FIs. I’m going to say that you’ll have at least two of the above and if they weren’t before, they are now another set of tools that have been added to your arsenal at no extra cost.

Checking your work on different formats isn’t something you’ll always need to rely on as you become more confident in your ability however, it is an invaluable tool to learn about how your mixes translate to real world systems. It is particularly useful for people who are mixing in acoustically un-treated or poorly treated spaces as it will expose areas of your mix that you may not have recognised before for example, overly generous low end frequency boosts and excessive amounts of reverb. As you complete more mixes and check them in this way, you will become more aware of any issues displaying themselves in your mixes and be able to address them at source.

One of my biggest problems that i identified was that my distorted rhythm guitars were too bright in quite a lot of my early mixes and although they sounded good on my studio monitors, they weren’t translating well enough on other formats. I’ve never had the problem again because i now roll off the high frequencies on rhythm guitars in an area that makes them sound good across all formats.

Although this is a very simple technique, it is a very useful tool for learning and developing your skills as it will provide you with evidence on how your mixes translate across different formats. Of course we all hope our mixes will be played on similar setups to our own or expensive HI-FI separate systems, but it is just as important that your mix is clear and sounds good on a pair of £20 headphones because then you truly know you have achieved a good, balanced mix.

EQ – A golden rule or just good practice? By: DAWsopenat7 No comments

When mixing, one of core tools we use to shape a sound is EQ.

We all use different plugins for this, some built into our DAW, some online freebies and others purchased from plugin developers such as Fab Filter.

For the purpose of this post, we will be focussing on parametric EQ. Typically having multiple frequency bands, we have control over the frequency, gain and bandwidth (commonly known as Q).

Frequency – Adjusting this control will determine which frequency will be affected by the choices made on the following two controls.

Gain – Adjusting this control will add or subtract gain to the chosen frequency. Remember that without using this control, no other parameters will have an affect.

Bandwidth (Q)– Adjusting this control will determine how wide or narrow the boost or cut to the frequency band is.

If you haven’t used this type of EQ before, the best thing to do is bring up the plugin on an audio track and have a play around. Create a 10dB boost at 100Hz with a narrow bandwidth (see the example below) then sweep up the frequency bands and listen to how the sound of the audio source changes.

Now, to bring this post back to the context of the title. I want to talk about the idea of cutting frequencies with a narrow bandwidth and boosting with a wide bandwidth. I’ll answer the question immediately, I believe narrowly cutting and widely boosting frequencies is just good practice, not a golden rule and I’ll explain why now…

It’s important to look at EQ within the context of what you’re mixing. Are you mixing a snare drum that has an annoying ringing tone? Are you mixing a kick drum that’s lacking some low end thump? Or are you mixing a vocal that needs a little more air adding?

I’ll firstly use the snare as an example. If I have an annoying ringing tone between 500Hz and 700Hz then I usually create a narrow band and boost by about 12-15dB to really accentuate the problem frequency. I sweep around these areas until I hear the ringing most acutely and quite often it will start clipping on the channel I’m working on. Once I’ve found this frequency I will normally cut it by as much as 6-12dB and sometimes more (it’s not about the numbers here, it’s about what your ears are telling you) and I will then bypass the plugin a few times both with the snare solo’d and also within the context of the full mix. The reason for cutting using narrow bandwidths is to ensure the fundamentals and character of the sound are left intact. The important thing to realise here is whether it sounds better with or without the cut, remember to trust your own ears and don’t just cut a frequency because other people say so.

I’ll use the vocal as another example. If I have a vocal that is quite dull and lacking some air, I usually create a 3-4dB boost between 8-12KHz with a wide bandwidth. I then check this solo’d and within the mix and add or reduce gain to taste. The reason for boosting with wide bandwidths is to ensure that the increase in gain is audibly smooth across the frequency band and therefore more pleasing to the ear. In the context of a vocal, imagine boosting a frequency with a narrow bandwidth in an area which happens to be around vocal sibilance and the result would be a dull vocal with accentuated S’s on certain words.

An example of when you might work against the practice of boosting with wide bandwidth is when you’re working with an ambient synth pad and you may want to highlight certain resonances to create a droning sound. Using a narrow bandwidth allows you to zone in on the fundamentals of a sound and choose exactly where you want to boost. You may want to highlight 440Hz which is the musical note of A.

Another example is when mixing a snare drum. One particular area i like to boost is between 170Hz and 200Hz (depending on the drum) to highlight the fundamental which adds a lot of weight to the snare. I prefer to boost using a narrow bandwidth in this frequency band as this is the only part that i want to be accentuated. I will usually boost between 4-6dB. I will often do a mirrored EQ on the bass guitar around the frequency that i have boosted and cut in the same area to allow both instruments to work together without competing for the same area in the spectrum.

The main purpose of this post was to give an insight into why boosting wide and cutting narrow with EQ is just a good practice, not a golden rule. There are always exceptions to a rule and i apply them or go against them on pretty much every mix i do. Remember to trust your ears when mixing and don’t judge a sound based on the visual aspect of an EQ plugin. The important thing to do when making EQ decisions is to ask yourself what you want to achieve and why.

Knowledge Wednesday By: DAWsopenat7 No comments

Wednesday weekly words of wisdom!

Parallel compression – Create a copy of your audio source in your DAW and add heavy compression (fast attack, slightly slower release, high ratio and pull down the threshold until you hear the compressor working, make sure the level is the same with the compressor bypassed) and blend in with the uncompressed track – try this on your drum buss for extra punch!

Parallel distortion – Create a copy of your audio source in your DAW and add distortion or saturation to this track and blend with the clean track – try this on your bass guitar track for extra bite and to help it cut through the mix and sit well with distorted guitars!

Mirrored EQ – Cutting a certain frequency band on one instrument and boosting on the same band on another – try a gentle cut around 65Hz on the bass guitar with a narrow/mid bandwidth and then boost with the same settings on the kick drum, this creates space that allows each instrument to sit nicely in the frequency spectrum in harmony. This technique can be applied both ways if you want your bass guitar to occupy more of the low end.

EQ in the mix as well as soloing – Use this technique when EQ’ing your drum overheads and room microphones to ensure you’re not removing too much of the frequencies that help them cut through! Switch between solo and full mix to hear them in context.

Automation – Automate your master fader to make your song more dynamic – A 1dB boost on a chorus can make a massive difference and grab the listener on that all important hook!