The EM Poll

Electronic Euphoria

Feb 1, 1999 12:00 AM, By Jeff Casey

           

Building a powerhouse mix with electronic instruments.

Panning and Placement

Many people don’t realize just how much EQ and level can affect the placement of an instrument in the stereo field. To check this out yourself, try the following experiment. Put the faders of your bass and kick drum tracks up with both channels panned to center. Boost them both by 15 dB at 200 Hz and turn up your monitors. You’ll notice that it becomes difficult to distinguish the hit of the kick drum. Now pan the bass to nine o’clock and the kick drum to three o’clock. When you do, the kick drum hit returns. Finally, pan them both back to center and pull down the level of the bass track; you can again hear the kick drum better when the bass is lower.

Light compression with a unit like the Joemeek SC2.2 is often best for electronic instruments.

This experiment illustrates how instruments can occupy the same frequency ranges, provided they aren’t at the same spatial position in a mix (and vice versa). I’ll discuss specific EQ applications below, but this is important to keep in mind when panning tracks. In general, instruments that comprise the rhythm section are kept toward the center of the mix (see Fig. 2). Specifically, drum parts, bass parts, certain pianos, and loops should be spread no further than ten and two o’clock. In fact, try putting monotonous loops in mono; this opens up the horizontal axis for the supporting characters (guitars, piano, strings, and so on). Whatever you do, don’t pan your drum tracks across the entire stereo image: have you ever seen an acoustic drum kit with toms that run from stage left to stage right? Keep the kit in the middle.

As a rule of thumb, any part that has a heavy low-frequency content should be situated toward the center of the mix. Simply panning the two signals is a prescription for trouble. True, Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick split the drums and bass to opposite channels on certain Beatles tunes. However, his drum and bass panning was almost certainly done out of necessity for bouncing tracks to overcome track limitations.

Slightly outside the rhythm section lie the supporting instruments: pianos, strings, guitars, and horns. This is also where you might want to place certain background vocals and percussion.

Lead vocals are generally put right up the middle; anywhere else makes them just distracting to listen to. Although instrument solos are usually panned dead-center, I prefer to spread them slightly to either side. Often, a solo will be played along with the lead vocal, and if both are in the center they will be competing with each other. (Many solo instruments have a frequency range similar to that of the human voice.)

Finally, the outside edges of the mix are usually reserved for effects returns (particularly reverb), for certain types of percussion, and for high-frequency background vocals (à la the Bee Gees). Be careful when placing sounds completely in one channel or the other, especially if you’re also processing them with multi-effects; in these instances, delays and reverbs that are panned opposite the source sound can cause phase cancellation.

Auto-panning synth patches should be addressed with caution. At what spectral position do these sounds start their journey, and where do they end up? This path must be clear of other sounds in the same frequency range; otherwise, dropouts will occur. Once you have a clear idea of where you want to place everything, it’s time to make sure that instruments sitting in similar places aren’t competing for room in the frequency spectrum.

Issues of Timbre

Proper EQ means more than just getting a great sound from a track; it’s about eliminating congestion in the mix. I want to stress the importance of subtractive EQ. In general, your mix will benefit more from cutting than from boosting. To tweak a sound with a parametric EQ, I usually start by doing the opposite of what I was taught in school: I turn the EQ gain down all the way and sweep the frequency knob, so I don’t even think about boosting anything unless I really have to. However, if you cut enough frequencies, you’ll probably need to make up gain at some point. Fortunately, many digital mixing consoles and DAWs provide a “gain makeup” capability as part of the EQ section.

With electronic replications of acoustic instruments, your best bet is probably to retain the authenticity of that instrument’s natural sound. This does not mean that the samples don’t need equalizing: although they are supposed to be accurate, pristine recordings of acoustic instruments, many are flawed. Basically, you want to eliminate frequencies that aren’t needed. What is the instrument’s primary range? In other words, which frequencies are needed to get it to cut through a mix, when that is desired, or to keep it back in the mix when it is supposed to be part of a pad? Once you determine the range, you can whittle it down to the necessary frequencies.

Equalizers such as this Drawmer 1961 are useful for timbrally separating instruments that are in the same range.

Two of the most important sounds in a mix are the kick drum and the bass part, and there should be a synergy to their relationship. These two tracks constitute most of the low-frequency energy in a mix. You need to decide which of these tracks will be the primary source of low end. For a traditional mix, I usually opt for bass, simply because there is more motion to it, and spotlighting it makes the low end more interesting.

On a bass part, I find that rolling off frequencies below 50 Hz is a good start. Boosting frequencies in the 300 Hz to 1.5 kHz range (admittedly a large range) will increase the track’s clarity, and pulling them out will round out the low end. Once I have the bass sound, I work the kick drum in as support, accenting mid frequencies (1 kHz) and boosting a little around 80 Hz (3 to 6 dB, with a narrow bandwidth).

On the other hand, if you’re producing urban music, the kick drum sample or synth patch should be the more pronounced low-frequency element. Because many hip-hop beats are derived from premixed loops, you’ll want to boost the track by about 3 dB at 120 Hz. Loops also have little high-end clarity, so you may have to roll off upper frequencies with a shelving filter (usually above 7 kHz). A mid-range boost might also be in order. Most other electronic percussion instruments are fine with little or no EQ; if EQ is needed, it’s usually a boost at 7 kHz or higher.

Certain synth pads—especially organ sounds—tend to be heavy on the low-end content. You’ll probably find that, although they sound really fat by themselves, they just don’t sit well with the rhythm instruments. Try rolling off frequencies below 300 Hz or boosting the track in the 2 kHz to 3 kHz band and lowering the fader level.

Digital pianos can often present the same problem in a mix, especially when the lower half of the keyboard is being used. As long as the piano isn’t the only instrument playing, my advice is to roll off the low end. I recently used snapshots to automate the EQ of a piano track in a rock song. The piano started the song out and needed to sound full, but when the rest of the band came in, it totally clashed with the bass. So I simply set up two snapshots—the second one with a highpass filter engaged—and performed the change on the fly.

Electronic strings should accent the high-mid and upper frequency ranges, so a little boost might be needed somewhere above 5 kHz. Try rolling the low frequencies off below 500 Hz. One very useful application of EQ is reducing hiss from sound modules. Although expanders and gates are an option, you’ll find that rolling off frequencies above 10 kHz is sometimes a better approach. Keep in mind that this will work only on synth outputs handling signals that have no frequency content above 10 kHz (such as drum tracks, bass parts, and guitar parts). Remember, every change you make to one track—no matter how small—will affect the other tracks as well. A tweak to the piano will change its relationship to the bass, which may alter the way the bass sounds. So if you make major changes on soloed tracks, be sure to check the sound in the mix immediately.