Mennis Music Production

I'm Matt, or Mennis, whichever you prefer, I'll be writing about and showing you tips and tricks on everything to do with recording, mixing, mastering, workflow, gear and even some of my own work. If you have any questions or want to collaborate in any way then send me a message!

[mennismusicproduction]

The power in starting over.

Hello friends and music makers. 

Today’s bit of advice is about the power of starting over, now my advice specifically is related to mixing music. Either by completely redoing the mix, or just being brave enough to pull a long line of plugins down on a channel and starting over with a new focus or fresh perspective. This can be a good bit of advice for any avenue in life.

I’ve been working on a mix for my friend this week and I found it a little difficult to get where I wanted it to be because of the unique arrangement. It had two drum kits in it, A boat load of vocals and lots of guitar parts. It seemed a daunting task to try and balance together two kits so I thought that it would be best to tackle how they blended together first. 

It’s a largely sampled track, all of the sounds were good in isolation and getting my drum mix together was fairly simple. However, when I started bringing in the other elements of the mix I just couldn’t get it to work together with these drums I’d so carefully crafted and balanced together. 

I’m stumped at this point. It took me a coffee break, some time away from the mix and a fresh listen for me to realise that I’d wasted my time getting these drums to work without taking the time to pay attention to the important part of the song which in this case was very much the vocals. 

So what I end up doing is pulling down every plugin and putting all the faders back to zero. The drums had defeated me, for now. 

Even though starting the mix over was a bit of effort. Pulling up everything around the vocals allowed me to get the impact I wanted and inevitably the drums sounded better, with fewer plugins because of it. 

I hope you can learn from my silly errors and that keeping this idea of starting over and using fresh perspectives to help you over any creative blocks you may be having with your music/mixes/life/work/Anything where it might apply. 

Have a great day in audio friends and music makers. 

[mennismusicproduction]

Edits that make your music sound more proffessional!

Good afternoon! 

I've always found that editing tracks can take such a long time, and because of that it can be a weird combination of both devastatingly tiresome and deeply satisfying. Not all edits are born equal though, here’s my take on the most important edits for getting big wins and a pro sound. Each one of these tips on their own wont always make your productions sound night and day better. But doing all of them (where necessary) will get you at a great starting point before a mix, or even before the next stage of recording! 

Timing Edits

This isn’t always required, but sometimes making timing edits can really help to improve the feel of a track. Other times leaving in the natural swing works perfectly, but it’s rare that every performer is in the pocket on a production, particularly a multi-tracked one. So, whether you’re locking everything into a grid or just nudging downbeats to sync up with the drums, the most important thing to get right is the feel. 

The easiest way to do that is to just sit there and listen to the track and if anything sticks out as potentially wrong then fix it. If that guitar strum is clashing with a kick drum hit then nudge it over and lock the rhythms in. If you’ve put everything on the grid and it feels too robotic then take it back and just lock in the big hits. It’s all about matching your taste with accuracy, so when it feels good, you’ll know. 

Noise Removal

This one made a huge difference to my productions, especially in combination with good timing edits. For me, this is the process of taking out sections that aren’t musically relevant. On a singer, not all of the breaths are going to be good. In fact, some of them are going to sound nasty. Fading into sections is also really important here. Everything has a noise floor, and letting your noise floor just jump in doesn’t sound very good. At worst it will create clicks and pops, at best it’s hidden under other tracks. But if you ever have to deliver stems then having bad in points on your tracks looks and sound unprofessional. 

Pitch Correction

Divisive by nature, pitch correction is a hotly debated topic in the audio engineering world. Love it or hate it though, It’ll be on almost every major record, almost out of a bad, cyclical habit. We’re so used to hearing heavy pitch correction on records that it sounds weird without it, so we use more pitch correction. New singers these days are even mimicking the sound and intonation of a tuned vocal because that’s all they’ve known. 

The trick is knowing when to use it and how much of it to use. On a pop, or heavily produced track you’re likely to get away with using a lot. In fact it might sound wrong to not have a lot of pitch correction on it. On a stripped back, natural sounding record you’re better off using it as a tool to nudge things in to place, or spending time to find a better take by revisiting your vocal comp.

The Big Wins

I’m keen to point out that these edits aren’t the be all and end all of good music. You can have a brilliant song with some slightly off timing, or a vocal that isn’t perfectly in tune. And fixing the timing and tuning of this great song and performance could take it to another level or completely sterilise it. There are so many intangible elements to music that editing can’t improve. But these three tricks can make massive differences and can get you one step closer to more professional sounding music. 

I hope these little tips help you get your music closer to where it needs to be! 

[mennismusicproduction]

Awesome Gating Techniques for your drums!

Hello friends and music makers,

I tried to write this post once, finished it and managed to goof it up by not posting and then deleting it somehow. (Good one, right?)

But yes, Noise gates and expanders have been a tool I've never really gotten much joy with. I wrote earlier that I was getting okay results by using it to dip, rather than to cut. In essence, I'm still doing that. But the results from these tips are a lot more accurate, aggressive and just plain good.

Here we go:

Use the side-chain EQ to get the gate to listen musically to the source.

This, as you might be able to tell is a gate being used on a kick drum. So there was a bit of snare bleed on this kick drum which I wanted to get rid of to create a really clean and tight sound for this track. So what I’ve done is to tell the gate to ignore everything above 3.4kHz where the the snare and cymbals are doing a lot of ringing. What happens is the gate responds only to the low end of the kick drum and opens and closes more in time with the kick drum attack and release, rather than misfiring, or re-opening on the way out because of snare hits. 

On the snare drum, I’ve done a similar move to stop my gate from opening on big cymbal hits and kick drum hits by getting the gate to ignore the high and low frequencies and to just open for when the snare drum hits.  

It’s a great technique to get you working your gate harder and more accurately. 

Multiband gating: Using Parallel channels and gates on Toms

This technique is great for toms with more bleed on them than you’d like, And works particularly well for more aggressive or heavily arranged genres such as Pop or Metal which might require harder hitting attack and severe EQ to work. 

This technique involves splitting off your Tom tracks in to two sections. One for the stick hit. And the other for the low end.  

What you’re doing here is using the gate to create a very clickly, attack heavy click which you EQ to accent the sound of the stick hit or the sound of the shell. And you combine it with the low end sound of the tom which again, is gated to only open for the low end. 

I hope that these techniques can help lead you to better, tighter drum sounds and stop you from immediately grabbing samples when your drums aren’t sounding as good as you’d like. 

Have a great day in music and audio friends.

[mennismusicproduction]

Using Match EQ on a Vocal.

Hello Music Makers and audio nerds alike. This trick was invented (I think) by my good friend Jordan and it works so frustratingly well that I thought I'd share it with you. Firstly, what is match EQ? For those of you that don't know, Match EQ is a function that some EQ's (Fabfilter Pro Q 2, Izotope Ozone, Logic's stock EQ etc.) have where they listen to both the audio running through the channel your EQ is on as well as a sidechain input of another song, a sample, whatever you want it to listen to! It analyses the differences and suggests or applies changes based on those differences. You might now think of match EQ as though it's some sort of trick that an inexperienced engineer uses to try and cheat a mix to sounding more like a reference track. Yes that is one of it's uses, I sometimes do that to get a master tonally closer to a reference track. But like any tool, it has other uses and provides important information that we can use to our advantage. The way I've been using match EQ recently is on my vocal, and using my vocal-less mix as the sidechain input. What this does is it gives me an EQ map of what frequencies I need to make my vocal sound more like the mix. So I use this information and I flip it on it's head. If the Match EQ is saying that a 4db Boost at 453Hz makes the vocal sound more like the mix then I make a cut at 453Hz instead. And conversely if it's doing a big dip at 1khz then I'd apply a boost instead. Now obviously it's not a perfect solution, I tend to get rid of anything that the Match EQ is suggesting to do in the ultra low end and anything about 5Khz because vocals don't have that much bass, and you'll often see a massive boost. They also don't need all the top end of cymbals or ultra hyped synths, so you might see some weirdness up there too. Where this technique really shines is in creating pockets for your vocal to sit in that vital low mid range and in finding space the upper mids for your vocal to poke through. It helps to achieve a really balanced sounding vocal that has this natural sounding separation from the mix. We usually want our vocals to sit on top of a mix and this technique is an almost foolproof way to help achieve that. So if you have an EQ plugin that allows you to use a match EQ, please give this technique a go. I never want to use it because it feels a bit like cheating. But it works too well not to use, especially if you're struggling with vocals in a mix. Have a great day making music friends!

[mennismusicproduction]

So here it is! The EP I've been working on for what feels like years and years. Hope you enjoy it, as always, any production questions are welcomed :)

[mennismusicproduction]

Who else hates tom mic bleed?

Except for on the most perfectly recorded drums which have been EQ’d and treated insanely well on the way in; Tom bleed just annoys the hell out of me. I used to use mute automation. 

But now my Toms will always just look like this:

Not only does this help give a dynamic lift whenever the toms come in, but it makes EQ easier and allows the kick and snare close mics to do their thing. 

[mennismusicproduction]

Leaving Home (ft. Rochelle Thomas), by Jack Allum

2 track album

Woo! So happy to see this released. Mixed and mastered by myself. 

Great work by @jackallum producing this. 

Any questions on the mix or master then let me know! 

Have a great day music makers and audio people. 

[mennismusicproduction]

Using different plugins and a different approach to Additive and Subtractive EQ.

Hello again music makers! 

There are absolutely no hard and fast rules for using EQ, and there is a lot of misinformation about things you should and shouldn’t be doing. So rather than give you any rules or guidelines I want to talk about my favourite way to use EQ, and why I choose to work that way most of the time. 

I like to split up subtractive and additive processing across two different EQ plugins. Why? Because it allows me to get into the correct mindset for each process.

Subtractive EQ is the technique of removing or cutting away frequencies that are unnecessary, masking other elements in your mix, or are just plain horrible. It’s a technique that lets you focus on revealing the best attributes of your sounds and then balancing them against the other tracks. 

My go to plugin for this job is the Pro Q 2 from fabfilter. It has a real time analyzer so you can see any lumps or bumps in the sub range that you might not have the monitoring for. And if I need to I can use a shed load of bands to make all of the necessary cuts. It also has the capability of having a very wide or very narrow Q setting. 

If I’m not working from home, like I wasn’t for my most recent project then I tend to just go for the stock EQ-7 in Pro Tools because it has good filtering options and almost always has enough bands to work with. Stock EQ’s are great for the clinical or technical work. 

My personal objective when using subtractive EQ is to end up with a sound that has no unnecessary subs, no ugly sounding resonances in the low end, and a balanced mix with minimal frequency clashes or masking between instruments. 

I consider this point A, even though you’ve been working hard to get everything here, it’s only the beginning. After you’ve cleaned everything up, you need to stamp your creativity and vibe to a mix. That’s where additive EQ comes in my workflow. When I want to add vibe I try to go for a 3 band EQ, or any EQ where I can’t don’t have a visual representation of the curve I’m creating. Sometimes this might not be EQ, saturation and compression can achieve vibe and character just as well as EQ!  

Since it’s vibe we’re after, this is where I feel being technically correct is a bit less important. Finding a sweet spot to boost usually has more to do with taste than anything else. I usually grab the Tokyo Dawn Labs Slick EQ (which is free and awesome) because it’s intuitive has some sweet non-linearities, and has saturation modes that you can dial in.

This is where I want to give each instrument a place to shine, It’s where I want to add excitement and interest. Presets can work fabulously for this job because they usually use additive EQ and are designed to try and get you excited about the plugin. And since you’ve taken the time before hand to get rid of any badness that was already present it’s less risky to use a preset in this scenario. 

So that’s my take on subtractive and additive EQ. It’s certainly not the way I work with everything, but a lot of the time it works really well for me. I hope that this has given you some new ideas on approaching EQ. Give it a go and let me know if it works for you!

Have a great week in music and audio!

[mennismusicproduction]

So happy to be able to share this, recorded, mixed and mastered by myself and a good friend. 

More music to come soon! 

Artwork by @jackallum  

[mennismusicproduction]

Mix Tip Monday: Using a dynamic EQ.

Howdy music makers and audio engineers! I hope your January has been bringing you new and exciting creative challenges so far!

This month I’ve decided to focus on the fine art of EQ. And in this week’s tip I will be explaining the idea of using a dynamic EQ to shape your sounds. This could easily be considered a type of compression, since it acts on a threshold and is a dynamic process. But I want to explain why thinking about it as an EQ move, rather than a compression move can help your critical listening and change the way you achieve a sound. 

Firstly let me give a quick explanation of what a dynamic EQ process is. It’s a method of applying an EQ boost or cut based on the intensity of frequency content within an instrument or sound from moment to moment. 

Unlike a normal EQ which cuts or boosts a static amount (Unless you automate it), the use of dynamic EQ allows you to dial in settings which make allowances for the varying musical range and timbres of the sound you’re working with. 

Let’s say you’re working on a small acoustic ensemble. Perhaps a guitar, some strings and a smooth vocal. Each individual element in that mix is going to either have some acoustic resonances or potential tonal changes across the performances. This setup will present you with the challenge of crafting the sound in a way that keeps the full tonal range of each instrument sounding natural whilst taming and controlling any of the resonances or that are building up or poke out in the song. 

Using dynamic EQ to make the cuts in the low mid range where resonances are likely to build up is a really clean way of processing in this scenario. It gives you the ability to tame the low build ups when they arrive without removing too much thickness and body from the entire performance.   

It’s a great technique when used in a subtractive manner because it can really help even out a sound and put it into a great place before adding in any extra tonal excitement or broadband compression to it. 

I hope that this tip can help you to achieve natural sounding mixes in the future! 

[mennismusicproduction]

Mix Tip Monday: The do’s and don’ts of automating EQ.

Happy Friday Music friends and Audio Engineers!

I want to talk to you about the dark, mysterious and often messy world of EQ Automation. 

Firstly, why on earth would you want to automate your EQ settings? You’ve spent a while getting your mix together, everything is sitting in a nice place and the idea of having to go back and change EQ settings for different sections just seems annoying and counter intuitive.

Well, automation of any kind is the process of making a sound work from moment to moment in your song, and that’s the important bit. The reason to automate is because something is working really well in one section, but is lacking something, or has too much of something else in another section. the most common example of this is using volume automation on a vocal to make sure that it is always upfront in the mix.

EQ Automation makes use of the exact same principle, except you’re changing the tonal characteristics of the sound so that it works with everything around it. It’s a great way to help achieve some of the technical or creative goals you might have for a mix.

Here are a few of my favourite examples of when it can be a good idea to automate your EQ: 

When a vocalist changes from their chest voice to head voice: The tonal changes that the human voice is capable of are huge. Taking the time to figure out the best EQ setting for these kind of changes in tone can really help the vocal to stand out and be the most important part of your mix. I’ve heard of a few pros which will take the time to split off the vocal track and make different channels to treat each section of a vocal uniquely and appropriately to the arrangement.     

To help amplify the tonal characteristics of an instrumental melody/hook:  This one can work really well on instruments with a wide range like guitars, piano or even some brass/woodwind instruments. If you’ve got a slamming riff that goes from melody to chunky chords then don’t be afraid to emphasize some low end fatness on the chords and pull out some more mid range tone in the melody sections. It may even be appropriate to do the exact opposite to make the section feel more cohesive. If you want to make it an important part of the song then it’s worth that kind of attention to detail.  

When an instrument plays more than one role in a song: Acoustic guitar is the biggest offender here. People will so often use an acoustic guitar as the foundation of a song and build from it. What I see in a lot of arrangements is that the guitar will start off a song, be really important in the first verse and then slowly decline in importance. It ends up being nothing more than a rhythmic element with a chord behind it in the most extreme cases. This is where I make use of EQ automation to try and have a nice, full sounding and natural acoustic guitar at the beginning which develops with each section to becomes a smaller part of a big arrangement. If like me you begin your mix at the busiest part of a song then it’s usually just a case of easing up on the cuts and boosts you’ve made on your EQ. For example, If you’ve ended up cutting 6dB out of the low mid frequency sound of the body resonance and added a 3dB shelf to the top end for the sound of the strumming then halving the cuts and boosts is a good place to start. 

I hope that this inspired you to try out some EQ automation on your next project! I’d love to hear what you’re using it for and how it works for you. 

[mennismusicproduction]

Mix Tip Monday: Understanding Height and Depth in a Mix

Good morning music makers! I’m back to give you tips, advice and point you towards my favourite resources for learning the magical craft that is audio engineering. I don’t know how long for, but we’ll see. :) 

So, this tip comes from my own experience and a little bit of research, I was mixing an EP for my band. I did my first pass of the first song and things were coming along quite nicely, I could hear everything and my ideas were coming together in a nice, creative way. 

I stopped and took a breather and thought that I should reference another pro mix. Just to see if I was in the right sort of area sonically. 

I was horrified. 

My mix sounded so... crushed. Not dynamically, I hadn’t gone to town with my compression settings. I’d quite simply just not made full and proper use of the range of frequencies at my disposal. My bass was being pushed too far up into the mid range which left less room for the low mids in my drums, and then forced me to push the guitars up further in the frequency range and add in these unnecessary high frequencies so that things would cut through. It was a mess, nothing sounded full, or natural and it was really killing the musicality in my mix. 

“Much like we see in 3D, we hear in 3D and taking out any one of these dimensions only serves to create a flat and unnatural sound “

I’m sure you’re used to working stereo field and manipulating it for width, and the very core of mixing audio is this fundamental concept of front to back depth which you can manipulate with volume, reverb and EQ, but height, is in my opinion one of the most difficult elements of a mix to get right because there isn’t a simple height fader or knob for us to use.   

If you use the image above then you might better understand where I’m coming from, you can see the left to right panorama, the front to back depth and then there is the height. It felt like all of my mix was coming through the middle dimension and it sounded small and crushed. But then when I swapped over to my pro reference track the bass literally dropped down and the highs rose up to create a sense of depth that I had never known really existed until I’d messed up and taken it out of my own music. 

I think that the essence of height in a mix comes down to the good use of EQ, really working your track to make the low end sit in the correct spot. Which you can then use to set a platform for the right balance in that crucial mid range. Making sure that your vocals and percussion are focused and balanced as they can be with EQ. And finally by making sure that your high frequency instruments are as exciting in the top end as they are carved and cleaned in the lower frequencies.

It’s tough, and to me it was conceptually a bit confusing at first. But when you get it right your music will start to feel more real and everything in your mix will start to work together in a clearer way. 

How do you achieve Height and Depth in a mix?

[musicproductiononline]

Here’s a real-time mastering session by Jonathan Wyner, plus you can download the session mastering chain preset… » http://talkinmusic.com/forum/threads/audio-mastering-workflow-izotope-mastering-chain-preset.25/

[mennismusicproduction]

It’s too early in the morning for frequency specific sidechain gating.

But here we go, I’m giving it a go and if all is well it will help me get my mix to where I need without having to fork out on some Izotope stuff.  

[mennismusicproduction]

I wanted to send out a huge thank you to my close friend Jack Allum for his awesome work on the art for my bands latest single! 

Check out the single here: https://withinamile.bandcamp.com/track/nightingale

For more of Jack’s work go here: http://jackallum.tumblr.com/

[musicproductiononline]

Understand what parallel compression is all about and how to use it more effectively…

» http://talkinmusic.com/musicproduction/use-parallel-compression-to-enhance-sounds

[mennismusicproduction]

Arrangement and Multi Mic Setup

Hey there music makers, 

In a time where DAW track counts are endless and the limits on our musical are either creative or self imposed, it's easy to overdo things quite simply for the sake of it. This post will hopefully help you to know when it’s time to bust out every mic you can and conversely, when to simply have one, well placed microphone. 

A sparse arrangement can sometimes demand more microphones: I will always remember when I first saw this old video from the bbc of a mix engineer working on a solo classical piano piece. He had four microphones which were placed at various distances to capture more or less ambience depending on the that distance from the source. He was able to create stunning emotional value and movement by automating the levels of direct and ambient material to the performance and because of that he created a very detailed and incredibly musical mix. 

This is an incredible way to work with a solo performances and small arrangements, this kind of mic placement gives you the power to make moves which help to bring out the musical qualities of a performance. So if your music has only got a few instruments in it then playing with ambience and stereo microphone placements will help you to build character, depth and a huge sound in your recordings which you can enhance or manipulate with simple automation rides. 

Large arrangements work like a puzzle, and often need smaller pieces to fit together correctly: When you’re working with a project that has a lot of instruments of varying importance I believe that it’s often better to opt for fewer microphones which are placed appropriately to create the sound you need. If not for your own sanity, then simply because having big, complex, multi mic’d sounds for every single instrument in a large arrangement will create a crazy amount of. Lots of stereo recordings won’t allow you to create a defined stereo image and having all of that detail on every instrument across a lot of microphones means that you’d likely be making lot of big EQ moves to try and make everything fit. You end up with a big mess of kind of stereo but also kind of muddy music and it can take a lot of effort to clean that up. 

The secret to creating that huge arrangement is to keep everything small. Keep most of your recordings down to one microphone so that things are largely mono and you can then use the power of panning to create your stereo image. Managing the low end and low mid range is also a key part of building a sound. If you have a lot of instruments playing then you’re going to get build ups in the lower frequencies. This can be easily countered in the recording process though! When you’re tracking that final guitar or keyboard part to make your last chorus that little bit bigger and thicker. Use microphone placement or high pass filters to manage the amount of low end coming through so that it can add a texture to your mix without ruining the power and punch of your kick and bass drum with it’s low frequency information. It’s always tempting to try and record sounds that could work on their own and that are able to carry their own weight because it means that you've done a good job recording that instrument. Which is awesome! But it’s important to keep the bigger picture in mind and manage every instrument that needs to be pieced together in that big ole arrangement of yours. Ultimately, how many microphones you use in your recordings is down to your music taste and the way you want your music to sound. It’s perfectly possible to record a small arrangement all in mono and have one instrument in the centre, one on the left and one on the right and for it to sound absolutely amazing. Alternatively you could have 12+ microphones on every source for an absolute monster of a song and reach a track count that I could only dream of and it could sound ridiculously good. This is just the way I approach my music with the limitations and gear that I have. 

I hope this helps you to craft some better recordings!