07 - 09 - 2018
4 Commentaires
How to think to your guitar sound in a mix.
When recording and mixing a guitar track, you are hearing in your DAW what the microphone is picking up from the speaker. Whereas when you play in your bedroom, you are hearing your cabinet in all its full glory: loads of bass, all the nuances of your pick attacks when playing
A good guitar track in a mix can be very different
When mixing you need a more scientific approach by cross-referencing the frequency range of each instrument. An easy way is to correlate your fretboard to the stave and the frequencies related, but with a necessary tweak.On a stave, The A4 is equivalent of fretting the 2nd fret on the G string. In terms of frequency, scientifically, the A4 is equal to 440 Hz. What happens in the real world, when you play your guitar is actually an A3 at 220 Hz.
The tweak is to consider all frequencies on the guitar to be an octave higher Hertz-wise. With the precedent example of the A3 played at 220 Hz, you will consider it equivalent to the A4 at 440
In all great
For the high mids, the competition will be against the lead vocal and the snare. Lots of things will be happening in the 2
The highs are about the sibilance of the vocal, the cymbals and the
Knowing the dominant key of the track can also help in finding EQ hotspots (the fundamental and its harmonics).
Once your mixed guitar sound sits perfectly in your song, listening to it on
And if you want to train yourself to guitar-tones-in-mixes, listen to Mastodon's guitar sound on "Curl of the Burl" to picture what a good guitar sound can be for a mix, but if played on its own, it will sound very harsh.
This is where tools like the Wall of Sound with its different cabinets for speaker simulation can really help in making a guitar sit right in a mix.
"Beginners, or very direct i-donot-have-time-mixes, will high pass every channel for safety and this where knowing where the bottom end of each instrument helps a lot."Andy Wallace does this all the time with his SSL console. One of the ideas is that despite of the fact that you don't hear some sound below certain frequencies, the sound can be there and it can affect your master compressor or mask other sounds.
Maybe Andy Wallace classifies more in the i-do-not-have-the-time mixes :D Totally right that by clearing your low frequencies, you will have better control on the compressors, or masking effects. The idea of high passing filter for safety can also be down with a shelf eq, and a shelf eq creates less phase issue than filters, but this is another subject.
Let's take only the Low E string for reference. If you play it, and measure its frequency, you will read 82 Hz. If you put our high pass filter at 82 Hz, you will still have your guitar's bottom end competing with the kick drum and the bass. The tweaked chart tkaes its idea from the fact that if you look at a stave, and look at a note (in our case the Low end E of a guitar), we are reading a note that is one octave higher from what we are actually fingering, frequency-wise. This is why the tweaked chart helps in your highpass filter: instead of setting your high pass at 82 you set it at 164 Hz. without doing much eq you will find that your guitar sits much better in regards of the kick drum and the bass int the global mix, especially if your tune is in the key of E.
I don't understand your purpose for the "tweaked chart". Are you saying I should double the frequency of actual the fundamental and use that as my guide when high-passing? Hence letting only the first harmonic and successive harmonics through? Please, be more specific.