Lately I’ve seen a lot of posts on various recording blogs about how to properly use EQ and compression to carve out space in your mix and glue the individual tracks together. It’s true, that’s certainly what these tools can help you do. And it can indeed be a confusing process to learn the best practices of utilizing these tools in order to achieve a mix well done.

But amongst all this talk about EQ and compression, (which is fun. I know people get excited about compressors. I certainly do-they’re exciting and make things sound cool), it’s important not to overlook a very simple tool that is easy to use, and does not really have a learning curve…

The pan knob.

One of the quickest and easiest ways to find space for an instrument, and help it cut through a dense mix is to simply play around with its position in the stereo field.

Perhaps you’ve got an acoustic guitar part that is in a battle with the electric guitars, snare drum, and lead vocal. It’s pretty amazing how that acoustic will suddenly and easily pop right out when you pan it (even just slightly) to its own specific space in the stereo field.

While EQ and compression can be fun and make things exciting, those tools can also be frustrating to use, time consuming, and sometimes even expensive. Maybe all that track needs is a little panning. After all, stereo remains the most popular method of sound reproduction today. Let’s make sure we’re utilizing it.

//Jon
Website: jonstinson.com
Twitter: @stsn

At my studio I often run into a problem when recording: I run out of resources.

I prefer to record all basic tracks live with the whole band, and often times this approach to recording leads me to run out of resources-mics, cables, mic pre’s, inputs, etc.

Although this really only becomes a problem when I’m recording five or more people at once, it happens often enough that I find myself having to work inside this challenge on most sessions where basic tracks are recorded at my studio.

My philosophy on recording allows me to approach a limitation, such as the one described above, as a catalyst for creativity, instead of viewing it as a disadvantage. I believe working within certain limitations causes you to make commitments on the spot, which in the end puts a more organic and natural feel on the character of the recording.

When I’m faced with the challenge of having to pick priorities for what mic will get used where, one of the first candidates for omission are the room mics. The reason I’m so quick to lose the room mics, is because I’ve developed a little mixing technique that allows me to recreate the room ambience in a very natural sounding way, which I will describe below.

Artificially Recreating Natural Sounding Ambience

1. Assign all your drum tracks to a stereo buss.
2. In your DAW create two Aux Inputs, and assign both of their inputs to the same stereo buss. Name the first Aux Input “Dry,” and the second Aux Input “Wet.”
3. On the “Wet” channel, insert a reverb plugin. I prefer to use a convolution reverb, because a sampled room sounds so much more natural than a totally synthetic reverb.
4. Turn the “Dry” channel up to 0dB, but leave the fader on the “Wet” channel all the way down for now.
5. Take just a few minutes to balance your drums while listening through the “Dry” channel. Don’t spend too much time on this initial balance, as you will fine tune it in a moment. Simply get the basic pan/level balance that feels right to you.
6. Once you’re happy with the basic drum mix, pull up the “Wet” channel to a good audible level. You may want to bring down the “Dry” channel just a little bit. You want the “Wet” channel a bit louder than it will be in the final mix for now. At this point you are not trying to get the final balance, you’re trying to get a sense for how the reverb sounds.
7. Spend a few minutes dialing in the settings on your reverb plugin. In most cases you will want to find a sound that most closely resembles room mics set up to capture a whole drum kit or band. However, some projects may call for something different. Use your judgement to determine what sounds best in the context of the mix you are working on.
8. After you have finished dialing in the settings on your reverb plugin, you should now begin focusing on the balance of the “Wet” channel against the “Dry” channel. As you balance these two channels together, you may find that you want to fine tune the balance and pan of the individual drum tracks from step five.

That’s it! Once you’re happy with the overall balance/pan of the individual drum tracks, and the “Wet” Aux Input channel with the “Dry” Aux Input channel, you should have a drum mix that includes some natural sounding ambience. Experiment with including or excluding certain drum tracks from the submix, such as overhead mics.

You can take this a few steps further by taking this entire submix, and incorporating the buss compression technique, or adding a bit more reverb of a different type to just the snare drum. You can also use this technique on something else entirely, such as an electric guitar submix, or a horn section submix.

Hope this little mixing tip helps you achieve a natural sounding ambience to your mixes when you don’t have the resources to record with room mics. As always comments are welcome. If you end up using this technique, post a link so we can all hear your mix.