Oh Lord in Heaven. It’s been what? Over a week? I am truly sorry for my lack of discipline and how I neglected this blog. I’m not gonna lie, it wasn’t because I was busy (I was busy, but not to the point where I couldn’t update this blog), or because I was sick. I was just lazy just didn’t feel like writing any posts, or I couldn’t think of any. So once again, I am sorry. I will try to update more this week. Last week was a little hectic. This week should be a bit calmer.
This is more like an advanced tip. Not advanced tips with an ‘s’. But it’s a very important tip, so listen carefully.
The overall goal in mixing, NOT COMPOSING, is to confuse the brain. If you confuse the brain in composing, then you have a bad song. But when confusing the brain in mixing, it will — for some reason — jazz up your tunes quite a bit. Why? Who knows, that’s just how the brain works. Have you ever listened to a song, and the song sounds awesome, but you can’t put your finger on what sounds so good? Or just listened to a song that “works?” Well, I’m gonna show you the sciences of how that happens, and how you can do it too.
I have come to a conclusion that the reason this phenomenon happens is mostly do to panning. If I haven’t said this before, I’ll say it now: panning makes or breaks your song. Panning is the equivalent of a bassline in musical composition. That is, it is the glue of your song. How can something stick if there is no glue? REMEMBER THAT!
So how does panning do it? How does it confuse our mind, and make everything work? The answer is the sound wave itself…
This is a sound sample. It can also be called a wav or wave, respectively. Before we look at the wave itself, let’s try and figure what type of basic sound wave it is, not what the sound is itself. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out. On the top left-hand corner, we have the sampling rate; it’s at a standard 44100Hz (Hz = Hertz). And below the word Format, we have what we’re looking for. The icon that says “32″ indicates bitrate, which is the overall quality for wav files. The sqaure shaped icon with the two little squares (referring to speakers) tells us its stereo, meaning it is comprised of two sound channels. That’s what we want to know. You see, it’s very important that we know whether it’s stereo or not. If it isn’t stereo, we want it stereo, even if it’s just a little bit stereo. In many cases it should not be drastic, as that would sound weird, especially for the bass.
So now let’s look at the scope itself. The scope is the sound wave you see. What sound does this make? That’s one thing you might have been wondering. The sound is a kick drum. An ordinary bass drum sound. However, it has a special sort of “groove” that makes it sound good. But “what” is the question… First off, you’ll notice that there are actually two lines to the scope. A blue and red line; these indicate left and right speakers. Keep in mind the length of this sound is only .6 seconds, so it will just sound mono to the human ear.
Now this is where the key part of the groove comes in. Look how much divided space the blue and red lines are. No, it is not normally like that; in fact, let me show you what this sound looks like, when unmixed, and unprocessed.
Wow! Doesn’t that look different? You can’t even see the two lines; they appear as one! As you can tell by the square icon under Format, it is indeed stereo, but it looks like just one line, meaning mono! Not only that, but the impact doesn’t look nearly as large neither, for those you who can read scope.
OKAY STOP OFF TOPIC TIME
Okay, this will be a little off-topic. When mixing, one thing you simply MUST know, is how to read sound. Yes, “read” sound. You read the sound you see in those pictures, and to be honest, it’s like learning a whole new language. You just have to keep looking at wave samples and such, and you get good at it. Obviously, you won’t be able to play a whole song in your mind that you’ve never heard before and have only seen the scope, but you need to be able to figure out basic sounds. Kicks like I am showing you here are pretty easy; they go quickly up, and slowly down. Natural kick such as this tend to look more distorted, while digital kicks look almost exactly like sine waves.
OKAY BACK ON TOPIC
Anyways, back to the groove. Take a look at the below picture:
This is a zoomed in portion where the source of the kick is. In fact, this is the part where you hear the most bass. Now, notice the highlighted part. The highlighted part is the very core of this kick. And right at it, both waves are crossing each other in an almost perpendicular fashion, do you see? THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT. That right there confuses the living shit out of your brain. It hears one sound cross to one ear while the other crosses to your other ear. Your brain just goes nuts. This is the source of a good sound, cross panning right at the core of your sound sample. Even if you have to manually build it, (which I don’t recommend because it’s time consuming and doesn’t come out natural) it will still be worth it.
How can you make this yourself? Well, it varies from sound to sound. Try equalizing, adding reverb, using dub delay, things like that and take a look at the sound source. Samples like a bass drum kick shown here that are used all the time should have some sort of perpendicular crossing. Trial and error folks, trial and error.
Now, you may think this is a bunch of bullshit. Well, I can’t stop you from thinking that. So fine. Take it like that. But you will be missing out on some musical gold, I promise you that.
