Mix Rescue: Adding Energy

This month’s featured artist is Jeff Hirata (https://linktr.ee/jeffhirata) with his song ‘Sunshine’.Photo: Katie Sambala, Kap2ure Creative Company

Ever thought you were nearing the end of your mix, only to realise the track needs a whole lot more impact?

How do you add energy to a mix? I mean, I imagine that every DAW user has at one time or another been faced with a project where they’ve gone through all the usual mixdown motions, but ended up with a result that feels somehow a bit lacklustre, plodding, and generally uninspiring. In other words, it lacks energy. And in my experience, it’s this malaise that most commonly leads SOS readers to approach the Mix Rescue column. With that in mind, I’d like to focus this article on a mix overhaul I recently did for singer‑songwriter Jeff Hirata, where I applied a variety of different techniques I’ve learnt over the years for enhancing this rather intangible mix quality.

Energetic EQ

When Jeff sent me an MP3 of his song ‘Sunshine’, he was already well aware that his mix didn’t feel as exciting as he’d hoped, given the cheery musical content. But he was stumped about how to improve matters. When he added more low end, or more compression, or extra guitar layers, it just made things muddy and sacrificed clarity. When he pushed the drums up in the mix, the sound became too aggressive and lacked cohesion. When he tried boosting brightness it just made the overall sonics abrasive and fatiguing. More insidiously, though, he just felt that the mix was making the music seem almost boring, despite what I agreed was solid songwriting and a decent set of performances.

Now, Jeff wasn’t wrong by any means in reaching for the mix tools he did, but in each case the problems he was addressing ran a little deeper than he’d identified. Take the idea of boosting the low end, for instance. In principle, this is a great way to make a mix sound more exciting, but there were two good reasons why I was able to do this in my remix where he’d previously struggled. Firstly, I cleared space for low‑end boosts on the kick drum and bass guitar by filtering out low end from more than a dozen other tracks: drum overheads, drum room, low tom, congas, steel pans, acoustic/electric guitars, and backing vocals. And, secondly, I realised that the fundamental frequencies of Jeff’s bass‑guitar part seldom strayed below 50Hz, which left plenty of free mix real‑estate for me to add a sneaky programmed sub synth layer. So, yes, more low end on your kick and bass will usually translate into a more exciting mix, but only if you plan enough space in the spectrum for that to fit.

Likewise, Jeff was right that brightening a mix often makes it feel more urgent and immediate, but you need to work in a targeted manner. So while I certainly brightened my remix with high‑frequency EQ boosts and saturation effects, I was able to avoid the harshness problems Jeff had originally encountered, by:

• Filtering high end out of less foreground parts, such as the hi‑hat and hand percussion.
• Softening fatiguing upper‑spectrum transients with low‑pass filtering (for the kick), clipping (for the snare), limiting (for the tambourine), and multiband limiting (acoustic guitars).
• Rebalancing overprominent noise consonants and sporadic high‑frequency resonances on the (numerous!) vocal parts with de‑essing, multiband compression, specialist spectral compression (from ProAudioDSP’s DSM plug‑in), and region‑specific EQ processing.

Here you can see various different processes Mike used to add brightness to Jeff’s mix without making it sound harsh at the same time: cutting high frequencies from the hi‑hat with Cockos’ freeware ReaEQ; smoothing the tambourine transients with Dead Duck’s freeware Limiter; de‑essing backing multiple vocals with Dead Duck’s freeware De‑esser; and controlling the lead vocal’s upper‑spectrum consonants and resonances with Pro Audio DSP’s DSM spectral processor.

Lively Dynamics

Jeff’s impulse to lean on his compressors had something going for it too, because compression can indeed add liveliness and movement to the musical balance. But the catch is that compressing the wrong things or dialling in the wrong settings can just as easily kill a mix stone dead! My main advice here is not to get too carried away with per‑track compression settings (where you run greater risk of compromising the musicality of each individual part), and focus more on compressing ‘ensemble’ signals. So in my remix, for example, I had no compression at all on any of the software drummer’s individual instrument channels, but instead compressed the drum room mics, the drum kit submix, the main mix bus, and a drums parallel channel. These compressors introduced subtle music‑related level interactions between each drum and the rest of the arrangement, thereby providing a more energetic‑sounding mix without a loss of musicality — as well as an increased illusion of ensemble cohesion into the bargain!

No compressor is intelligent enough to consider lyric intelligibility or melodic phrasing — all it sees are signal levels.

But however you decide to use compressors for your mix, it’s vital to understand their limitations, so you don’t expect them to deal with mix‑balance problems they can’t reasonably be expected to handle. Nowhere is this more important than with lead vocals, where no compressor is intelligent enough to consider lyric intelligibility or melodic phrasing — all it sees are signal levels. In my ‘Sunshine’ remix, for instance, I had plenty of compression on Jeff’s vocal (a chain involving a fast limiter, a slower compressor, and a fast parallel compressor), but while that certainly helped give the performance a subjectively assertive attitude, it was actually my detailed fader automation that consolidated its place in the mix balance and ensured that every word cut through clearly.

Automation is also crucial for breathing life and humanity into the mix balance as a whole. You see, one of the things that makes a production seem engaging is if listeners are constantly alerted to new and interesting facets of the musical material. By simply going through your arrangement and turning up the most interesting moments, you’ll actually make the music itself seem better, as well as generating...