MONO AND BACK

The Challenge

This challenge is all about clarity and depth, take your mix and make it work in MONO, then when you fold it back out again you’ll be amazed at the space you’ve created.

The Goal

The idea behind this exercise is to help teach you 3 key mixing assets:

  1. When less is more and when more is better.

  2. How to identify build ups and masking across the frequency spectrum.

  3. The importance of depth in a mix and understanding front to back mixing.

There’s only so many decibels, frequencies, samples and bits. So your challenge is to make every single one of them count. Can you make a song sound good in mono?

***Read through the challenge before you get started. It will help you be more effective (especially the sum up).

The Process

Step 1 - Tonal Balance

  1. First use your normal balancing technique of kick, cymbals and snare to establish the top and bottom of your mix and set a good tonal balance. Remember to start at the loudest part of the song and gain stage!

  2. Next add your bass keeping in mind your kick and snare.

  3. Then fill out the midrange with your instruments and vocals so you have a messy but full mix.

Step 2 - Front and Back

  1. Now play with your instruments and decide what's more important to the song.

  2. Mute any parts which aren’t adding to the emotional narrative of the song.

  3. Turn down any supporting parts until a space between them and the lead instruments open up.

  4. Now start filtering out top and bottom information from the supporting instruments to help separate and send them further back.

  5. You should now have two fairly clear layers to your mix - front and back.

Step 3 - Lows

  1. Now it’s time to figure out the low end.

  2. Is there anything unnecessarily clogging up your low end? Can you get rid of it to make room for the bass and kick?

  3. Does the bass sit above or below the kick? Which is more important to the feel of the song? Which will you prioritise?

  4. Can the kick snare and bass all punch through?

Step 4 - Midrange

  1. Hopefully you’ve only got three sustaining melodic instruments jostling for this space. The vocal, the lead instrument and supporting instrument. If not no worries, you’ll just have to work slightly harder.

  2. Imagine they can all only speak between 700hz and 5khz. Who is going to get which frequencies? As an example I might do:

    1. Bass - 700-1000hz

    2. Lead guitar - 1.5khz

    3. Vocals - 2-3khz

    4. Rhythm guitar 4k

These exact numbers only offer an example, every song is different - you’ll have to figure yours out.

Step 5 - Tops

  1. What is eating up the top end? What is special about each instrument 5k and up?

  2. How much information does each instrument need above 8k? Can you make room for your lead instruments to shine simply by filtering the others?

Step 6 - Compression

  1. Use your normal compression settings on things, or at least your normal way of finding compression settings.

  2. Experiment with faster and slower attack times on things, the further back you want something in the mix the faster the attack time.

  3. The more you want something to stay solid in its position in the mix the slower the release time. 

Step 7 - Freemix

  1. Balance is the key to figuring out the puzzle of any mix. Compression and EQ are just the tools we use to help us.

  2. Try to move things up and down in smaller and smaller increments getting the balance dialled in exactly how you want it.

  3. Try and finish the mix until you’d be happy to release it. It’s a big ask for a mono mix but this is such a good learning exercise it’s worth persevering! 

Step 7 - Freemix

  1. Balance is the key to figuring out the puzzle of any mix. Compression and EQ are just the tools we use to help us.

  2. Try to move things up and down in smaller and smaller increments getting the balance dialled in exactly how you want it.

  3. Try and finish the mix until you’d be happy to release it. It’s a big ask for a mono mix but this is such a good learning exercise it’s worth persevering! 

Step 8 - Stereo that thing!

  1. Now you’ve got a banging mix going, do a ‘Save As’ and start panning out your instruments!

THE SUM UP

You should be able to revel in the clarity and space in your mix. Things might sound too sparse and disconnected at first but fight the urge to change things and let yourself adjust. If your mix sounds too weird then you could try adding a bit of the same reverb to everything, maybe some stereo bus processing to provide some glue. 

If those things don’t work then just start finishing it as you normally would. Hopefully you’ve learnt something from this exercise. Maybe it’s a new compression technique, maybe it’s about divvying up the midrange or filtering things. Who knows!?!

Thanks for giving the challenge a go. If you’re a social media type then please share your experience and tag @mixinghertz in it so I can share it. If not, send me an email I’d love to hear about it and if there’s anything I can help you with.