Sample Magic Releases Magic AB Plug-in

Have you ever read about a new plug-in and thought, "Why didn't I think of that?!"  Sample Magic's new Magic AB plug-in sounds like one of those plug-ins to me.

When mixing and mastering tracks, it can be especially useful to compare the track you are currently working on with a different track you consider to be a good representation of "professional sound".    Magic AB allows you to compare the mix you are working on in your DAW with up to nine other sound files of mixes you want to use to reference to.

Magic AB is available at the special price of £19.90 (regularly £24.90) for a limited time. Available for Windows (VST, RTAS, AAX) and OSX (VST, AU, RTAS, AAX).

Mix n' Match

Some time ago, I wrote an article suggesting that you could get interesting results on drums if you combined a dry snare with a fully-wet reverbed different snare at the proper levels, you could get some unique sounding drum and percussion sounds.

It just so happens that this works on synths, too. Try setting up a lead line on a dry (no reverb) synth lead sound. Copy that sequence to a new instrument track and call up a different synth lead. Now, feed the second synth lead through any sort of reverb you like with the wet dry mix at 100% wet. You can get some really striking sounds this way. Don't just try it with reverb either. Try distorting one layer and keeping another clean, etc.

Creating the Illusion of Distance

Even when one is talking about mixing to stereo (as opposed to 5.1), a song's mix can be very three dimensional.  Perhaps not literally, but in the same sense that a painter can simulate the way an image diffuses the further it is away from the viewer, it is not terribly difficult to simulate the characteristics of a sound that is far from the listener.  This can be brilliant at setting a mood and creating a real sense of depth.  Here's two easy steps that when used together can really give them a sense of three dimensional space.

1.  The first thing to remember is that, with all other things equal, a low frequency wave will travel further than a high frequency wave.  If you've ever approached an outdoor venue while a band was playing, no doubt the first thing you were probably able to hear is the rumble of the kick drum.  So distant sounds aren't very bright (in terms of tonal balance, not intelligence).  Use a lowpass filter or roll off the higher frequencies with your favorite EQ to simulate this.  The further the sound is intended to be from the listener, the more high end you should roll off.

2.  If you are standing far away from a sound source in a reverberant environment, there comes a point where you will be hearing more of the actual reverb than the original signal itself.  Thus, if you want to create the illusion of distance, you'll also want to play with the wet/dry mix on your reverb of choice.  The 'wetter' the signal, the farther away the sound will appear to be.

For best results, you'll want to utilize both of these techniques simultaneously and in the correct balance.  Nothing too difficult to figure out with a little messing around.  What about you?  Any favorite techniques for putting a sound "far away" from the listener?

In Defense of Noise

Back when I was working on my second album, I had a small problem I, in my naivety, asked the mastering engineer to fix for me.  There was an exposed synth line in the intro to one of the songs that had a little bit of noise in the recording.  I asked if the mastering engineer could run some sort of noise reduction to get rid of it.  He rightly advised me against this pointing out that the artifacts most noise reduction plug-ins  introduce is more distracting than the noise itself.  He was right.  I was being anal to the point of absurdity.  Even worse, I was trying to remove a thing of beauty from my song.

Noise is the sound of your old  synths breathing.  It's what tells your ear the sound is being produced by real circuitry and not ones and zeros.    Noise is character.  Noise is organic.  Noise is interesting.

More importantly, noise surrounds us every day of our lives.  The ambient hum of the city traffic... the eerie nightime calls of spring peepers (frogs) in the countryside... the whir of your computer's fans... noise is an inescapable part of our lives.  So why do we want to get rid of it so much?

I think there is a tendency for technology to take things a step too far, at least initially.  Those of us old enough to remember recording on tape can attest that noise reduction was a sort of holy grail in those days.  Every year or so a company (usually Dolby) would come out with some new improved recipe for their noise reduction process.  Of course, this was necessary as tape is an inherently noisy medium.  But once digital recording came around, it was possible to not just reduce the noise, but to eliminate it almost entirely.  That's the step too far I mentioned earlier.

Look, I'm not saying we should all start making our mixes sound like they were recorded on Thomas Edison's wax cylinder, just that maybe we should stop worrying so much about trying to cleanse our recordings of one of the things that can end up making them more interesting.In fact, everyone, at least once, should try to deliberately rough up their recordings and make them noisier.   Try recording an old toy keyboard through the noisy headphone jack.  Have a lush pad you want to warm up?  Lay it down to cassette tape and resample it, hiss and all.  Even consider sampling the sound of a blank tape's hiss and laying it behind your recordings or samples so it's barely audible.  Imperfections give a sound more life.  So embrace the noise!

Try it Out: Overdriving Your Drums

Unless you're a guitarist, overdrive may be an effect you're not familiar with. Simply put, overdrive is a gain effect that raises the signal level to the point where it softly clips. It's a bit like a more dialed back distortion. Guitarists like it because it compresses the signal and adds lots of lively harmonics that really brighten up a sound.

Reading that description, it's easy to see why this is an effect that can sound fantastic when applied to drums. I don't think it sounds very good on cymbals, but on kicks, snares, and toms it can sound brilliant. The key, as with most effects, is not to overdo it (unless you're after a very harsh sound). Your ears are your best guide, but try a relatively low drive level and if your favorite overdrive effect allows for it, crank up the tone control to brighten up the sound and add in plenty of those tasty harmonics.

At ideal settings, the drums won't sound distorted at all, just a bit grittier, harder, and punchier. If you're having trouble getting your head around compressing drums, give overdrive a try. You obviously give up a lot of the control and nuance that an actual compressor offers, but it's an easy way to get more level, body, and punch if you don't know what you're doing. (But seriously, learn to properly use a compressor too... it really makes a huge difference.)

Infected Mushroom Reveal Their Studio Secrets

Regardless of what you think of their music, it's impossible to deny that Infected Mushroom has some pretty spectacular production. They talk about production and spill some juicy studio secrets in this awesome interview on AudioFanzine.com.

Get Your Freq On: Getting Started with EQ

Next to compression, equalization (or EQ, as it is more commonly called) is perhaps one of the toughest mixing concepts for most beginners to get their heads around. The concept is pretty simple to understand - you use controls to emphasize or attenuate specified frequencies in a sound, thus allowing you to alter the overall tonal balance of the sound. The bass and treble knobs on your car stereo are examples of a very crude equalizer. Where EQ can be difficult to grasp is in the actual practical application; not just the how, but the why. So today, I'm going to share some tips I hope beginners will find useful in getting them on the right track with this often-misunderstood effect.

• Get Your Hertz Sorted
As you may remember from your elementary school science class, a sound's frequency is measured in Hertz (abbreviated Hz). A Hertz measures the number of wave cycles per second in a sound. Thus lower frequencies, which have longer wavelengths, are found at the lower end of the scale, and higher frequencies which have shorter wavelengths and thus more cycles per second, are found at the high end. A human's hearing range is generally believed to be between 20Hz to 20,000Hz (aka 20k - 1k = 1,000 Hz). Your mixes will generally be in a much narrower range, though.

A good thing to do when you are starting out with EQ is to play around with an equalizer on an audio track just to see what boosts and cuts in different frequency ranges sound like. Just by doing this, you should start to get a good idea of basic frequency ranges - what boosts make a sound bassier, which make them brighter, etc. As time goes on, you should make an effort to learn more specific ranges and useful frequencies to improve your ability to hear what cuts or boosts need to be applied to a sound. For instance, you'll find the rumbly sub bass frequencies around 60Hz... a boost around 150Hz can help warm up a bass sound... a boost around 1.5k can make a vocal more intelligible, etc. There are no absolutes when it comes to EQ. Each application might require its own, unique solution. But if you take the time to learn some basics about the frequency ranges various instruments or sounds generally fall into, you'll be able to narrow in on the problem spots faster and more efficiently.

• Trim the Fat
Just about every sound under the sun contains a much wider range of frequencies than is typically needed in a piece of music. You might be playing a high register synth string patch, but if you look at the signal through an analyzer, you'll see that while most of the sound energy is in the upper range, there are probably a bunch low frequencies in there, too. This sounds great when you play it by itself, but when you place it in a mix, those low frequencies are suddenly put in competition with the low frequencies in your synth bass and your kick drum. Frequencies are very selfish. They don't like to share their space very much and if you have too many instruments inhabiting the same frequencies the result is audio mud. The solution here is to cut out the frequencies you don't need in each track so they are no longer clashing with those same frequencies in instruments that DO need them. Likewise, with your bass sound, you can probably cut some of the higher frequencies. While these EQed tracks will probably sound "wrong" when soloed, in a well-balanced arrangement, each instrument contributes to the over all tonal balance and everything sound full without being muddy. You'll note that you can have way more parts going on at once without it sounding bad if you practice subtractive EQing. Obviously you don't need (or want) to go overboard here. You're not trying to totally eliminate different tracks from having some of the same frequencies, you're just trying to minimize the overlap as much as practically possible.

• Never Boost When You Can Cut
All mixes have what is known as "Headroom". Headroom is basically a limit to the amount of signal in your mix (or individual track) before clipping and distortion occur. Any time you boost something in a mix, whether it is the actual track volume or making a boost in EQ (which boosts the volume of a frequency range and thus the volume of the track itself), you are putting yourself closer to that limit. Therefore, it is always preferable to make a cut instead of a boost when it comes to EQ. Not only are you giving the sounds more of their own space, but you're opening up room in your mix as a whole. Let's say you have a guitar and a vocal that are clashing. Instead of boosting 1.5k on your vocal to help bring out the midrange, try cutting that same range in the guitar track to create a 'hole' for the vocal to sit in. Finding the right places to cut holes and doing it transparently takes time and experience, but you'll end up with much cleaner, more open mixes if you get in the habit of utilizing this practice.

• The Eyes Have It
First and foremost, you should be making EQ adjustments using your ears. Remember the credo: if it sounds right, it is right. However, using visual aids such as frequency analyzers can be extremely helpful, especially if you are new to this and aren't yet familiar with the general frequency ranges different sounds occupy. Frequency analyzers represent the frequency content that makes up a sound in the form of a real-time graph. Frequencies that are in abundance are the higher points on the dancing line, while the ones that are more scarce are in the lower regions. This gives you a way to see the overall frequency picture of your sound and take an informed approach to applying EQ to achieve the end you are after. Some EQ plug-ins have built-in frequency analyzers, but there are several dedicated frequency analyzers out there as well.

• Not Everything Needs EQ
It's REALLY easy to go overboard when you are just starting out with EQ. Always stop yourself before you are about to EQ and ask yourself why you're doing it. If you don't have a specific answer, maybe you don't really need it. In fact, a well-arranged track may need very little EQ at all on its individual tracks. Always have a purpose in doing what you're doing. Don't EQ just to EQ.

Backing Vocals

All too often, we as musicians are focused on the foreground elements of music - guitar solos or driving drum beats or hypnotic synth basslines, or perhaps most of all, lead vocals. While this is undeniably important, it sometimes comes at the expense of not paying equal attention to the background elements. This is a big mistake because the more well-crafted those background elements are, the better those lead elements sound. These support players help to highlight and reinforce the lead elements and give them the "larger than life" sound that is the trademark of a professional sounding recording.

This is perhaps nowhere more evident than with vocals. When you hear a song on the radio, 9 times out of 10, you're not hearing just a single vocal track. There's usually harmonies, doubling, and other backing vocals there to make the lead vocal sound even better. So today I'm going to brainfart out some random thoughts on the use of backing vocals in music.

• Imperfection is Okay
Keep in mind that backing vocals are just that - vocals in the background. In some cases, they may be barely noticeable, just to add an 'edge' to a vocal. So don't worry about giving the vocal performance of a lifetime for backing vocals. In fact, a little imperfection might actually sound nice, within reason. Multiple vocal tracks have a tendency to "average out" instances where you might be a little flat or sharp, and the result is often a pleasant sort of chorusing. Which brings us to...

• Double It
Even if you don't want to try anything fancy, at least give a try to double-tracking your vocals. Chances are, you're doing multiple takes of your vocals anyway, so set a good one aside, put it on a second track, and mix it behind the lead vocal according to taste. Because you're human, you're never going to sing a melody the exact same way each time you sing it. Take advantage of that and the "averaging" effect I described above. You get the same fattening effect as chorus, but in a much more natural and pleasant way. Or, double your vocal by singing the second layer an octave above the first for yet another cool effect.

• Harmonic Convergence
If you want to try something a little more advanced, try singing harmonies. If you're like most people, this won't come naturally at first. Your natural tendency will be to sing along with the lead vocal than to harmonize with it. When I first started using harmonies, instead of trying to come up with them by singing against the lead vocal, I'd try to tap them out on a keyboard while I listened to it. I personally found this a bit easier, and it didn't take much time before I was able to do it with my voice on the spot. So if you're having trouble coming up with anything coherent by singing, try playing along to the vocal with whatever your instrument of choice is.

• Don't Compete
As I keep emphasizing, your backing vocals should be just that - in the background. Don't let them compete with, or even dominate your lead vocal. The lead is the star of this movie. Your backing vocal is that character actor you really like, but whose name you can never remember. It's there to make the star shine brighter. One way of helping to ensure that happens is to use EQ properly on your backing vocals. Your backing vocal doesn't need to contain as wide a frequency range as your lead. So my first move with most backing vocals is to make a big ol' low-end cut from about 200Hz and below. I'll sometimes add a tiny boost somewhere around 3-5k to add some presence. If you listen to the track soloed, it would sound a bit thin and weak, but behind a lead with a more robust range of frequencies, it'll sound great.

• Compressing the Issue
I tend to compress my backing vocals quite a bit harder than the lead ones. By doing this, I can mix them in at a lower volume level and they'll still sound loud enough. This allows for some nice 'barely there' effects, but is useful as a general rule in keeping your mix clean. You can't go too extreme or it'll pump and clip in a distracting way, but the lower volume level will definitely cover up some of the more unnatural artifacts of heavy compression within reason. I've also had some interesting results from not compressing the backing track at all. This can work for very subtle chorusing effects when the second track is mixed low.

• Spread Out a Bit
If you're doing multiple tracks of vocals, you should definitely play around with them in stereo. As a general rule, your lead vocal should always be front and center. But mixing the backing vocals a little off-center can really help fatten up your overall vocal sound. Try using a stereo spreader, too. Sure, it won't be mono-compatible, but honestly, I think the days where we need to sweat that too much are behind us.

• Snip Snip
The closer your lead and backing vocal match in terms of the rhythmic delivery, the slicker it will sound. The best way to do this is to rehearse the vocal a lot before you actually record it. If you know the song inside and out, you are more likely to sing each take consistently, so the parts will line up correctly. Even then, your timing is bound to be a little off, so I like to cut the backing vocal up by word and align each one with the corresponding word in the lead vocal. But like I said, imperfection is not a bad thing. You may prefer the more natural sound of an unedited backing vocal. The perfectly-lined up ones do sound really nice, though.

So what about you? What kinds of techniques do you use when you're dealing with backing vocals?

Eavesdropping on Yourself

You probably know by now that when you are mixing down a song, it's a good idea to listen to your mix on a variety of playback systems - car stereo, iPod, computer speakers, home stereo - before committing to your final mix. Different systems will reproduce sound differently, so listening on a wide variety of systems helps you fine tune your mix so that it sounds good wherever a potential listener might hear it.

Over the years, I've discovered another trick has come in handy particularly when I've been mixing for awhile and am having trouble figuring if a particular mix element is too loud/quiet. I simply start playback on my song, and step into the other room and listen from there. For whatever reason, this always helps me easily hear if a mix element is where it needs to be. Perhaps getting out from in front of the speakers just 'resets' things for me, but regardless of the science behind it, it seems to do the trick. Your mileage may vary, but give it a try some time. Do you have any 'unconventional' methods of evaluating a mix?

Thinking in Stereo

Last week, a reader requested I write something about panning and stereo placement of instruments. I'm going to expand on that a bit and talk about stereo in general, as there are several important elements that can effect how your mix sounds.

• Does is really need to be in stereo?
One mistake many beginners make when they start recording on a DAW, is that they record everything in stereo. In reality, only a relatively small percentage of your tracks probably really needs to be in stereo. If the sound you are recording has stereo effects applied to it, has auto panning, or stereo spread (as on some unison modes), then yes, maybe it should be recorded in stereo. But most instruments don't fall into this category. Remember, you can record a track dry (with no effects) and in mono, and apply stereo effects as part of mixdown. A stereo file takes up twice the disc space as a mono file, so that's reason enough to be sure you really need both channels to record a particular sound.

• If Everything is in Stereo, Nothing is in Stereo
Okay, not really, but the effect is the same.  Big, wide stereo sounds are best used sparingly. Contrast with the other elements in your mix will help make the sounds larger than life, but if everything on your track sounds like that, you lose some of the impact (and probably have a really messy-sounding mix). So choose 1 or 2 elements, such as strings or pads that will be your massive stereo sounds and let it contrast with the mono elements. The effect will be much more striking. Remember that most synth presets are designed to sound impressive when you are playing them by themselves, but the huge reverbs or pan spreads might not be practical in the mix. So prioritize what your big, widescreen sounds are going to be and keep it restricted to those.

• If a Track is in Stereo, You're Not Really Panning
With a mono track, adjusting the pan knob will place the track wherever in the stereo spectrum you choose. If you do the same thing to a stereo track, however, you're not actually panning, you're essentially adjusting the volume balance of the right versus the left channel. There are plug-ins, such as Logic's Directional Mixer, that will allow you to do proper panning of a stereo track, but honestly, if you are planning on putting a sound off-center, you are probably better off recording it as a mono track and panning as normal.

• Keep Your Bass in Mono
As a general rule, it is always best to keep your bass track in mono. The main reason for this is that it can cause phasing problems, but you'd also be surprised at how many dance clubs and music venues have mono PA systems. So important elements (at least in dance music) like your kick and your bass are best left in mono and kept panned to the center. I realize that in this era of super fat unison sounds, a lot of synths have bass sounds that have some degree of stereo spread on them. If you like the way this sounds, I suggest EQing out the bass frequencies and then layering the sound with a simple sine wave sub bass in mono to flesh out the low end. This way, you have stereo effect, but it's only happening in the higher frequencies where it is less problematic.

• Middle of the Road
As a general rule of thumb, when it comes to panning, your most important elements should always be dead center. Examples would be your bass, your kick and your snare, and vocals. Our ears give priority to things that are in the center and it also gives your track a more solid-sounding foundation.

• Think First
Some elements of panning are rather easy to figure out. For instance, with your drum tracks, you've probably got your kick and snare in the center, you hi-hats slightly to one side (which side depends whether you want to mix from the drummer's perspective, or from the 'audience'), your toms left to right or vice versa, and your other cymbals placed throughout the stereo spectrum based on where they are on the drum kit. However, with most other elements, it's less obvious. So give some thought to what you want to pan to a specific position in the stereo spectrum, and more importantly why. A good example would be if you had two different instrument parts that fall into similar frequency ranges. If they are panned to the same position, some frequency cancellation will probably occur, and it's harder to hear each part distinctly. However, if you pan one element slightly left, and the other slightly right, there is less interference and you will be able to hear each part much more easily. Listen to a track by a band with more than one guitarist, and you will probably hear this in action.

• Avoid the Extremes
Panning, like most things in life, is best done moderately. Having a track panned hard left or hard right sounds extremely unnatural and unbalanced. Instead, keep your pan knob values somewhere between about 9 o'clock and 3 o'clock. Of course there are exceptions, such as when you want to create a special effect, but most of the time that range will be about right.

• Keep it Moving
Autopanning is an effect where the signal is automatically panned from left to right within a specified range and at a specific speed. This can really add interest to a mix, but don't overdo it. Restrict it to no more than one track. Any more than that and it can get very distracting. If you don't have an autopanning plug-in (most tremelo effects can be used as autopanners too), you can use the automation facilities in your DAW to do it manually. This is obviously a lot more work-intensive, but it does give you more flexibility.

Turning Off the Visuals

Recording and mixing a song on a computer has many distinct advantages over doing the same on hardware, but perhaps the most useful advantage is how much visual feedback it allows us. We can literally see the structure of our song laid out in front of us. We can see where each of our channels is peaking. We can quickly and easily see what effects and patched to what tracks. You get the idea...

But sometimes this visual feedback has a downside when you're mixing. It becomes very easy to start making adjustments to your mix using your eyes rather than your ears. Relying too heavily on what the meters read versus just setting what sounds good is a common problem and can complicate the mixing process needlessly.

That's why I recommend, when you're giving a first listen to a mix you've set up, you turn off your computer monitor. Or simply turn you chair around. Or close your eyes. The important thing is that you listen instead of watch. You'd be amazed at how differently you will hear your music when you detatch it from the visual distractions DAWs can sometimes cause.

Do you have any unique ways of evaluating your mixes that others might find useful? Let us know!

Separating Your Sends

When it comes to mixing, there are basically two types of effects: insert effects and send effects. Insert effects are for effects you want to be totally 'wet'. Compression, EQ/filters, and Distortion are good examples here. These are effects that are applied directly to the instrument or audio channel itself.

Send effects, on the other hand, are useful when you want a mixture of the original, dry signal and the effected signal. Reverb and delay are the most commonly used send effects. These effects are applied to an auxillary send on your mixer (hardware or software) and you dial in the desired amount of effect with the send level on your instrument or audio channel. The added bonus here is that you can send as many different channels to the same send as you want. This not only saves you CPU power, but it can also make for a more realistic sounding mix, since in a real space, you'd have several sounds all being 'treated' by the space's natural reverb.

One technique that can be helpful sometimes in creating cleaner mixes, is to actually EQ the send. Why would you want to do this? Well, let's say you have a cool synth bassline that sounds a lot cooler with some delay on it, but the low frequencies in the bass sound turn into mud when sent through a delay. Leave your synth bass EQ untouched, and simply slap an EQ on your delay send and filter out those pesky low frequencies in the delay only. The mud is gone, but the mids and highs still carry the rhythmic interest the delays added.

You can also get unusual, artificial-sounding (in a cool way) effects by applying cuts or boosts to your reverb send. EQing your sends is not something you will do every day, but it can come in handy in a few instances, and can be a lot of fun to play around with at more extreme settings.

4 Beginners Tips for Cleaner Mixes

Arrangement, Arrangement, Arrangement! One of the most common mistakes beginners to electronic music make is to haphazardly add parts to their song without any sense of logic or order. This leads to muddy mixes with multiple parts fighting for the same frequency space. When you are adding a new part, pay attention to what frequency range it's in to ensure that you aren't putting it in an octave that is going to compete with an existing part. If it does, try playing the new part an octave higher or an octave lower. A well-arranged track can have a lot going on and still sound clean with each part distinct from the others. The cleaner your mix starts out to begin with, the cleaner the end result will be.

Think in 3D
Not having multiple parts playing in the same frequency range is a good rule of thumb, but isn't a hard, fast rule. There are things you can do so that two parts in the same range aren't fighting for space in your mix. The simplest is to change the position of one of the tracks relative to the other by using panning or reverb level. By having one track panned more towards the right, and the other more to the left (avoid panning hard left or hard right, though, as this usually sounds very unnatural), you can have two parts around the same range and still have them sound distinct. This is still a common technique used in mixing multiple guitars in rock music. But don't stop there. Consider also the position of tracks 'back to front' in the mix. 'Wet' tracks that are heavily reverbed have a tendency to sound further away from the listener than ones that are drier, or have no reverb at all. This doesn't quite produce the same degree of separation that panning does, but done correctly it can definitely help two competing parts sit well together.

Subtractive EQ
The biggest trouble area for most mixes is the low end You want the bass frequencies to sound nice and full, but sometimes you just end up with pure mud. The best way to remedy this problem is through judicious use of subtractive EQ. Subtractive EQ simply means using an equalizer to subtract frequencies rather than boosting them. In fact, it is always preferable to cut frequencies than to boost them if possible, because by cutting frequencies you are freeing up bandwidth in your mix, while boosting them takes up more room in your mix. So make a habit of cutting the bass frequencies out of everything in your mix that isn't a kick drum or bass. You might think that sounds like violins or bells or crash cymbals don't have much low end, but you would be surprised just how much there usually is. And even small amounts of unneeded bass frequencies can add up over several tracks and make your low end wooly and indistinct. My default starting point is to use a highpass filter to cut out everything below 200Hz on most non-kick/bass tracks. And on the kick and bass tracks, it's a good idea to roll off everything below 40Hz since most consumer stereos won't reproduce these frequencies anyway. Keep in mind, this is just a starting point - you will undoubtedly need to tweak each track individually to get it perfect. You'd be amazed at how just this one simple trick will clean up your mixes. Your kick and bassline will come through much clearer, and your mix will sound more open, even allowing you to add more parts if you desire.

Keep It Hot
If you are recording hardware instruments, you need to make sure you record them as loudly as possible without clipping the signal (unless you are deliberately clipping it for effect). It's easy to forget that 'real' instruments and mixers emit noise (since softsynths don't have this problem). You want to ensure that your 'real' instrument parts are as far above the noise floor as possible. Simply normalizing your already recorded track is not good enough since obviously, making your track louder will also make the noise louder. So take time to set levels properly and you will minimize any noise issues.

What are your favorite tips for cleaning up mixes?

Something to Gain...

If you're anything like me, when you are first building your mix, you may have to drop the levels of all your channels a time or two so that your levels aren't clipping. This is easy enough to do in Logic... you simply highlight all the channel names on your mixer, and drag one of the level sliders and all of the selected channels will move in proportion, thus letting you adjust levels without losing the balance of the mix you just built. There is one problem with this. If you have any sort of volume automation on any of your tracks, once you play back your project the levels on those automated tracks will jump back to their original levels. This is because automation values are absolute and not relative. So how can you have flexibility with changing your mix levels without having to redo all of your volume automation? Use Logic's "Gain" plug in (located under the Utility plug-ins) and automate THAT instead of the actual track volume. Gain works by adding or subtracting volume relative to the track's level, so no matter what you change the track's level to, the gain automation will increase or decrease in the proper proportion, thus preserving the proper balance of your mix.

Plug: Subversive Studios

If I may be crass and do a plug for a friend of mine for a moment...

Subversive Sound Studio is a Philly based facility that specializes in the production, mixing, remixing, and mastering of electronic music. The head of the studio is Isaac Glendening of the band Cesium-137. I've been to the studio before and it's much nicer than mine. haha At any rate, one of their selling points is that they try to keep their rates as reasonable as possible, so if you're looking for any of these services without having to sell a kidney, give 'em a look!

An Insanely Useful Plug-In

One of the things that should be in every electronic musician's plug-in folder is a spectrum analyzer. As the name suggests, this tool measures the relative strength of different frequencies in a signal, allowing you to see the dominant frequencies, potential trouble spots, etc. Where it comes in most handy, however, is when you have multiple instruments in the same general frequency range that are clashing with one another. Using a spectrum analyzer, you can see the common frequencies between the tracks as well as the results of EQ cuts you make as you try to make them fit in the mix together. The problem is, most analyzers will only show you one signal at a time, meaning a lot of going back and forth between tracks while you are mixing. Vertex DSP's MultiInspector removes that limitation by letting you view the plots of multiple tracks at the same time in a single window. Although it has been around for at least a year, MultiInspector doesn't seem to be very well known among the musicians I know. There are two versions of the plug in: the free MultiInspector Free, which is limited to 44.1k files and only lets you plot 4 tracks at a time maximum, and the commercial MultiInspector ($115) which significantly expands the features. Both plug-ins are available for Mac in AU and VST formats, and for Windows in VST format.