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Streeter Seidell is a comedy writer and (mediocre) drummer living in Brooklyn, NY. During the day he edits the front page of CollegeHumor.com but when the sun goes down he takes his place at the helm of the Indablog. He maintains a personal blog at StreeterSeidell.com and wants to make sure you know he once wrote something for the New York Times and that it was, in the words of his mother, "Amazing! You're so talented!"

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Recording Tip: Multing

Friday November 16, 2007 at 12:00 PM

From Dan Here is a mixing tip that will really get some punch in your snare, kick drum, and bass tracks. I first learned it about a year ago in a small mixing seminar with the great mixing engineer, Paul Special (Billy Joel, Aerosmith, Paul Simon, STP, Nike, VW, and so on). Essentially what you are doing here is duplicating a track, processing it differently by applying different effects and levels to each one, and grouping them to sound like one track. It works basically the same way for any of these three instruments, adjust ingredients to taste. For this example let's take a kick drum track as an example.

First, duplicate the track so you have two identical versions of the kick track. Next, apply a very liberal amount of compression to one of the tracks, getting it to an unnaturally tight, almost crunchy level. Once you have compressed the track, add some EQ to get the punch in the right frequency range (of your choice).

Now, if you play these two tracks at the same time (the un-processed one and the new, processed one) you might here that they are slightly out of time. Even if you don't, I promise they are. Adding a real time effect plug-in to one of two identical tracks will necessarily add some delay (probably about 5ms). This can be easily fixed by adding a "ghost" plug-in to the other, un-processed track, bringing them back in time together. Don't worry about this getting them out of time with other tracks, it will generally be completely inaudible. A good ghost plug-in on these tracks is a compressor, without adding any compression. You are already adding compression to the new, processed, track, so by adding the same compressor, just at a minute level, will snap things back into time and if any "color" is added at all to the, otherwise un-processed, track it is consistent with the color on the second track.

In order to get these tracks to actually sound good together, you have to adjust their relative volumes. The original track is really what you want to hear. The second track is really just to add that punch, so the volume should be significantly lower. You don't want to hear your kick drum peaking and crackling, you just want to add the subtle crispness of it underneath the original sound. Adjust these levels while listening to the rest of the mix. There is no reason to isolate these sounds and try to get a good sound. It doesn't matter how it sounds on it's own, it matters how it sounds in the rest of the mix.

Once you have a good sound group/lock the two tracks together so that, later on, you don't accidently move one and not the other.

And that, my friends, is multing! Simple but it makes a huge difference.

Tags: Recording Tips

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