Production Best-Practices for Maintaining Sonic Integrity Without Slowing Down Creative Workflow
Producers who wish to be in the upper echelon of the profession, should work on being able to produce something as finished-sounding as possible before a mix engineer touches it. Below are some simple tips and best-practices which will help get you most of the way there. If you build these as second-nature habits during production, you will find yourself ahead of the curve come time for mixing. The mix will sound better, the master will then sound better, and the client will be all the happier for it:
Put as many of your creative FX on sends as possible, rather than individual track inserts. This will allow for the manipulation of your FX separate from the dry signal (EQing them, stereo manipulation, etc.), and ensures there will automatically be a dry stem to work with in mixing.
It is especially useful to always put your reverb FX on sends. This frees up significant CPU bandwidth, keeps the sense of space consistent throughout the song, and allows you to quickly add any track to that send, saving the time of loading a whole new reverb instance on each insert.
Bonus reverb tip: understand and use the pre-delay setting on your reverbs, especially on vocals. This slightly delays the onset of the reverb effect, creating a bit of separation from the dry signal, which helps ensure the reverb doesn’t wash out the clarity and presence of whatever it’s applied to.
If you want to use a plugin that affects the entire song, do so on a bus that sits before the master bus in your signal path, OR assess whether the song would be better served by having that plugin apply to only a subgroup of composition elements.
A good reason for this, is if you are ever exporting stems (for publishing, mixing, remixers, etc.) those master bus effects will not be printed on the stems, making it a lot harder to maintain the creative intent of your song as it changes hands. Even if you were to manually print each track one-by-one through your master bus, the processing will not react the same to each soloed element as it would when all of the tracks are being summed through it simultaneously. Additionally, this will allow for much more flexibility in the mixing stage.
If you are using FX on the master bus, be conscious of the fact that you are essentially mixing into it as you produce the song, and the sonic foundation you’re building that song upon may likely fall apart if that effect is removed later on. One must either commit to using FX on the master bus and be willing to live with any sonic limitations that it can present down the line, or be more careful/selective with how one uses them. I advise the latter.
Gain staging is a key element that can be overlooked by producers. Oftentimes, when something does not sound quite right, the instinct is to simply make it louder by pushing up the fader. This is a sure sign that either the sound selection/recording needs more work, or some manipulation needs to be done to the sonic characteristics of that sound, rather than the simple addition of more gain.
It is understandable that this can be one of the hardest things to focus on when trying to be creative, as watching meters is the last thing a lot of people think about while producing. There are, however, some simple measures that can be taken to maintain good gain structure practices as you create.
You don’t have to watch every meter, but there are some meters that matter more than others, and those are the meters associated with the sounds that take up the most headroom, and/or have the highest peaking transients (transients are the points where audio peaks highest when looking at a waveform). These sounds are typically: kick, bass/808, snare, and sometimes things like hi hats or shouty vocals. If you watch the level of your kick and bass especially, the gain structure of your entire production will usually fall into place in relation to these two elements.
I typically look to keep kicks at or below -6dBs peak on the individual track meter, and even lower for bass/808, although this is not a hard rule.
Note: there is a difference between actual loudness (measured) and perceived loudness (how loud we actually hear something as). If a kick sounds good/loud at -6dbs peak, that is a sign of a well-produced/selected kick. If a kick sounds low and muffled at -6dbs, that is an indication that either it’s the wrong kick, or the rest of your production elements are too loud in relation to your kick, in which case you should consider looking at the gain structure of your entire track.
One quick tip to help understand this, if you are just starting out, is to mute the kick and bass/808 if your track has them, and look at your master bus meter. If the song is already hitting close to or over 0db peak RMS without those two things, then your overall gain structure is probably inadequate.
Also note that it’s not just the DAW meters you should pay attention to. Different audio plugins have different input levels they were designed to operate at. So while your DAW meter may not be peaking, you could be clipping your plugin with a signal that is coming into it too hot, therefore introducing undesirable audio artifacts such as aliasing. This compromises things such as how well your track will translate to various compression algorithms or loudness normalization used by the various music streaming DSP’s.
When it comes to achieving a certain sound, less is often more. Do you end up with tons of plug-ins on each channel to achieve the sound in your head? It is possible you are adding redundant processing to your sound.
For example: If you add distortion to something and the sound becomes a little harsh, before adding a second or third EQ or compressor to the channel, try adjusting the distortion itself, or cutting out more of that harsh frequency with EQ before it is fed into the distortion. OR put the distortion on a send, so that you can EQ the distortion itself, independent of the FX on the insert.
Here’s a good metaphor for this concept: “If you paint with every color at once, you’ll end up with the color brown every time”. Think of your FX as a color pallet, and apply them as if you are painting on a canvas. Allow space for your greens to be green and your blues to be blue. It’s a bit of a fluffy concept, but there’s quite a bit of truth to it in practice.
Reference commercial releases while you produce. This is often something people are told to do while mixing, but is just as useful for producers looking to make tracks that sound like other commercial releases. Take a moment every once in awhile to give yourself some aural and mental perspective while producing. If your production is not sounding anywhere close to the sonic standard of the songs you admire, consider that it may lie in the nuts and bolts of the sound selection and processing of your production, and should not be something to leave until the mixing stage. The earlier in the process things sound good/professional, the better the finished product.
Listening, critical listening, is one of the most important skills a producer can develop. The ability to hear a thing, and understand how to achieve that thing in practice.
Lastly, arrangement is king. Better mixes and masters usually start with better arrangements. Do you need to add that 6th synth layer? Or would you have been better off putting more work into the first synth? Are there a lot of things which, if muted, do not really take away from the overall feel of the song?
This goes back to the previous point of how less if often more.
I have heard people say a mix sounds “expensive,” and they applaud the mix engineer for that; and oftentimes, rightly so. However, this is more usually a direct result of great production and recording practices, with the mix engineer sometimes only accounting for maybe that last 10-20% of polish.