How To Fix A Muddy Mix: Stuck In The Mud?
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Have you ever spent hours on one of your tracks and ended up making it sound worse rather than better? Here’s how to fix a muddy mix.
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How To Fix A Muddy Mix
Perhaps you’re working on your own productions or a local punk band has asked you to mix their wonderfully garage-recorded EP. Either way, we’ve all reached stuck points on mixes where it feels like more harm is being done to the music than good.
Mixing is an art form that takes years to master, so let’s look at a few methods you can apply in your workflow to cut through the chaos and hopefully achieve more clarity and focus with your mixes.
How To Fix A Muddy Mix: Identify The Core Elements
Every mix has a group of foundational sounds that hold it together. Once you’ve singled out these elements, we can get to work on making sure that nothing is getting in their way. Depending on the genre, this could be the kick, the snare, the bassline of the track, a melodic instrument, and almost always the vocals.
Start by listening to your mix with a critical ear, so you can determine where the problem areas are. If you’re still unsure of where to begin, try listening to a professionally mixed reference track in a similar style. When focussing on the core elements, pay close attention to their tonal and spatial characteristics in relation to the other sounds in the mix.
Now that you’ve got at least a rough idea of your fundamentals, you can start listening to them in solo to hone in on problematic aspects of each sound. If you’re new to mixing, taking notes at this stage can help you stay on the task at hand rather than being distracted by other sounds in the mix.
How To Fix A Muddy Mix: EQ Techniques
Now that we’ve isolated some of the problem areas where sounds are infringing upon each other, we can use high-pass filters to create space for our key low-end elements. This is particularly important for sounds that occur on the same beat, so finding the octave range of the bassline and setting this above or below your kick will help with separation and clarity.
When dealing with harmonic information, setting the high-pass filter at the frequency of the lowest note being played will remove the unwanted low end. Meanwhile, by boosting the Q factor you can actually increase the punch, as that note becomes more apparent in the context of your mix.
If your kick isn’t punching through in the upper mids, find the instruments playing with it and carve out a 3 to 6 dB cut from them in this frequency range. Repeat this on the core elements in your mix, so you keep reducing and removing undesired frequencies. Now, instead of boosting frequencies for clarity, try finding the bands that sweeten and enhance the key instruments.
How To Fix A Muddy Mix: Kick and Bass
Improving the relationship between your kick and bass can do a great deal for the overall clarity and punch of your mix. No matter which style of music you’re working with, one of the tried and tested techniques for creating space for the kick and bass is sidechaining.
Luckily, this can be done with the stock compressor in your DAW (the Logic Pro compressor is perfect). To squeeze the bassline when the kick hits, add a compressor to the bass channel and assign its sidechain input to the kick. We want the bass to drop instantly in level, so set the attack as fast as it can go and set the release time to between 50 and 60 ms.
Once you have the compressor pumping nicely, you can use the threshold control to determine how much you want to squeeze the bass. To control sub-bass frequencies, you can use a low-shelving filter. Meanwhile, the kick’s attack point (upper mids) and the growl of the bass (mids) can also be boosted to increase the separation.
How To Fix A Muddy Mix: Balancing Your Mix
If you’re experiencing muddiness in your mix, or even in certain sections of your mix, the balance of your sounds could be part of the problem, especially your low-end elements. As your song moves from the intro to the first verse or the pre-chorus to the chorus, you can encounter mud due to the mix becoming more dense in these sections.
How you approach balancing the sounds in each section of your song, is largely dependent on the style of music. In songs that contain electronic drums like Pop, Hip-Hop, and EDM, you very rarely hear dynamic changes in the main drum and bass channels as you do in songs with a live drummer and bassist playing.
This means that you can start by balancing the song’s biggest chorus or the most dense section before the last drop in the track (if you’re working with dance music). Also, by using a compressor like the Waves RVox on your vocal bus, you can compensate for the level increase when the doubles and harmonies play.
How To Fix A Muddy Mix: Channel Grouping
One of the easiest systems for making adjustments to your mix and doing volume automation is by using channel grouping. This way, you are dealing with five faders, rather than a forest of 160. Start by reassigning the outputs of all your drums to an aux bus, and don’t forget to include the outputs of any effects returns that have been sent from your drum channels.
Do the same for your synths, vocals, and guitars, and then you can EQ and compress each of your group busses and start adding volume automation to add drama to your song’s transitions. Another neat trick is to use mid-side processing on your busses, as this way you can adjust the center channel and side channel info separately.
The Voxengo MSED is a great plugin that allows you to mute, boost, or cut your mid and side channels individually. This way you can create mid and side pockets for the main elements in your track the same way we approached equalization earlier in this article.
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One response to “How To Fix A Muddy Mix: Stuck In The Mud?”
If your mix is lacking punch, a one-band expander can be used sparingly to give it some dynamic range. If your expander has a gating feature, turn it off. The expander does the opposite to a compressor, making the loud bits louder with respect to the quiet bits. It’s always best to ensure you normalise the mix after expansion to peak at around -6db, to give yourself enough headroom when mastering. An expander tends to louden the main features of the track, which can help if your mixdown is a bit muddled, but also means you may lose a few nuances. Worth a go if all else fails.