The Importance Of Space In A Mix: Part #3

Welcome to the third and final article about space in a mix. If you haven’t already read the first two, check out:

Mixing Space

So you’ve recorded all your instruments and room captures, you’ve got a basic mix going, and you’ve selected your delays and reverbs.

Now what?

As discussed in the prior articles we are either looking for a sense of coherence, or a surreal space that has some kind of orchestration to it. Our sonic elements for working toward our goal are the same as any other set of sounds: tone, texture, rhythm, and spatial cues.

I’m not normally a mix-by-numbers sort of person, and there’s certainly no one way of working ambiance into your mix. However, I am going to share some of my thoughts and techniques which you can lift or use to platform your own techniques.

First, find your real spaces and focus on those. Room captures in particular can serve two very useful functions in a mix. First–they add actual living breathing space–something no other reverb can really do.

Second–the room captures expose the sound of the space that the close captures possess at a much subtler level. In other words, the room captures put a magnifying glass on the sound of the space that is in the close miking on any given instrument. This makes the room captures a good place to start.

Also, if you tracked in multiple rooms–getting a sense of consistency here is of the utmost important. All the artificial reverbs can be tweaked to fit the sound of the real room(s)–but the real rooms can’t be tweaked to match the artificial reverbs except to a minimal degree.

Working The Real Room

Rhythm: If it’s late, use a gate. Expansive rooms yield long reverb tails–and those can throw off the rhythmic sense of the song. Fast songs and long tails are generally a rough combination. If it feels like the room decay is just hanging around too long, a gate can be just the thing to shorten it up.

Just remember that hard gating a reverb sounds unnatural–a gradual gain reduction will be much more transparent. Conversely, if the room sound is too short, a compressor can bring up the tail and give the impression that the reverb is decaying more slowly. This is also a good trick to use if you want to create the sonic image of a large room, when a large room is not at your disposal.

It helps a great deal to make this decision at the tracking stage, because the digital world is a cruel place for the ends of a reverb tail.

Tone: In some genres, room sound is very much desirable–often in Jazz, Indie Rock, and Classical styles you want a specific and flattering room sound. Other genres–Pop Rock, Hip Hop, and Dance–a natural room can be unwanted.

A room will have response up and down the hearing band, but there will be specific areas of tonal signatures. These are the areas of sonic build up that re-emphasize the content of what’s being played in the room. You’re going to find these in the mid-range–and depending on the style, you either want to really emphasize these areas, or completely cut them out.

Texture: Specifically how the room reacts to transients, and how diffuse the room is. Outside of some mild compression, there’s not much one can do about the texture of a room–basically the best thing to do is to acknowledge the textural cues of the room sound, and note them for later when building the rest of the mix.

Isolation Room Verb

Some mixes call for exceptionally dry sounds. Dry sounds can come off as stale, or dead in the water. Even for things that are recorded in super dead isolation rooms–there is still a sound to the space. It’s just super subtle.

Careful compression on the dry source can help the air around the source come up and create depth even where there is very little reverberation. Start with very long attack times and very short release times–and work your way to the point where the air develops, but the naturalness of the source is not overly compromised.

Click to read the rest of this article over at The Pro Audio Files.

You learn the following in the rest of this article: