Producing Beats

Mixing Category

uHear icon
As a musician you will probably want to keep your hearing in tip top condition, but sometimes all that clubbing, going to concerts and general listening to loud music can take it's toll on your ears and as a musician your ears have probably taken some damage.

Today I found a nice little application in the iTunes app store which allows you to test your hearing straight from an iPhone or iPod touch and it seems to work pretty well. Currently the app is available for free (it was paid for very recently) and is called uHear. I thought I would post about this because as a music producer, I think the results can be applied when creating mix downs and it is nice to know how well your ears are functioning anyway.

The app is split up into 3 sections as listed below.

Parallel Gating
Before I began writing this post I did a quick search on Google for Parallel Gating, to see what other sort of articles were already out there for it and came up with next to nothing, I found this a little strange as I have found it a great little technique to know which was taught to me on a studio course I went on a long time ago and yet seems to be talked about very little.

New York Parallel Compression
The compressor can be one of the more difficult effects to get your head round using effectively, today I am going to show how to use it to make your beats sound noticeably louder using parallel compression, which is great for harder sounding genres of music. Firstly it is probably best to show you what the original beat sounded like before any compression is applied.

A good track usually has a nice clear sound down in those bass frequencies which doesn't sound muffled. Many mixes from beginner producers struggle to get a great sounding mix and complain of a muffled sounding mix in the lower frequencies. Usually the cause is that too many instruments are competing for the space within the bass.

A commonly used technique to leave room in this area is to use some low cutting of EQ or a high pass filter on certain problem instruments. For example, imagine we have a bass guitar and a standard electric guitar. When both are playing together, the electric guitar will still be producing some frequencies down in the range where our bass should sit. Applying a high pass filter (cutting out the low frequencies) on the electric guitar can remove these often unnecessary frequencies that the electric guitar is producing and thus allowing the bass guitar to push through much clearer.