How to find that last 10-15% 'commercial' sound fully ITB?

[LouBot]

Hi All - ill try keep this brief
I produce and mix 100% ITB (no outboard gear, no instruments out except for mic).

I'm content as can be with the basics - arrangement, mixing, balance, EQ, compression, etc...HOWEVER I'm finding that my songs overall have more of the forward 'exposed' naked sound of a 'home' studio production and less of the polished more 'receded' rounded clarity of commercial tracks.

I've found the below recently helped get me a lot closer to that 'commercial' sound I'm talking about - (more specifically the late 90s and early 2000's sound + not a huge fan of in your face highly compressed brightness you often hear with most recent radio pop)
- stereo imaging
- meticulous compression to remove pokeyness and smooth out elements
(indivudal tracks and mix bus )
- touch of reverb on the mixbus
- EQ mixbus especially scooping mids where relevant
- Rear bus technique (parallel compression of sorts ala Andrew Scheps)

BUT I still feel like im not quite there yet!
I'm very aware that the actual recording\ tracking of ORGANIC instruments is a huge part of this (given that you can adjust mic placement to create tasteful airy distance between the instrument\ vocalist and the mic and perhaps this is part of the difference but does anyone have any tips on how to achieve\ at least provide the 'illusion' of this quality and the above fully ITB?

[whyterabbyt]

practice and experience

[LouBot]

ok let me rephrase this (not being ungrateful here since I fully agree with you reply in pricipal but I kinda knew that already ) but do you have any addtional advice that can help me get there a little sooner?

[DMG68]

You may want to post an example to hear. It’ll be hard for anyone to give you specific feedback without hearing the current sound that you want to improve on.

[legendCNCD]

I'd also say practice and experience, a lot. Secondly, references references references.

For these I am asking - Why? :
- meticulous compression to remove pokeyness and smooth out elements (indivudal tracks and mix bus )
- touch of reverb on the mixbus
- EQ mixbus especially scooping mids where relevant

Do you really need to compress so much? How about clipping the peaks or limiting?
Why reverb on mixbus?
EQ scooping mids where relevant I understand, but why on mixbus, why not on the channels themselves?

Also do not totally scoop out 200-400 range, you'll need some driving energy there

[enroe]

ok let me rephrase this (not being ungrateful here since I fully agree with you reply in pricipal but I kinda knew that already ) but do you have any addtional advice that can help me get there a little sooner?

Haha, yeah, that's the ultimate question that everyone here on KVR is working on in their studio.

Therefore: There is no recipe! Exactly what whyterabbyt already said applies: try out and work a
lot. What I can say: At the very beginning there is composition and arrangement. If these are not
good, then everything else is difficult or even impossible.

[Scrubbing Monkeys]

Treated room and good monitors. Will go much father than adding plugins and will accelarate your learning curve. In the 90s we mixed with very little outboard gear. Board saturation helped. Good mics. Good live rooms. Of course the last two are more for tracking.

[lfm]

Some good hands on mastering tips
https://youtu.be/wALzBvB_l7o

and surely some to pick here too
https://youtu.be/H5imUCJbQmc

and good reference music to calibrate ears.

[soundmodel]

1. Have a good composition and mix.
2. Then at master your tools are:

• A Pultec-style EQ, which means that is should only have a few broad bands.
• A good reverb.
• A transient shaper if the production is "modern".

If you cannot get the sound with these, then your mix or your composition sucks, so go back to those.

A caution against attempting to "repair" things at master e.g. by putting in a sound-goodizer plug-in like some maximizer. A much better strategy is to compose and mix into such plug-ins, not attempt magic afterwards.

When you reach master stage your production should be 0-3% ready, not 10-15%. The changes done at that stage are very small, but they can still make a difference.

For a certain genre, using the same or comparable gear helps.

I'd also recommend studying mixes that have the sound that you want. Run them through FFT analyzers and look how the frequencies behave. Try EQ:ing them to see what bands are prominent and how they are related. Very often e.g. "an expensive sound" is merely a careful boost at a particular band. You want to understand the bands like chords, certain bands carry certain emotion or impact.

In a rudimentary sense the whole mix (and each individual track too) only has two bands. A low-band, and a high-band. This is why the most common EQ is two-band bass/treble.

You can therefore also make the mastering example a bit harder by assuming that your only tool at master is a bass/treble EQ with the bands fixed at certain frequencies. Again, if you cannot get the sound, then your mix fails for most consumer listeners.

[LouBot]

thank you all - appreciate the comments and much food for thought. and I agree with the whole sentiment 'theres no magic bullet' (sometimes theres just a different path to take to get to the same destination; ) Im also finding that mixing other peoples material is dfeintely helping get that different persoective and experience that im seeking.

[soundmodel]

thank you all - appreciate the comments and much food for thought. and I agree with the whole sentiment 'theres no magic bullet' (sometimes theres just a different path to take to get to the same destination; ) Im also finding that mixing other peoples material is dfeintely helping get that different persoective and experience that im seeking.

It's a typical part of professional workflow to listen the tracks one works on relative to existing final masters in the genre or near it. In this sense, this is a magic bullet. You just mimick what others are doing. You mix rock? Okay then you listen to Bon Jovi or whatever. Pop? Beyonce or something. ... When your mix sounds like them, you're done.

The problem is that such references don't exist for novel genres or tracks. So e.g. when it comes to Aphex Twin, then you just have to figure out yourself what sounds okay. Basically, all those "yo dawg YouTube mixing tutorials" are useless for this.

[soundmodel]

Also,

HOWEVER I'm finding that my songs overall have more of the forward 'exposed' naked sound of a 'home' studio production and less of the polished more 'receded' rounded clarity of commercial tracks.

Sounds quite a bit of the usual novice problem of dynamics. Many people would suggest that you learn to use compressors to "glue" tracks together and use compressors as EQ. It's a common feature of "novice sound" that the tracks aren't as loud as commercial tracks.

However, this is a two-edged sword: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war. In some sense, the commercial sound is not a good sound, it's just very loud (which people have learnt to associate with good). In reality, most commercial tracks could sound better with more dynamics.

Depending on the genre you work in, you either look for the "loud sound" or then you figure out your own sound. I.e. if you produce dubstep, then it's sort of a given that you're expected sound "loud".

You may benefit by getting a RMS level meter and then aiming so that your finalized mix sits at -9dBFS RMS, which is a common radio standard. Your goal is to make your mix sound as good as possible without going hotter than this. If you're below this, then it guides you to look for whether you could make things sit more. However, this is just for learning, not a general guide for good mixes. The benefit of this is that you're forced to not put in too much things.

Also, ITB, home studio, does not matter. I've heard home studio ITB mixes that sound better than those made in expensive studios. It's about skill and not the gear.

[Big DAW Audio]

Some things that help:

Multiple compressors working in unison so each one doesn't have to do as much.

Proper gain staging and bussing of sounds, which will result in the most headroom possible.

Adding a limiter or clipper onto the main elements of the song and pushing each sound into them, so that you are working with nice loud crispy sounds as your main elements. Add very light limiting on busses as well to control peaks (which ensures you can push the master compressors/limiters harder).

A perfect low end with kick and sub dancing around each other (which also vastly helps with headroom).

Sidechaining elements to the kick and sometimes other instruments (manually, with multi band EQ or with soothe / trackspacer.

Gating (manually or with plugins) of all the main repetitive elements (especially the drums/percs).

[soundmodel]

Proper gain staging and bussing of sounds, which will result in the most headroom possible.

Not relevant if the production is fully digital (except import samples).

What one could focus on is making sure that one doesn't have unnecessary "Analog" -settings in synths or FX. That is, settings that add noise. Unless you specifically want that noise.

A perfect low end with kick and sub dancing around each other (which also vastly helps with headroom).

Yes and due to audio perception a muddy low-end tends to mask higher frequencies as well.

Gating (manually or with plugins) of all the main repetitive elements (especially the drums/percs).

Varies. Gating is inappropriate for some tracks, because it will create audible gaps in the background (the tail disappears) or some particular frequencies. However, it can also add clarity.

[KBSoundSmith]

Without hearing any of your sounds, @LouBot, it's a bit hard to truly say what's going on. That said, a few things do come to mind. I won't rehash the technical things others have already mentioned. Rather than as an engineer, my thoughts of this are coming more from composition and sound design.

It may be that your sound selection isn't 100% correct. Or that they haven't been treated properly for the effect you are wishing to achieve. You complained about everything feeling forward, exposed, in your face. This seems to me that your mix may be lacking a sense of depth, of 3D space. I think sound selection or a few other adjustments may, theoretically solve the problem (again, no one has heard any of your material, could be what others have said are what you need to look at).

Step back and think about sound at a fundamental level. If something is close to you, the transients are going to be sharper and more defined; if farther from you, it may even just be a blur, without a sense of the transients. Additionally, the closer something is to you, the more likely it will be that the higher frequencies are easier to hear and more defined; if farther from you, the energy of higher frequencies may have completely dissipated by the time the sound reaches you, plus it is more likely that the sound has been diffused in the environment. Lastly, a sound farther way is typically going to be much quieter than a sound directly in front of you.

So it may be that you need to use sounds with less-prominent (or seemingly absent) transients, with less high frequency energy, which are quieter, and given a more generous proportion of dry/wet reverb, plus maybe panning and width.