Fatten It Up

[Sweaty Ear]

Hello all,

what are some techniques to add more weight to thin stems besides turning up the volume or layering? want to beef up some tracks to add fullness while keeping the sound in tact.

[legendCNCD]

Saturation, dynamic eq...

[BertKoor]

In the art of mixing anything goes. If regular EQ & compression doesn't cut it, then you gotta be creative. Just try some effects.

[Sweaty Ear]

ok, thanks. will try these out.

[Zeisner]

Multi-band compression, EQing into a clipper, dynamic EQ has already been mentioned too. All of those can also be combined.

I recommend to look up articles on pre-emphasis/de-emphasis because this is what makes all those classic vinyl/tape records sound so fat. The fatness was originally just a side effect of trying to work with formats with low (frequency-dependent) signal-to-noise ratios.

[Sweaty Ear]

hadn't thought of these. definitely will do.

[Songwriter101]

Saturation and limiting/clipping for sure. Limiting for tonal stuff, clipping for percussion/transient rich sounds. Getting those peaks down to get to the meat of the sound. Always looking for a trade-off not too kill to much transients but it's better to go full on with an effect and then to back off than to be too timid about it.

[Spin Boyz]

if your stems sound thin, I wonder if there’s to much high passing and deep cuts in the mids/low mids on the individual tracks

[Karakhi]

Parallel compression with a fast attack and a bit of saturation on a dedicated send track always does wonders for fattening up a mix without losing the initial transient punch.

[Sweaty Ear]

if your stems sound thin, I wonder if there’s to much high passing and deep cuts in the mids/low mids on the individual tracks

it could be that thin is the wrong word. have a track where at one point the energy drops when it should rise because the arrangement goes from more to fewer instruments playing more aggressively. since my skills aren't much past volume balancing i don't have any solutions at my disposal and didn't know where to start. although people seem to be saying eq and saturation.

[Sweaty Ear]

Parallel compression with a fast attack and a bit of saturation on a dedicated send track always does wonders for fattening up a mix without losing the initial transient punch.

this one sounds good.

[kernaudioio]

the reframe in your later post changes the whole problem. if the track only feels thin when the arrangement drops from many aggressive instruments down to a few, then the fix isn't really static processing on the stem. it's a transition/energy problem, and you solve those at the arrangement and bus level, not by making one part "fatter."

a few things that have worked for me there:

automate perceived loudness into the sparse section. when half the instruments drop out, the remaining ones should usually come up a little, not stay where they sat in the busy section. ride the section gain, then check it against the busy part by ear. our ears track relative density, so a part that felt full in a crowd will feel hollow alone at the same level.

karakhi's parallel suggestion is solid and worth saying why it works here: a fast attack on the parallel bus clamps the body while the dry transient passes through untouched on the main path, so you add density and sustain without dulling the hit. the saturation on that send adds harmonics that read as "weight" even when the fundamental energy didn't change, which is exactly what you want when one instrument is suddenly carrying the section.

put some of that glue on a bus that's always on, not just the stem, so the floor of the mix stays more constant as instruments come and go. and the boring one that fixes a lot of transition flatness: write something into the gap (a sustained note, a tail, a reverb throw, a sub layer) so the ear has one more thing to hold onto rather than squeezing the parts you already have.

i'd start with the gain automation and the always-on bus glue before reaching for anything per-stem. those address the actual cause, relative density between sections, instead of treating the symptom.

[Sweaty Ear]

thanks for these good suggestions. in the future i'll try to be more accurate about terminology. it does only drop at that section. the question was just to find out what expert producers would do if they received stems like this and didn't have the opportunity to change the arrangement. you're right though. could see how glue on a bus might even out the sections.