Reverbs are an important part of mixing. We often hear people refer to a signal as dry or wet, referring to the type of reverb. Shorter reverbs can sound dry as they are perceived, rather than heard. Longer reverbs are audible in the mix and they are often referred to as a wet sounding. In this article, we will look at a few techniques of using reverb as an effective mixing tool.

1. Using Your Reverb Post-EQ

Producers use reverbs both as inserts and returns. EQing our signal before it comes to our reverb has a lot of benefits. We can use a low cut or low shelf to reduce the amount of reverb applied on the lower frequencies to prevent unwanted muddiness in the low mids. Similarly, a high cut or high shelf to reduce the reverb on some sibilant frequencies so that they are not amplified in the mix. Always use your ears and check how your signal sounds with and without the EQ. Another important point to consider is that nothing is stopping you from EQ the signal after the reverb as well. Although we are using an EQ to sculpt our signal into the reverb effect, it does not mean that other problems will not be introduced in the areas reverb is being applied. You can use a separate EQ for this role or you can also use your Reverb's own EQ, provided it has that feature, to sculpt your input signal for the reverb.

In the image above we are using the Reverb on a return track. We are sending a drum loop to our return and creating a room sound for it. We are using an EQ before our reverb in the return to control the amount of reverb applied on the kick and frequencies above 7000Hz.

2. Compressing the Reverb Tail

When using longer decay times on a reverb plugin to create lush soundscapes, we run the risk of drowning important musical phrases in a performance. It can create a lack of clarity when used on quick vocals or melodic runs. Compressing the reverb tail gives us greater control over the decay so that it ducks whenever our lead sound is playing. In our example, we will use the sidechain function on our compressor to duck the reverb tail according to our sidechain input.

As you can see in the image above we have selected the Vocal Chop track for our sidechain input so that our reverb ducks down every time the vocals cross the threshold we have set. We are also using the release time of the compressor to shape the recovery of the reverb signal after our vocal chop has ended temporarily.

3. Avoiding too many Different Reverbs

Reverbs essentially refers to the space in which your mix exists. If you want an intimate feel in your sound, then you should stick to shorter room reverb. If we suddenly add another sound with a lush hall reverb, then it might mess up our mix's focus in a lot of cases. It is important to think of reverb as an effect that adds context to the mix. It makes the listener feel like they have been transported to a certain environment meant, the music is being performed. This should not sway you away from using multiple reverbs if your intention is to create a certain vibe or effect. A lot of producers use two reverbs for their mixing session, a shorter one to add body and depth, and a longer one to add some wetness to an otherwise dry sound. Always visualize the space the listener would feel they are in. If we are applying Reverb to a snare drum then we have to think would it should be like it's being played in a church or perhaps a warehouse or any other space. This pattern of thinking will help us make better decisions during our mix.

4. Creating Stereo Width with Reverb

We can use reverbs to enhance the stereo field of a mix. A common technique is to keep the main sound in the center while the reverb is panned back and forth by automation. This can be used to create some stereo detail in our mix to make sounds stand out from the rest. Another way reverb panning can be helpful is in those situations where there is panned sound but our reverb is centered, thus not giving a sense of space to our main sound. We can pan our reverb in this case to the position of our main sound so that we can reinforce the panning. We can also create our own wide stereo Reverb by sending a signal into two return tracks with similar-sounding reverbs and panning one hard right and hard left. The main sound will remain in the center creating a pleasant ambiance.

5. Automating Reverb Parameters

Most often producers dial in their desired reverb setting and leave them static throughout the mix. This can lead to a boring mix. To elevate our mixes it is important to obsess over the details. A common pitfall of using longer delays is sometimes one phrase will have its reverb tail overlapping on the next phase in the performance resulting in dissonance. This can also happen when we are transition from one section of a song to another, while the reverb tail from the preceding section continues to sustain. An easy fix is to automate our dry and wet settings so we can create clearer transitions between musical phrases and song sections. You can also automate your reverb to create swells and impacts in your mix. Always use your ears to see where the reverb tail is creating problems and address them immediately.

6. Less is More

Overuse of reverbs can notoriously lead to muddy mixes. The presets or samples we use often have reverb built into the sound from the plugin itself. It is useful to think about whether we require that reverb if we are going to create our own spatial location with our own reverb settings anyways. There is no creativity in drowning the details of performance with the overuse of reverb. On a lot of occasions, it is more beneficial to be conservative with our reverb to avoid any undesirable fogginess. If we let a set reverb tail color every section of our mix, then chances are it will not sound as good in certain sections as it does in other sections.

7. Having our Reverb Decay Time Synced With the Project BPM

It is important to remember that reverb is a function of space. So the size of your space or environment determines the decay time of your reverb. The decay time of a small room reverb will be considerably shorter than that of a chamber reverb. To make our mixes sound tighter, we like to have our reverb decay time match the BPM of the song. This lets us dial in the exact number of note duration we want our reverb tail to sustain. You can use a Reverb and Delay Time Calculator on the internet to calculate what decay time setting will be ideal for your project tempo. You will simply have to enter your project BPM and let the calculator do the work. There is also a small hack for calculating the time manually. If we divide the value 60,000 by our project BPM, then it will give us the decay time for 1/4 note duration in that BPM. So now we can manipulate this number depending on what kind of ambiance we want. If we want the decay to sustain a full bar then multiply your result by four. If we take 100 BPM as an example, then 600ms (60000/100) will be the decay time for a 1/4 note in 100 BPM. Now if we want our tail to last a full bar in 100BPM, then our timing will be 2.4 seconds (600 x 4 = 2400ms = 2.4s). Now we have a clear idea as to how long our reverb will sustain in the mix.

Basslines can be tricky for beginners to program. The bass plays a significant role in our mix because it provides energy and thickness to the track. Any track would sound thin and weak if bass frequencies are lowered beyond a point in a mix. In this article, we will explore a few techniques that can help us to come up with catchy basslines for our songs.

Choosing the right notes can be confusing for our bass sounds. Everything becomes much easier if we have a chord progression in mind. If you have your chords layed out on a piano roll, then the bottom note for each chord can be a good starting point for our bassline. You can try changing the bass notes to add a different colour to the chords playing on top. It is not necessary that you stick to only the root notes.

For our project, we will be using the chords Em, Am, Esus2, Bmin; as you can see in the image above. We will use the bottom notes of these chords to create our bassline. Do not forget to try out some different combinations. You can also look at the image below to analyse the bassline we have created. Our Chord progression is in Em, so feel free to look up what notes you can try.

Glides can take your bassline from boring to lively in seconds. Look for a glide or portamento option in your bass synth. Once you activate it, adjust the glide time to your liking. Do not go overboard with the glide time as it can sound out of tune. We will be setting it around 120ms. To create glides, make sure your notes overlap, so the first note can slide up/down to the next.

Both the kick and the bass reside in low frequencies. This often causes clashes between the two sounds as they compete with each other for space in the mix. Sample selection and instrumentation is key here. If we select a kick and bass combo that sounds bad, then chances are even with a lot of EQing it won't end up sounding that good. So give yourself a strong start, choose a preset or a sample that sits well with each other even without any processing. This will ensure that they both can push through the mix without a lot of effort.

Another step to make our bassline work even better with the kick is using a sidechain compressor on the bass with the sidechain input is assigned to the kick. This reduces any type of masking issues when our bass and kick are triggered at the same time. Even with our bass having a higher fundamental from the kick, the attack of the kick is often overshadowed. Provided that our bass has been side chained to our kick, these problems can be prevented.

Human beings do not appreciate a completely robotic sound. Having our bassline adhere to the grid, takes away from its humanisation. If you are playing your bass part on a midi keyboard remember not to quantise the whole performance. Use your ears and only quantise those parts that require it. You can also play around with your quantisation settings so that the quantise percentage is reduced, as a result, the sound will be not be fully locked in with our DAW’s grid. If you are programming your bassline like we did here, you can use something like the groove pool feature in Ableton to inject a human feeling to your bass parts. Other wise, you can manually offset the notes as well if you want to be surgically precise. In that case you can turn your grid off.

All DAWs come with their stock distortion/saturation audio effects. You can also find some free plugins on the internet that will help you. This step is important because it adds harmonics to our initial bass sound. Usually a bass sound as it is would be dominant in the lower frequencies. When played together with the rest of the track, these bass sounds tend to get lost. We have to listen quite attentively to hear them. In certain cases they become completely inaudible among all the harmonic richness in our mid and high frequencies. Adding some mids and high mids with a saturation plugin at this juncture can make our bass sound more present in the mix.

We are adding an overdrive and a saturator on our bass channel. You might be confused on whether to insert these effects pre or post EQ. Always remember to use your ears and listen to what sounds best, go with that. You are not also restricted to one EQ, you can use a pre and post EQ if you deem fit. For our project, we will use our overdrive and saturator pre-EQ, since these effects are creating some unpleasant low frequency harmonics which we are removing with our EQ.

Once you have the basic sound of your bass ready, remember to add some multi band processing to add depth to your mix. Multiband means we will split up our bass into two or more different frequency bands and process them independently of each other. This is useful when you want to add a modulation effect on your bass. Applying a modulation effect on the whole channel can mess up our low frequency response. We rather apply our modulation effect to mids and high mids, so that our low end is intact. Multiband processing on the bass also opens up our option for stereo imaging on the higher bass frequencies which can add a lot of presence to our bass.

We are not adding any processing on our lows other than to isolate them from the mids and high-mids. You can also make this layer mono if it makes the bass sound better.

We are then splitting the mids from 188Hz to 20KHz in High 1 chain, where we have added a flanger to create some movement in our bass sound.

Equalizers are among the most commonly used plugins in mixing and mastering tasks. Equalizers can be used for tone shaping, controlling problem areas in the frequency spectrum and enhancing certain frequencies to add presence. Equalizers have different filters that can attenuate or boost different parts of the frequency spectrum. In this article, we are going to take a look at the different types of Equalizers used in music production.

A parametric EQ contains various filter types. Let us get accustomed to them first:

a. Low Cut Filter (Highpass)

f. Peaking Filter

All DAWs, no matter how basic, implement some form of automation. Automation means having a computer take control of a parameter within a DAW and change it's value over a period of time set by the user. Automation can refer to the turning of a knob, the sliding of a fader and the toggling of switches within our audio workstation. To carry out any form of Automation the user draws automation curves in the DAW timeline (commonly in an automation lane) which defines the movement of the selected parameter for a certain duration defined by the user. In this article we will explore some creative automation tricks and tips that will improve your mixes.

1. Creating Variations For Programmed Instruments

There are countless advantages of using MIDI, but one of the areas where this technology fails to deliver is in the realm of humanization. A programmed instrument most likely would have all notes playing in the same velocity, with the same articulation. A real instrument played by a person would naturally have a lot of variations in dynamics and articulations. The same can be done for MIDI instruments but the process often takes a lot of time and patience. Automations can be a great tool to create these variations quickly and efficiently. Automating the volume of a hi hat for example can help make it sound more natural, letting some hits be louder than others, similar to accents performed by a drummer. The pitch can also be automated to simulate articulations like vibrato and pitch bends. The pitch can also be automated in cents for instruments like drums to simulate the drum stick striking different regions of the drum skin. These techniques can add a lot of expression and dynamics to robotic MIDI sections.

4. Automating Reverb And Delay   

Reverb and delay are two of thew most common audio effects used while mixing. But, overusing them can lead to loss of clarity. A bit of automation can clean up these problems with ease. Using a separate bus for the Reverb, we can automate the send level of the channel where the reverb is required. This gives us the option to manually reduce the send level at the beginning of a signal, therefore bypassing any leftover reverb tail from the previous signal in the channel. This is very common in vocals where the sends can be raised at the end of phrase to fill silences or gaps in the performances, similarly we can also bring the reverb send level down for a busier section of the performance where more clarity is required. Similar techniques are used for delays as well known as "delay throws", where a delay in added to a bus with a quarter note or eighth note setting. The delay send can be raised for particular words and phrases which would ring out in the mix for a longer time. This is a great way to fill empty spaces in a performance, add some ear candy to the mix and also hold the audience attention during the quieter sections of a track. When using reverbs and delays in this way it is common to have the timing synced to the project tempo.

Any live performance will have lots of tempo variations. It is only natural for musicians to play quieter sections of a song at a slower tempo, in relation to the the louder parts of the song that tend to increase in tempo as the volume level increases. This change in tempo will be missing for songs composed within a DAW for obvious reasons. Most DAWs give their user the ability to automate project tempo. This feature is useful to make a studio recording feel more like a live performance. The tempo can be lowered during the intro and outro sections while during the choruses the tempo can be increased to give the feeling of a rise in intensity. It is recommended that the tempo automations are gradual and have a diminished range. Drastic tempo changes are only used if that is the intended effect. In case of a live performance the change in tempo is a natural consequence of the situation, hence it is not intentional. Keeping the tempo changes mild will emulate this phenomenon much better in the context of a mix.

Lo-Fi is a type of music where imperfections are introduced into the audio signal deliberately to achieve texture or character. Lo-Fi is an abbreviation for Low Fidelity, so music producers often employ plugins that artificially degrade the audio to give their sound a vinyl quality. In this article we will explore 6 easy steps to compose a lo-fi hip hop beat.

Step 1: Creating the right Chord Progression

Lofi chords are a huge part of their sonic quality. Most loft producers sample old jazz and soul records to create a nostalgic feeling. We will be creating our own progression from scratch and then we will sample ourselves. Lofi hiphop can be anywhere from from 70-100 BPM, sometimes even slower than that. The BPM for our project will be 75 BPM. For sound selection, try to remember what type of instruments old jazz and soul records would use. Using those sounds to create our sample will help us create a more old timey vibe.

Look at the chords that we have drawn in the image above. We are using a rhoads preset to create these chords. You can use an acoustic guitar or any other instrument but the way you create your chords will change according to that instrument. Here we are using the chords Em7 - Am7 - CM7 - GM7 for the first four bars, in the second four bar cycle, we are substituting Em7 with Emadd9. You can experiment with the added notes on these chords, also use vinyl or modulation fx on the channel to make things sound more aged.

We are using the phaser-flanger device of ableton, as shown in the picture above, to modulate our Rhoads sound.

Step 2: Turning Your Chord Progression Into a Sample

Once you are happy with how your chords are sounding, freeze and flatten them to convert into audio. There are a few ways we can sample this. You can do manual edits in your Daw to create MPC like chops.

In the image above, you can see that we have made quite a few edits to our original sample after freezing and flattening. Have your metronome on for this section as it will help you to flesh out interesting patterns. We are also applying crossfades at clip edges to prevent any clicks and pops. Alternatively, you can add your freeze and flattened sample into a simpler and use the slicing mode to create patterns using midi.

In the image above, we have added our sample into a slicer and then turned on Slicing Mode. You can play around with the sensitivity and slice by settings for different sets of chops. You can now program you sampled melody using midi.

These are the notes we drew in with our piano roll for the simpler. We are going to use this as a variation on the main melody.

Step 3: Drums that sound old

The tone of your drum samples play a huge role in lofi hiphop. The drum programming itself is fairly simple. Go for drum sounds with some audible background noise, You can use some processing to lessen the high frequency response of your drum sounds. We also like to add distortion to our drums to make them sound more crunchy. Once you have your drum sounds selected you can arrange them directly on the track according to our grid, but we will use a drum rack. We are using a kick, snare and hit for our beat.

This is the pattern we have created, shown in the image above. Do not forget to vary the velocities of your hits as required. You can also use some saturation on the drums to fatten them up and add some more character to the sound. You can also experiment with different grooves on your drums, which will offset our midi from the grid, giving the beat more human touch.

Bassline in this genre of music is very different from one song to another. Tonally the bass sounds mellow and has much rhythmic variation built into it. Select a preset that has a solid low end with some subtle harmonies in the mids. For the notes in your bassline, you can follow the root notes of the chord, and then develop it further from there. We like to use a lot of octaves and melodic runs to keep things interesting.

As you can see, we have added our bass notes along with some melodic and rhythmic variations. Do not forget to add some processing to your bass if it is too quiet in the mix even when the volume is unchanged. We are using a saturator on our bass channel with the settings shown in the image below.

Step 5: Adding Fx and Foley

Textures are a major part of Lofi sound. The signature vinyl crackle is present on every track to give the listener the perception, that the song is being played from a vinyl record player. We are using a little bit of vinyl distortion on our main sample to simulate the vinyl crackle (image below).

You can also layer your sounds with foley to create more texture along with the vinyl crackle.

As you can see in the image above, the drums that have been programmed with midi is being layered with different foley samples to add depth and character to our drums. Vocal chops and one-shots also spice up your beat in a major way, making it more memorable for the listener. You can sprinkle in some more details with risers and down lifters for transition sections.

As you can see in the image above we added an impact sample and a white noise riser sample for our project. The impacts are placed at the beginning of every 8 bars, while the risers are placed at the 7th bar and 15th bar with varied lengths.

Mixing a lofi beat is fairly easy. Make sure to balance your faders first and then you can experiment with the pan pot. As long as your sound is well balanced in terms of levels and stereo image, you are halfway there. Kicks and Snares need to be able to punch through the mix. Keep the drums as dynamic as possible. Your bass would also be mixed rather loud in the mix. Other instruments and synths can be balanced according to your taste. EQ out any undesirable low frequencies to make space for your bass sound. Getting rid of the lows in your hiatus, cymbals, fx and instruments, will also reduce muddiness of the overall mix. Sidechain compression is also used in this genre often as an aesthetic tool rather than a tool for mixing. You can sidechain various instruments to your kick and exaggerate the sidechain effect to emphasise on the lofi character of your track.

As you can see in the two images provided above, the side chain settings on my melody sidechain and bass sidechain are different. The melody sidechain has more exaggerated and audible sidechain compression happening to create movement in the sound, while the bass side chain is much more focused on attenuating our bass sound whenever the kick strikes without being necessarily heard. You can also experiment with some subtle saturation or soft clipping on you master buss to further drive in that lofi feel of your track.

If you want to follow along with our Ableton project file, then click on the link provided below to download the .alp file:

Crypto Cipher Academy_Lofi Beat Tutorial (Ableton Project Download)