Using Effects During Mixing

Using effects can make or break your mix. Mixing makes a simple recording into a major production, but over processing can spoil the end results. I’m going to cover the commonly used effects during a mixdown of a song. We are going to start with the most important tool in the studio, the reverb.

Reverb creates the illusion of space and makes vocals sound more musical helping them to sit with the mix, but too much can make them sound distant and cause sibilance. Hardware is still the best and if you are using plug-in don’t go for low quality reverbs especially when applied to vocals.

Avoid applying it on bass instruments, because it will make your mix muddy on the low end. If you need to add some space to your kick use a short ambience or a gated reverb. Use hall reverb to keep a sound moving in a mix, for drums apply a room reverb with a low cut and apply a spring reverb for vocals, to keep other instruments at the back of a mix use a short reverb.

Chorus effects are great for creating space and movement but can push a sound back in a mix. It works really well with backing vocal harmonies or an acoustic or an electric guitar. It’s a great ear candy effect and can double up sound.
Distortion is mostly used for electric guitars. Add distortion effects to the bass or a synth sound to give it warmth, and it fattens the sound also giving it quality. You can also get tape sound with it and another way to get the old tape sound is to add a bit-crusher but be careful with that try adding at least 12% to 15% When using it on the master channel.

For delays use stereo delays with one side set at a quarter note timing and the other with eighth note timing, but you can get the same results by using two delays with one panned hard right and one panned hard left this is called cross-delay and it sounds expensive. A sync delay is perfect to match the delay with the tempo of the song.

Phaser and Flanger sounds great when used as send Fx, and introduce them in certain parts of an arrangement, this can also bring drama to your song, it’s an old music production trick but rarely used this days and it can be an excellent ear candy.

Vocals benefit a lot when processed. Create different tracks for different effects and different panning, avoid using multiple effects on one vocal track and always leave one dry version of the accapela. Use a high-pass filter for backing vocals and boost the high frequencies about 5db.

For a bad performance use pitch-correction effects such as the legendary auto-tune, but just a subtle percentage will work, not 100% like T-Pain LOL!!!Use a de-esser to remove sibilance from vocals, the hiss sound, over compression can also cause sibilance.