Are YOU Making This Crucial Ambient Mixing Mistake?
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- Опубліковано 8 чер 2024
- In my experience, the biggest issue ambient artists have when mixing are related to phase. It's a topic I knew intuitively, but have had difficulty explaining, so I went deep on research this week to enable me to teach it to you! I'm still wrapping my head around the technical aspects, so please excuse me if I've made any mistakes in my explanation, but hopefully this goes some way to demystifying for you how phase cancellation happens, and the ways to troubleshoot it in your mixes. Nailing good phase will make it MUCH easier to get a good stereo image, and less mushy-sounding mixes!
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00:00 Intro
00:33 What is phase cancellation?
03:22 Why is phase cancellation so bad for ambient?
04:42 How do we fix bad phase?
10:23 Outro
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More free resources on producing and releasing experimental music:
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Good video, I was messing with haas delay for a certain sound within an ambience track i've been making, and I had to be real careful to make sure it sounded good in mono, not just because it might scoop out frequencies I wanted, but it also leaves this nasty comb filter sound that I really don't like. Pitching one of the signal copies differently seems to help with phase cancellation but then it sounds like a chorus which I like more but is still inappropriate in many cases.
I guess, intuitively, if you delayed a frequency by a time equal to half of it's cycle (or the time it takes for it to return to zero crossing for a sine wave), then that would result in the phases cancelling, and you'd want less than 1/4th (or maybe more than 3/4th as well) for the phases to be agreeing more with each other than disagreeing.
I might try looking at my unison or stereo wideners or any situation with those kinds of delays in a numerical lense to get a real visceral sense of what it's doing to the phases of all the different frequencies. That retro color plugin seemed to be a red flag as it's simply labeled "stereo" but doesn't seem to have much numerical feedback as to what it's doing, though I could be wrong since I don't use it. Either way, I like my plugins to be as geeky as possible (without being a headache)
Thanks! As I understand it, plugins like Ozone Imager (particularly its "stereoizer") are more effective than basic Haas delay at because it accounts for phase rotation, but even it has limits. Yeah as much as I love Retro Colour, it's not particularly helpful about telling you what it's doing to the sound 😅
Thank you really much for this information! Just today I had a question about phase cancellation because of my project 😮
I hope this helped! This is such a deep topic, I feel like I'm just scraping the surface
had this issue with a client just this last week. they sent it to me, saying they wanted it wider and more consuming, that they had experimented with stereo imagers but just weren't getting what they were after. they didn't realize they were halfway to being 100% sides. i think this comes back to the idea that there needs to be mono or at least "narrower" sounds in the mix along with wide-to-the-limit sounds. mono signals in super wide ambient music sound so good to me. i love hearing a warbling cassette tape in mono but panned off the center 5 or 10% buried down in the mix while these beautiful pads and reverby guitars are going. it's like looking at a huge landscape and then looking down and seeing a single worm. or something. lol
Exactly! Took me ages to realise that width is all about the interplay between the centre and sides of the stereo image - you need that centre to enable that lizard brain to compare the things in the sides to. I learned LCR panning when I studied mixing, but because I was learning in the context of rock music I felt it like it didn't apply to ambient (as I imagine a lot of my fellow artists assume). Only recently realised how wrong I was 😋
Could you make a video about how to fix phase issues with EQ m/s?
Definitely!
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Respect for the attempt and all, but ppl pls mix with your ears and not your eyes. Yes it can help, but you can detect phase issues with critical listening.
Agreed! I made this video out of a concern that some artists may not actually know what phase issues sound like, because I have encountered quite a few ambient tracks in my time that are almost entirely sides, with no centre. My hope was that by using their eyes to start with, they can help train themselves to hear what good phase sounds like.
@@holosuitemastering indeed. In an attempt to make the track as “wide as possible” and add movement to the droning elements, people indeed make mistake of missing the centre, hard panning and when you sum to mono you get a chuck of dirt. This is one of the traps of ambient/evolving music sound design as there is a fine line between evolving drones, be it pure noise with a filter on top, and the absolute blob of layers threw on top of each other masking and beating the hell out of each other. Also as you said, phase issues might creep in and be harder to detect as ambient music doesn’t have super dynamic repetitive elements that usually stand out if not in phase (example - top and bottom mic of the snare drum not phase aligned). So, the problem often is not understanding that less is more when it comes to ambient, and that you better design one killer drone that stands out dynamically and in frequency spectrum vs piles of random preset layers. And then, we have the mid/side issue with lots of people’s mixes, since no one thought them to watch out for it. On another hand, there is also tons of comments that make MS into mystery and science, and people start being restrictive. Again, yeah, fine, use Izotope to see you centre but listen to what you are producing because there is no manual. Anything can work and everything can clash:) cheers mate
Beautifully put! Eventually I will make a video about "mixing with your mind", ie planning and designing your sounds/recording so that they will slot together and require minimal mixing, which will cover the points you've noted there. Although definitely in the experimental sphere this is something that takes time and experience more than anything, because our music is so idiosyncratic and unique. But it's definitely the most important way to improve a mix!