FXpansion BFD Premium Acoustic Drum Module Mixing with BFD User Manual
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Mixing with BFD
Get a feel for your monitoring environment. Listen to music you know well to get a
reference point. However, always remember that commercial recordings are usually
mastered with heavy brick-wall limiters and other mastering tools to make them ‘louder’.
Even so, they will give you a decent reference for how to make different instruments sit
together.
Make sure that your monitors are placed optimally, ideally isolated on good speaker
stands filled with sand or lead-shot. If you don’t pay attention to this, it’s very common
to get a skewed perception of the frequency spectrum, with certain frequencies creating
resonances within furniture, floor and walls.
It’s not recommended to have a ‘finalizer’ or ‘maximizer’ type compressor-limiter plugin on
your master output, as you can quickly lose perspective when mixing - it will be especially
hard to tell what other dynamics processes are doing when the final output is being
compressed as well. It might be beneficial, however, towards the end of the mix process
when you might want to occasionally compare your mix against a loudly mastered
commercial recording. Limiters also tend to cause square-wave distortion, which can be
horribly fatiguing to listen to.
Alternative reference speakers and listening environments are invaluable. Some
alternative monitors, cheap hi-fi speakers or even ‘multimedia’ PC speakers are useful,
and try and check your mix in the car stereo or wherever else you can think of.
Take regular breaks!!!!!!!! The ears get tired quickly - you need to rest them. Leave your
studio for a while, go for a short walk... anything but listen to more music.
Don’t mix on headphones. While they are good for checking for clicks, crackles, clips
or distortions, they are not very good at all at allowing us to perceive the relative levels
of sounds, and they do not have a flat frequency response. It’s also impossible to ‘feel’
the music through your body. This makes it especially difficult when dealing with low
frequencies.
The environment in which you write is not necessarily good for mixing. If you have to,
bounce your tracks down as audio, without any EQ, dynamics or effects, and take them to
a more suitable studio to mix!