Mixdown 63
MD4—Owner’s Manual
Mixdown
This section provides tips and techniques for achieving the perfect MD4 mix.
•Balance levels—you should already have some idea of how you want your mix to sound.
This will, obviously, depend on the application and the instruments being mixed. Start with
all faders positioned at the 7–8 mark. This is an optimum setting with regard to mixer per-
formance and leaves you with some headroom to increase levels later. If one particular
instrument is too quiet, rather than increasing its level it may better to try reducing the lev-
els of some of the other instruments. If you keep raising faders bit-by-bit, you’ll soon end up
with some faders set at maximum and no room for further adjustment. Vocal and instru-
ment levels should be balanced to create an agreeable sound mix. Nothing too loud, nothing
too quiet. What needs to be heard (i.e., vocals, solo instruments) can be, and backing
instruments are where they belong—in the background.
•Pan the sounds—pan allows you to position sounds from left to right in the stereo field.
This is often used to provide space for individual instruments. Bass instruments and lead
vocals are usually panned around center. Rhythm guitar maybe panned to the left and lead
guitar or piano, to the right.
•Balance tonal content—you can use EQ to filter out any unwanted hiss, hum, or fre-
quency abnormalities in a sound. Instruments with overlapping frequencies often cause
peaks at certain points in the audio spectrum when mixed. Using the EQ you can cut back
some of these overlapping frequencies. This will improve the separation between instru-
ments and provide a more tonally balanced mix. The overall sound should be tonally bal-
anced so that the low, mid, and high bands of the audio spectrum contain an equal amount
of sound energy. Too much bass or treble leads to listening fatigue. With EQ, it is often bet-
ter to cut than boost.
•Individual track monitor—when several instruments are mixed, it can be difficult to
make individual judgements about them. By temporarily setting the input selector switches
on other input channels to MIC/LINE, you can monitor an individual track. If you can hear
noise or other unwanted sounds, use this technique to listen to each track in isolation and
correct as necessary.
•Apply effects—vocal and percussion sounds always benefit from the addition of a little
reverb. Reverb adds that professional sparkle that you hear on most modern recordings. If
you don’t yet have an effects processor, a reverb unit is probably the most useful type of
effects processor to start with. MD4 has stereo AUX RETURNs, so a reverb unit with stereo
outputs works best.