The Rough Balance

Faders, panning, and sends

Most of your mix quality comes from balance, not plugins.

A mix is decisions, not effects

  • Every fader move answers one question
  • What should the listener pay attention to right now?
  • EQ, compression, delay, reverb can’t answer it
  • They only support an answer the faders already made
  • Wrong balance + plugins = a louder, brighter wrong balance

The static mix

A rough draft made with only three tools:

  1. The fader
  2. The pan knob
  3. A high-pass filter

No EQ moves, no compression, no effects. Yet.

Step 1: rank your tracks

Order of importance to the listener, not track order:

  • Lead vocal
  • Drums (kick and snare first)
  • Bass
  • Chord instruments (guitars, keys)
  • Everything else: doubles, percussion, ear candy

Step 2: build up from silence

  • Pull every fader to -inf dB
  • Loop a full-sounding section (a chorus, not the intro)
  • Bring up track #1, peaking around -6 dB on the master
  • Add track #2 where it sounds right against #1
  • Continue down your list, one track at a time

Headroom

If the master meter creeps toward 0 dB:

turn the tracks down, not the master.

The space you leave is headroom, and every plugin you add later will need it.

Trap 1: fader creep

  • Something feels buried, so you turn it up
  • Now something else feels buried, so you turn that up
  • Twenty minutes later: every fader higher, master clipping
  • And the balance is exactly as bad as when you started
  • The rule: to make something louder, turn other things down

Trap 2: louder always sounds better

  • Your ears judge louder as better, every time
  • More volume = fuller bass and treble (equal loudness, week 1)
  • Pick a comfortable monitor volume and leave it alone
  • Distrust any improvement made by turning something up

Pan with a plan: the center

The stereo field is real estate. The middle is reserved:

  • Kick, snare, bass, lead vocal stay center
  • The power of the song lives in the middle
  • Anything with heavy low end stays in the middle

Pan with a plan: the sides

  • Hard left and right: matched pairs
  • Two rhythm guitars, doubled vocals, drum overheads
  • Splitting a pair wide = instant width for free
  • In between: everything else finds an off-center home
  • Keep the two sides roughly balanced

Sends vs. inserts

An insert is a guitar pedal.

The whole signal goes through and comes out changed.

EQ and compression live here.

A send makes a copy

  • The copy is mailed to another track holding the effect
  • The original stays dry; the copy comes back wet
  • You blend the two
  • Reverb and delay live here

Why bother with the copy?

  • One space, many instruments — send snare, guitars, and vocal to the same reverb and they share a room
  • One plugin instead of ten — reverbs are CPU-hungry
  • Separate control — send level sets how much goes in; the effect track’s fader sets how loud the space is

Making a send in Reaper

  • Create a track named for the effect
  • Set its plugin fully wet: wet 0 dB, dry -inf (like the reverb lesson)
  • Drag from the source track’s Route button onto the effect track
  • The send level lives in that routing window

Check against a reference

A/B your balance against a real mix.

Match the volume first.

The louder one always sounds better.

Saved for Audio Production II

DAD 322 spends a semester on the rest:

  • Monitoring, rooms, and building a reference-mix library
  • Compression and EQ used to hold a balance in place
  • Automation: a balance that changes with the song
  • Master bus processing and mastering

Lab: rough balance in 20 minutes

Bluegrass multitrack from the EQ lesson . Faders and pans only.

  • Rank the five tracks; choose your center
  • All faders to -inf, loop a busy section
  • Build in ranked order, peak around -6 dB
  • Pan: what stays center? which pair splits?
  • Toggle mono and listen

Next: Project 3

The first thing you’ll do to the Angels in Amplifiers multitrack is exactly what you just practiced.

Project 3: In-class mixing assignment

Resources