5 Tips for Mixing Live Band Recordings

1. Preparation, preparation, preparation

So, you’ve got your raw multitracked live recording in situ on a stack of tracks in the arrange page of your DAW, but before you even begin to think about mixing it, there’s some preparatory ground work to be done. First, get your various tracks and the audio regions thereon clearly named, grouped if necessary (the separate components of the drum kit; amplified and DI guitar, etc), and coloured for ease of identification. Then, trim each region down to lose any dead air at the start and end, and consider cutting out any long periods of silence in the interest of background noise reduction – or not, as we’ll come to later. Finally, load a compressor and parametric EQ plugin onto every channel in the project if your template doesn’t include them already, so that you have said fundamental mixing essentials at your fingertips from the word go.

2. Focus on the drums

By and large, the most technically challenging aspect of any live band mix is the drum kit, calling for at least a moderate degree of expertise and experience to coax a satisfactorily ‘professional’ sound out of. However, well-done drums serve as the solid foundation on which the rest of the band sits, and can greatly elevate the wow factor of the whole mix, so it really pays to spend as much time and effort on them as required to get a suitably fulsome, balanced sound.

Potential snags to listen out for when mixing drums include muddying of the low end due to the kick drum and the bass guitar clashing (easily resolved with sidechain ducking compression), levelling the snare drum too high, excessive cymbal brightness and hi-hat sibilance (insert a de-esser), and phase problems – speaking of which…

3. Look out for and correct phase issues

The bane of any recording that features multiple microphones capturing the same source instrument, out-of-phase signals can make a mix, or elements within it, sound hollow, thin and downright odd. When the peaks in the waveform recorded by your top snare drum mic coincide with the troughs in the recording from the bottom mic, for example, the two cancel each other out to a greater or lesser extent, weakening the snare sound as a whole. To check the mix for phase issues, simply click the phase invert button on any track that shares a common instrument with any other track – drum spot mics and overheads, guitar amps and DIs, etc – and if the sound suddenly improves in terms of weight and presence, you’ve discovered (and corrected) an out-of-phase signal. Alternatively, having tracked down an out-of-phase track pairing, you can nudge either audio part left or right to match up the peaks, or fire up Sound Radix Auto-Align to have the correction done for you automatically.

4. Take control of mic bleed (if necessary)

Hopefully, whoever recorded your live band performance will have taken all necessary measures to minimise the amount by which the sound from each instrument incidentally bleeds into any other instruments’ mics; but even in the most optimum scenario, there will be some amount of leakage to contend with at the mixing stage. If it’s minimal and unobtrusive, you may not need to do much if anything to get it under control, and it might actually add to the character and liveliness of the mix (see below). If, on the other hand, the intrusion of, say, an unintended guitar impedes your ability to level, pan or process the vocal track effectively, or your drum channels are wholly unmanageable because of bleed, get busy with gate/expander and/or EQ plugins to reduce or remove it, and perhaps take a look at a dedicated noise removal solution such as Waves Clarity Vx or Acon Digital DeBleed:Drums.

5. Keep things simple to maintain energy and vibe

It’s often said that if the source recordings are up to scratch, crafting a great band mix should involve little more than channel levelling, gentle compression and a touch of EQ. While that’s a bit of a simplification in the majority of cases, of course, it is certainly fair to say that if your audio parts don’t specifically need ‘repairing’, less is indeed invariably more, and the single-minded pursuit of a perfectly polished sound can take you down all sorts of engineering avenues that risk doing more harm than good to the overall aesthetic of the end product. Wading in with heavy-handed gating, de-reverbing, auto-tuning and other destructive processes in the interest of noise reduction, bleed elimination, pitch correction, and maximising general cleanliness and accuracy, can result in a flat, overly dry mix, as those seemingly irksome sonic characteristics turn out to in fact be contributing to the desirable live energy and texture of the original performance.
 
Ultimately, the visceral power and edginess of a band playing together in a room is a wondrous thing that should be preserved in the mix at all costs, even if it means erring on the side of ‘messy’ when dialling in effects. So move fast, don’t overthink, only fix things that actually need fixing (ie, really obvious hum and noise), exercise caution and judgment when tweaking plugin settings, and always stay true to the intended spirit of the song.