Managing Sub Bass

http://audio.tutsplus.com/tutorials/mixing-mastering/how-to-manage-process-sub-bass-frequencies/

Building Triads

Building Triads Building Triads by Counting Half Steps

Major = Root position + 4 half steps + 3 half steps (7 half steps above root)

Minor = Root position + 3 half steps + 4 half steps (7 half steps above root)
Augmented = Root position + 4 half steps + 4 half steps (8 half steps above root) 
Diminished = Root position + 3 half steps + 3 half-steps (6 half steps above root)

Building Triads with Major Scale Degrees

Major = 1, 3, 5
Minor = 1, flat 3, 5
Augmented = 1, 3, sharp 5
Diminished = 1, flat 3, flat 5

Frequencies

Frequency asked questions...

Low Bass: anything less than 50Hz

This range is often known as the sub bass and is most commonly taken up by the lowest part of the kick drum and bass guitar, although at these frequencies it's almost impossible to determine any pitch. Sub bass is one of the reasons why 12" vinyl became available: low frequencies require wider grooves than high frequencies - without rolling off everything below 50Hz you couldn't fit a full track onto a 7" vinyl record. However we do NOT recommend applying any form of boost around this area without the use of very high quality studio monitors (not home monitors - there is a vast difference between home nearfield and studio farfield monitors costing anywhere between £5,000 and £20,000). Boosting blindly in this area without a valid reference point can and will permanently damage most speakers, even PA systems. You have been warned!

Bass: 50-250Hz 

This is the range you're adjusting when applying the bass boost on most home stereos, although most bass signals in modern music tracks lie around the 90-200Hz area with a small boost in the upper ranges to add some presence or clarity. 

Muddiness/irritational area: 200-800Hz 

The main culprit area for muddy sounding mixes, hence the term 'irritational area'. Most frequencies around here can cause psycho-acoustic problems: if too many sounds in a mix are dominating this area, a track can quickly become annoying, resulting in a rush to finish mixing it as you get bored or irritated by the sound of it.

Mid-range: 800-6kHz 

Human hearing is extremely sensitive at these frequencies, and even a minute boost around here will result in a huge change in the sound - almost the same as if you boosted around 10db at any other range. This is because our voices are centred in this area, so it's the frequency range we hear more than any other. Most telephones work at 3kHz, because at this frequency speech is most intelligible. This frequency also covers TV stations, radio, and electric power tools. If you have to apply any boosting in this area, be very cautious, especially on vocals. We're particularly sensitive to how the human voice sounds and its frequency coverage.

High Range: 6-8kHz 

This is the range you adjust when applying the treble boost on your home stereo. This area is slightly boosted to make sounds artificially brighter (although this artificial boost is what we now call 'lifelike') when mastering a track before burning it to CD.

Hi-High Range: 8-20kHz 

This area is taken up by the higher frequencies of cymbals and hi-hats, but boosting around this range, particularly around 12kHz can make a recording sound more high quality than it actually is, and it's a technique commonly used by the recording industry to fool people into thinking that certain CDs are more hi-fidelity than they'd otherwise sound. However, boosting in this area also requires a lot of care - it can easily pronounce any background hiss, and using too much will result in a mix becoming irritating.

EQ Tables

EQ Tables

__________

50Hz

1. Increase to add more fullness to lowest frequency instruments like foot, toms, and the bass.
2. Reduce to decrease the "boom" of the bass and will increase overtones and the recognition of bass line in the mix. This is most often used on bass lines in Rap and R&B. 
__________

100Hz

Increase to add a harder bass sound to lowest frequency instruments. 
Increase to add fullness to guitars, snare. 
Increase to add warmth to piano and horns. 
Reduce to remove boom on guitars & increase clarity. 
__________

200Hz 

1. Increase to add fullness to vocals. 
2. Increase to add fullness to snare and guitar (harder sound). 
3. Reduce to decrease muddiness of vocals or mid-range instruments. 
4. Reduce to decrease gong sound of cymbals. 
__________

400Hz 

1. Increase to add clarity to bass lines especially when speakers are at low volume. 
2. Reduce to decrease "cardboard" sound of lower drums (foot and toms). 
3. Reduce to decrease ambiance on cymbals. 
__________

800Hz 

1. Increase for clarity and "punch" of bass. 
2. Reduce to remove "cheap" sound of guitars 
__________

1.5KHz 

1. Increase for "clarity" and "pluck" of bass.
2. Reduce to remove dullness of guitars. 
__________

3KHz 

1. Increase for more "pluck" of bass. 
2. Increase for more attack of electric / acoustic guitar. 
3. Increase for more attack on low piano parts. 
4. Increase for more clarity / hardness on voice. 
5. Reduce to increase breathy, soft sound on background vocals. 
6. Reduce to disguise out-of-tune vocals / guitars
__________

5KHz

1. Increase for vocal presence. 
2. Increase low frequency drum attack (foot/toms). 
3. Increase for more "finger sound" on bass. 
4. Increase attack of piano, acoustic guitar and brightness on guitars. 
5. Reduce to make background parts more distant. 
6. Reduce to soften "thin" guitar.
__________ 

7KHz 

1. Increase to add attack on low frequency drums (more metallic sound). 
2. Increase to add attack to percussion instruments. 
3. Increase on dull singer. 
4. Increase for more "finger sound" on acoustic bass. 
5. Reduce to decrease "s" sound on singers. 
6. Increase to add sharpness to synthesizers, rock guitars, acoustic guitar and piano.
__________ 

10KHz 

1. Increase to brighten vocals. 
2. Increase for "light brightness" in acoustic guitar and piano. 
3. Increase for hardness on cymbals. 
4. Reduce to decrease "s" sound on singers. 
__________

15KHz 

1. Increase to brighten vocals (breath sound). 
2. Increase to brighten cymbals, string instruments and flutes. 
3. Increase to make sampled synthesizer sound more real.

Instrument Frequency ranges

Instrument Frequency ranges
To understand EQ and its intricacies you need hands-on experience, but to help you get started, here's a table of general uses and the different ranges that EQ can affect. As every sound is different, though, these are necessarily very general guidelines...

Kick Drum

Any apparent muddiness can be rolled off around 300Hz. Try a small boost around 5-7kHz to add some high end.

50-100Hz ~ Adds bottom to the sound
100-250Hz ~ Adds roundness
250-800Hz ~ Muddiness Area
5-8kHz ~ Adds high end prescence
8-12kHz ~ Adds Hiss

Snare

Try a small boost around 60-120Hz if the sound is a little too wimpy. Try boosting around 6kHz for that 'snappy' sound.

100-250Hz ~ Fills out the sound
6-8kHz ~ Adds prescence

Hi hats or cymbals

Any apparent muddiness can be rolled off around 300Hz. To add some brightness try a small boost around 3kHz.

250-800Hz ~ Muddiness area
1-6kHz ~ Adds presence
6-8kHz ~ Adds clarity
8-12kHz ~ Adds brightness

Bass

Try boosting around 60Hz to add more body. Any apparent muddiness can be rolled off around 300Hz.If more presence is needed, boost around 6kHz.

50-100Hz ~ Adds bottom end
100-250Hz ~ Adds roundness
250-800Hz ~ Muddiness Area
800-1kHz ~ Adds beef to small speakers
1-6kHz ~ Adds presence
6-8kHz ~ Adds high-end presence
8-12kHz ~ Adds hiss

Vocals

This is a difficult one, as it depends on the mic used to record the vocal. However...Apply either cut or boost around 300hz, depending on the mic and song.Apply a very small boost around 6kHz to add some clarity.

100-250Hz ~ Adds 'up-frontness'
250-800Hz ~ Muddiness area
1-6kHz ~ Adds presence
6-8kHz ~ Adds sibilance and clarity
8-12kHz ~ Adds brightness

Piano

Any apparent muddiness can be rolled off around 300Hz. Apply a very small boost around 6kHz to add some clarity.

50-100Hz ~ Adds bottom
100-250Hz ~ Adds roundness
250-1kHz ~ Muddiness area
1-6kHz ~ Adds presence
6-8Khz ~ Adds clarity
8-12kHz ~ Adds hiss

Electric guitars

Again this depends on the mix and the recording. Apply either cut or boost around 300hz, depending on the song and sound. Try boosting around 3kHz to add some edge to the sound, or cut to add some transparency. Try boosting around 6kHz to add presence. Try boosting around 10kHz to add brightness.

100-250Hz ~ Adds body
250-800Hz ~ Muddiness area
1-6Khz ~ Cuts through the mix
6-8kHz ~ Adds clarity
8=12kHz ~ Adds hiss

Acoustic guitar

Any apparent muddiness can be rolled off between 100-300Hz. Apply small amounts of cut around 1-3kHz to push the image higher. Apply small amounts of boost around 5kHz to add some presence.

100-250Hz ~ Adds body
6-8kHz ~ Adds clarity
8-12kHz ~ Adds brightness

Strings

These depend entirely on the mix and the sound used.

50-100Hz ~ Adds bottom end
100-250Hz ~ Adds body
250-800Hz ~ Muddiness area
1-6hHz ~ Sounds crunchy
6-8kHz ~ Adds clarity
8-12kHz ~ Adds brightness

Scales and Chords - Its not as scary as you think

I wrote this in another thread a few days ago and a few people said it was helpful to them and should be stickied so i thought i'd post it up here for anyone thats struggling with their basic theory. Everything i've learned i've pretty much picked up myself, so i dont know how these methods would be viewed by a professional, but this is how i learned how to write scales and find chords within a scale.

So it all revolves around this chart:

You can find all the major scales using this chart, this is how its done.

1) First we pick our scale, for example lets say we want the A major scale.

2) We find the "A" in the chart, ONLY looking at the CAPITOL letters for now. You can see its the 4th column, 3rd row.

3) Look above and you will see its underneath a number, in our case its 3. This means that there are 3 sharps in the A major scale. Why sharps? Because the "A" is sitting in the "#'s" row. If it was in the "b's" row, it would mean there were 3 flats (i.e the Eb major scale).

4) So now we know that the A maj scale has 3 sharps, now we need to know which notes are sharps. This is where the lower case letters come in. You'll see underneath every CAPS letter is a lower case letter, these show which notes are sharpened or flattened in eac scale. All we have to do is count backwards. So in our example of A maj, the sharpened notes are G, C and F. You see how we got there?

5) And thats it, now we have the A major scale, it should look like this - A B C# D E F# G# A

Notes:

Dont get sharps and flats confused with major and minor, they are completely different things. There is a C# major scale and a C# minor scale, there is an Eb major scale and an Eb minor scale.

The above steps are to find a major scale. I will show you in a minute how to find a minor scale.

You'll notice there is no "C" in the chart, this is because the C maj scale has no sharps or flats. Its just; C D E F G A B C

Minor Scales

Now you know how to find a major scale, you can easily convert it to a minor scale. All you need to do is flatten the 3rd, 6th and 7th notes in the scale.

So sticking with our "A" example, the A minor scale looks like this:

A B C D E F G A B

Remember in the A maj scale the C, F and G were all sharp, we flattened them and now we have the minor scale.

Another example:

E major scale - E F# G# A B C# D# E

E minor scale - E F# G A B C D E

Chords

Okay so now you wanna know how to play chords within your scale, this is the easiest part. Every chord, just like scales, follow a pattern. Let me explain what i mean.

C major chord - C+E+G

D major chord - D+F#+A

What do these two chords have in common? They both use the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes in their respective scale.

C maj scale - C D E F G A B C

D maj scale - D E F# G A B C# D

Using this rule, you can find the major chord in any key by simply playing the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes in the scale.

Every chord has its own "spelling". Using these spellings to find chords in a scale instead or memorizing individual notes means you have much less stuff to remember. 

And as you practice, you should naturally pick up which notes to play.

So here are the spellings for some of main types of chords (there are loads). Remember, these are the notes within the scale you play.

Major

1 3 5

Minor

1 3b 5

Major 6th

1 3 5 6

Minor 6th

1 3b 5 6

Major 7th

1 3 5 7

Minor 7th

1 3b 5 7b

Dominant 7th

1 3 5 7b

Diminished

1 3b 5b

Diminished 7th

1 3b 5b 7bb

Power Chord

1 5 8

Augmented Chord

1 3 5#

Sus 2

1 2 5

Sus 4

1 4 5

Notes

When you see a "b" in a chord spelling, that means you flatten that note. For example, the minor chord spelling is "1 3b 5", which means you play the 1st note, the 3rd note (flattened) and the 5th note.

When you see "bb", thats simply means you flatten the note twice (see the diminished 7th chord)

People usually use Roman Numerals instead of numbers, i am pretty much self taught, so i dont do it that way. Dont let the Roman numerals fool you.

To finish off...

I hope i explained everything well, i'm pretty much self taught so i just know my own way, i dont know how much sense it makes to other people cuz no one ever really explained it to me lol. If you are unsure about anythin just gimmie a shout i'll try and help. 

Also cuz i am self taught, not everything i say might be considered 100% correct, i'm still learning myself. If anyone knows better than me and spots a mistake let me know so i can change it. I've just explained it as I understand it, someone who has been professionaly trained might know somethin i dont.

Hope that helps someone, learning theory was a huge pain in the ass for me, so i hope i've made it easier for some people to understand. These are just the very basics, so once you get your head round major and minor scales and chords, it will be a lot easier to get into more advanced stuff. Remember i've only showed you two types of scales, there are hundreds of different scales each with its own sound and character. The chord spellings are still the same, if you find a list of scales (google), you can use these chord spellings to find chords in all those exotic scales.

Tips for Mixing

1 Parallel compression
2. A bit of saturation
3. Clipping
4. Limiting

The long answer:

The starting point for this this 'loudness chain' should be a good mix onf which the loudest peaks are between -3 and -6 dBFS. There should be no clipping (audio above 0 dBFS) at all. Thanks TheBose, for pointing out.

1. Parallel compression: Most probably, people know parallel compression for use on drums but you can use it on whole mixes too. It will blend a heavily compressed sound with the open uncompressed sound to get more 'body' and you can do it with every compressor that has a dry/wet rotary button. I use fairly short attack and release times on the compressor; attack time; shortest possible or something around 1 or 2 ms to get the kicks and snare snappy. Release time around 50 ms. Compression ratio somewhere between 2:1 and 4:1. Lower the threshold until you get 7-8 dB of gain reduction on the peaks. Your song does sound really squashed now. Put the dry/wet button somewhere between 10/90 and 20/80 meaning that you mix 10-20 % of the compressed (wet) sound with 80-90% of the dry sound. My 2 favorite pugins for parallel compression are Cytomic the Glue (http://www.cytomic.com/glue) and DDMF NYcomp (http://www.ddmf.eu).

2. Saturation: Adding a bit of saturation will take away some peaks in a colorful way (like good old tape) and your limiter won't need to work that hard at the end of your mastering chain. My favorite saturation plugin is Variety of Sound's TesslaSE, followed directly in the chain by TesslaPRO (for some more depth). Both are freeware and you can find them here: http://varietyofsound.wordpress.com/vst-effects/. Dial the input button until the peaks of your music are slightly hitting the red part of the VU-meter. In most cases I active the 'SBE' button (Subbass Enhancement). Now calibrate the output until in sounds more or less equally loud as the sound entering the plugin. The TesslaPRO doesn't need much setup, just put it in the chain and it will sound just fine.

3. Clipping: clipping eats away the peaks in a more transparent way than a limiter, so if you wanna really go loud, combine a clipper with a limiter. My favorite clippers are Stillwell's Event Horizon+ (http://www.stillwellaudio.com/?page_id=16) which is 'low cost' or gclip which is freeware (http://www.gvst.co.uk/gclip.htm). Just lower the threshold until the loudest peaks are chopped off. If you hear distortion you have gone too far. Simple as that.

4. Limiting: Most known 'loudness plugin' but by using the aforementioned processes, your limiter doesn't have to work that hard to give your song a decent loudness. My favorite limiter is Jeroen Breebaart's 'Barricade Pro' (low cost) but there is also a freeware version (called 'Barricade'). Get both here: http://www.jeroenbreebaart.com/. Use short release times and keep the gain reduction around 3 dB. If you use very short release times (even 0 ms sounds good sometimes) you can have short gain reduction peaks of 4 db. But listen carefully if distortion does occur when using very short release times. If it does, choose a longer release time.

EDIT: The download of Jeroen Breebaarts plugins are disabled right now, but thry this freeware plugin:

http://sirelliot.blog.com/2010/10/29/sir-elliot-master-limiter/

Other great limiters are:

- Voxengo Elephant
- Fabfilter Pro-L

Chord Progression rules

Use Chord Progressions when Writing Music

Chord progressions are the patterns that music composers use to put musical notes and chords together. When you write music, chord progressions are critical in writing songs that sound harmonious and have the desired tones.

If you look at Western harmonic music, you can see patterns emerge in the ways chord progressions are built. It is possible for any one chord to progress to any one of the other chords in a key; however, certain chord progressions are used more frequently than others. Why? Because they just sound better.

These natural patterns are pleasing to listeners and composers alike, and therefore they appear in popular music, classical, rock, jazz, and so on. Music theorists have taken note of those patterns and come up with a set of "rules" concerning chord progressions. These "rules" are immensely helpful in songwriting. The following tables show common chord progressions for major and minor chords, along with the corresponding chord names for key of C major and C minor.

Uppercase Roman numerals represent major chords; lowercase Roman numerals represent minor and diminished chords.

Common Major Key Chord Progressions

Chord	Chord in C Major Scale	Leads to
I	C	Can appear anywhere and lead anywhere
ii	Dm	V or vii° chords
iii	Em	IV or vi chords
IV	F	ii, V, or vii° chords
V	G	vi chords
vi	Am	ii, iii, IV, or V chords
vii°	B°	I chord

Because minor scales offer some flexibility in the sixth and seventh notes of the scale, you have more chord possibilities to account for. For example, in a C natural minor scale, the chord built on the seventh note would be Bb major, but if you're writing in the harmonic minor scale, that seventh chord would be a diminished B chord (B°). The parentheses around some of the chords indicate less commonly used chords, but they are still acceptable and they would work in the progression.

Common Minor Key Chord Progressions

Chord	Chord in C Major Scale	Leads to
i	C	Can appear anywhere and lead anywhere
ii° (ii)	D° (Dm)	V(v) or vii° (VII) chords
III (III+)	Eb (Eb aug)	iv (IV), VI (#vi°), or vii° (VI) chords
iv (IV)	Fm (F)	V(v) or vii° (VII) chords
V(v)	G (Gm)	VI (#vi°) chords
VI (#vi°)	Ab (A°)	III (III+), iv (IV), V (v), or vii° (VII) chords
vii° (VII)	B° (Bb)	i chord

Some of the most common chord progressions in popular music are I-IV-V-I, I-ii-V-I, and i-iv-V-i.

Like everything in music and art in general, you are the creator of your work, and you can decide whether you want to follow the rules or try something completely different. Just for fun, try playing, or just listening to some chord progressions to get a feel of how easy it can be to build a great song—or at least a halfway decent pop song.

Listen to the I-V-I (G Major-D Major-G Major) chord progression in G major.

Listen to the I-ii-V-I-iii-V-vii◦-I (CM-Dm-GM-CM-Em-GM-Bdim-CM) chord progression in C major.