BIG AND FAT

Well the festivities are over and we are thrown into another new year of big hopes and aspirations. Although the energy levels, bank balances and Alka Selza tablets feel particularly scarce at the moment, your torso certainly doesn’t against your waistband…

If you feel that it is your mixes and not your waistline that need a little fattening up, then this month it’s all about being big and fat in the mix.

Firstly I think its important to identify what accounts for something sounding ‘big’ or ‘fat’ and then also which instruments are key to achieving a ‘fat’ and ‘weighty’ impression.

When listening to a sound or a complete song, it will only sound ‘fat’ if there is a good representation across the frequency spectrum within the overall sound.

A lack of low frequency content and low mids will have the greatest negative effect, as this will make the song sound thin. Try adding in extra sounds, or give an EQ boost in these areas. For instance, on a vocal line, remember that the note A by middle C on a piano is 440Hz in the frequency spectrum, this means there are bound to be a number of fundamental frequencies around 400 – 500Hz usually varying depending on whether it’s a male or female vocalist, so try giving these a gentle boost. You should then look to boost the surrounding harmonics of this fundamental frequency. For instance, if you make a boost to the vocal line at 400Hz, try a small boost at 200Hz and 800Hz as starting points.

Some of the key frequencies across the spectrum of the mix, where there should be content are 150Hz, 400hz, 800hz, 1kHz, 2kHz, 4kHz, 7kHz, and 10kHz.

As you notice from the frequencies listed, a lack of high mid and high content can also prevent you from achieving a ‘fat’ sounding mix. This is because aurally, the song will sound smaller and less wide without that high-end sparkle.

Reverb trails and percussion are a nice way of achieving a good sounding sparkly top end that will add space and dimension to your mix.

So once you are aware of which frequencies are important to you, now you need to think about which instruments define your big, weighty sound you are trying to achieve.

Your rhythm contained within your drum track is the backbone of your song, this determines a lot of the feel of the track and its tempo and pattern is usually the key in defining genre of the piece. Within this drum track, making your kick and snare stand out is essential for achieving a ‘fat’ sounding track.

A mistake a lot of people make with kick drums to make them more prominent, is to just turn them up and up until it is actually distorting. Volume is not the answer; neither is limiting the kick to 0dB.

The best way to make a kick sound fatter is to actually layer the sound. If you are recording live drums you can do this by using at least 2 mics on the kick. Try something up close to the skin inside the drum to get the slap or crack of each hit, and then have another placed further back towards the opening of the drum to get the ‘boom’ sound. You will find that using this combination firstly helps you achieve a bigger, weightier sound, but secondly, it also means you have much more control over the sound of the kick by balancing up the ‘slap / crack’ sound with the ‘boom / oomph’ sound.

If you program your drums using either a pattern editor or samples or playing it in as a finger drummer, you can actually use completely different kicks at the same time to layer up your kick sound. When doing this however please be cautious not to choose additional kicks with a long delay on fast tempo music as this could blur the rhythm and make your mix sound muddy.

When you are recording a snare drum live, try using one mic facing down at the top of the snare and then a second mic facing upright towards the bottom of the snare. This will help you capture the ‘crack’ and the ‘crunch’ of the snare hits. Do not forget that due to the polarity of the two mics, you should always reverse the phase of the second microphone when recording. This can usually be done from your console channel or preamp unit. Again if you are programming your drums yourself, you can start layering the snare sound either with other snare hits or maybe a rimshot to really give it a sharp edge and a nice crisp finish.

The other important element is your bassline. A mistake that often occurs is that people go for a very low sub bass as their main bassline. This means that on some playback systems it cannot be heard properly and causes the mix too actually sound thinner on these playback systems. To compensate people end up turning the bass up, which actually causes it to overload on larger playback systems and sound unbalanced. Although sub is important, you should also have some bassline content around 200Hz, so that the melody can clearly be heard and sits on top of your kick drum nicely (kick will probably be around 80-120 Hz). Having space for your kick is essential and the bassline should sit just above it and just underneath it, do not try and turn your kick into your sub content.

If the bassline is a key element of the song then the bigger the frequency content the better, you should even try mirroring the bassline an octave up, but slightly lower in the mix to give it more depth and melody.

Once you have your bottom end nicely fattened, repeat the concept of layering sounds throughout the piece. Pack up vocals with harmonies and backing vocals, Fatten up guitar lines by adding the same hook but with a bit of distortion and add to string parts by adding pad sounds and individual string parts to make it all appear to sound bigger.

Once you have finished, use some multiband compression or mix bus compression to glue everything together into a nice solid finish and try adding a smile curve EQ boost – a gentle lift in the lows, a cut in the mids and a lift in the highs. This technique is commonly used on HiFi stereos to produce a more sonically exciting finish to a piece of music.

Combining these techniques means your mix will soon be saturated with ‘fat’. Enjoy.