Shaping the end sound and pre/production
> Balancing layers > Staging sounds > Sharing a song > Exporting to a DAW
In the final part of the Songzap for Pianists blog series, we’ll experiment with and shape the sonics of our designed and captured creations. The song we made in Part III features a mix of recorded keyboard performances and drum patterns we prepared for the song’s different arrangement sections, which deploy drum sounds from Songzap’s sample libraries. The objective here will be to mix all of the song’s elements into a cohesive whole that delivers the song’s narrative effectively.
The process of mixing (often also referred to as sound/balance engineering) is an artform that requires experience, skill, ear-training and many hours of trial and error. Professional mix engineers are highly sought-out and many have a unique sound or footprint that makes musicians, bands or labels pursue them, so they can bring their identifiable sonic aesthetic to their musical creations. The artform combines technical and artistic decision-making deployed to elevate musical arrangements toward their ideal sonic manifestation. This is often driven by musical trends, stylistic objectives and even technical characteristics (for example, mixes that translate well in the car, the club, on headphones or for a range of different dissemination formats).
Songzap features a simplified Mixer that lets you experiment with some of the most essential processing options, allowing you to shape the sonics of your song. You can think of a mix as the amalgamation of all the sonic choices you make resulting in a three-dimensional aural illusion (a sonic ‘world’), which you can share with your listeners. Some of these decisions are more pragmatic or technical (for example clarity, or avoiding instruments masking each other), and some lean on the artistic or emotional (for example, making a solo feel ‘epic’ through the use of reverb or frequency enhancement). A simple way to break down the mixing workflow is to think about the essential ‘dimensions’ of a mix architecture and then to tackle each systematically – these are:
- Balance (how loud an element is when compared to another and all other elements)
- Stereo image (where on the left, middle or right an element sits)
- Depth (how far or close does an element feel)
Relative balance, image and depth are manifestations of multiple processing decisions (for example, reverb can affect our perception of volume and therefore balance, whilst equalisation may affect our perception of proximity), but a simple way to start is to use:
- Volume faders to set up a basic relative balance
- Pan pots to position elements on the stereo axis
- Reverb controls to give elements the perception of surrounding space or depth
In the sections below, we’ll apply some of these ideas to the song we recorded in the previous post.
Balancing your creations and layers
The basic view of Songzap’s Mixer gives you all the essential controls to start shaping your mix. The Mixer is conveniently split in an upper section with four blue control dots (Volume faders) corresponding to Tracks 1-4 where we recorded the piano and keyboard parts. The lower section features another four faders, the first three corresponding to the three drum sounds comprising your beat patterns (kick drum, snare drum and cymbals or tom), the fourth one a Master fader for your whole song. Above each Volume fader for the recorded tracks and drums, you’ll see a pink Pan control dot representing the respective element’s stereo position (pan stands for panoramic), and a green Reverb control dot enabling you to dial in the amount of reverb you want to apply to said element. The default position for the Pan control is the middle, and moving it left or right places the element closer to your left or right ear on the stereo axis. Try experimenting with the extreme edges of the spectrum, then position elements where they make sense to you (for example, a secondary piano part mirroring the position of the first part on the opposite side, and additional keyboards ‘filling in the gaps’ so to speak). Low-frequency parts (like the Moog bass) tend to sound better close to the middle, but as with any rules, they’re there to be broken. I’ll explain my panning strategy for this song in the next section in more detail. The default position for the Reverb control is 0 (no reverb), which is on the far left. Moving this control dot to the right results in increasing amounts of reverb applied, ‘washing’ the elements in a perception of lush spaciousness.
It’s worth starting the process by just balancing the volume of your sounds (and not getting too carried away with stereo imaging and spatial processing initially). Make sure you play your song a number of times and trust your instincts (and ears) as you move the Volume control dots to where elements make most sense. Some mix engineers start with the drums, then match the kick drum with any bass instruments (for me here, the Moog bass), and proceed ‘upwards’ either in terms of frequency spectra (i.e. lower to higher instruments) or in terms of narrative and instrumental function (e.g. main piano part first, then additional layers brought in to match that, and the drums and bass). As you balance your tracks, keep an eye on the Master fader and its peak level indicator: you want to stay below 0.0 dB – any higher than that and you’ll be ‘clipping’, which results in harsh digital audio artefacts. It’s not unusual for novice mixers to keep pushing elements higher and higher until they overload the master, and then need to reset. Try to keep your headphones at a healthy level, take breaks and work by focusing on the relative balance between instruments.
Some advanced/premium concepts
One of the difficulties with balance mixing is that recorded performances are dynamic and tracked elements don’t tend to stay at the same perceived level consistently throughout a take. You may have played parts softer or harder (that is often the aim of an expressive performance after all) and by the time all tracks are playing back, you’ll find that there are sections where certain parts sound balanced and others where they feel buried or – conversely – too loud. Mix engineers have historically been deploying compression processing to deal with this issue. And Songzap Premium features a Compression control in the advanced view of the Mixer. Tap on the Advanced Mixer button near the top-right of the Mixer page and you’ll see additional controls populate the area above the Volume faders.
Compression is a type of dynamic processing that allows you to reduce the peak levels of your instruments, bringing up their quieter range and resulting in more consistent volume profiles for your overall performances. Experiment with the orange Compression control dots (no compression toward the left, increased compression toward the right) and listen critically to your elements being processed. You’ll notice that overdoing it will bring up every micro-characteristic of your recorded part (mouth noises, creeks or noise), while finding a happy medium will result in quite consistent levels that allow you to ‘place’ your element within the mix architecture more confidently. It’s often the case that you’ll need to re-adjust the Volume fader position for a track after you’ve applied compression, as the level perception changes significantly. But mixing is an iterative process, and listening critically to each sound, its relationship to others and the whole mix lets you create congruent sonic relationships whilst training your ears. Take it slow, take breaks (worth repeating), and don’t be afraid to reset your faders and re-approach your song’s balance after you’ve made new processing decisions.
In the Advanced Mixer view, you’ll also notice two more (deep purple) controls indicated by EQH and EQL per track. These controls correspond to High and Low Equalisation respectively, and let you enhance the high and low frequency spectra of your sounds. You can, for example, give your piano recording more ‘sheen’ in the high frequencies or make your synth bass feel deeper, denser and heavier in the low register. Adjusting EQ controls is a great way to not only expand the captured spectra of your sounds, but it also doubles as a means to ‘juggle’ the frequencies of multiple elements, making sure they don’t mask each other, ‘cutting through’ instead sufficiently within the overall mix. The combo of equalisation and compression is a powerful feature palette for shaping the dynamic and spectral ‘conversation’ between elements, and it’s one of the areas where mixing experience is best manifested. It requires more advanced ear training, but don’t let that scare you. Having these tools at your fingertips on a mobile device exposes you to unlimited experimentation and learning over your own, captured sounds. Trust your instincts, take breaks (always) and keep having fun.
Extending the depth and image of your captured sounds
Once you have balanced and sculpted your sounds using the Volume faders (and compression and equalisation if necessary), you’ll have a better idea of how they should sit in the stereo spectrum and how ‘spacious’ they need to be. Go back to your Pan and Reverb controls and continue having fun. For my song, I took an approach where I positioned the main piano part slightly to the left, because I was replicating my actual listening/playing position on the piano. The first part featured left-hand bass and middle-register chords with some improvisations going higher. The second, electric Rhodes piano part was generally occupying a higher register, so by panning it slightly to the right it felt more distinct from the acoustic piano and it led to an illusion of a three-hand keyboard spreading over the entire stereo image. Given the accumulation of more piano bass on the left, I mixed the Moog bass slightly to the right, whilst also making sure that the kick drum, left-hand piano and Moog made sense against each other in terms of levels.
Next, I applied some reverb to the Rhodes part to enhance its psychedelic nature in a narrative sense. I applied even more reverb to the Hammond organ pads to make them feel farther away in the sonic illusion. Small amounts of reverb to the piano, snare drum and cymbals/tom contributed to a feeling of spatial ‘glue’ (most mix elements now inhabiting a sense of shared space). I also panned the hats/tom slightly to the left, away from and mirroring the higher registers of the Rhodes, making sure there was a balanced spread of frequencies on the overall low, mid and high registers of the song’s instrumentation. It’s often useful to imagine your instrumentation as a stage occupied by live musicians, and position them on this imaginary stage in terms of size and left-right, front-back placement. The video below demonstrates my ‘play’ with the mix controls over the song recorded in the previous post. You’ll notice my cyclic workflow shaping the different sonic dimensions of the song’s elements via level, equalisation, dynamic and spatial processing, over multiple playbacks of the song.
Sharing a song
Now that we have achieved an enjoyable, balanced and enhanced mix of our song, it’s time to share it! Finishing and sharing songs is important. It lets us move on, receive feedback and it also frees us from getting stuck in cycles of overt perfectionism. After all, this is still a demo, not a professionally mixed record, and there are many reasons for sharing a demo creation: showing it to musical collaborators, having an output of your work for personal reflection, receiving input from people you trust, or communicating it to producers and engineers who can help you elevate the captured ideas to a more advanced standard.
If you’ve just finished mixing your song using the Mixer page, tap on the Export button at the top-right of the menu bar (also available from the Tracking, Arrange and Groove pages). You can access the Export button from the bottom of the Home screen, too. Once in the Export page, tap on Share – this allows you to export your song as a compressed (reduced size) mix audio file (mp3), ideal for sharing via email, on social media or through messaging apps.
The Songzap Mix.mp3 below is the result of the mix process showcased in the previous video. Enjoy!
Exporting individual parts and taking it to the next level
In Part II, we imported an externally produced track into Songzap so that we could overdub additional piano and keyboard parts over it. We first uploaded the external track onto our Songzap folder on iCloud, which made it easy to then import into a new Songzap song, match the tempo and continue working. But using iCloud and Songzap Premium, we can also do the reverse: export every element of a song created and captured exclusively using Songzap, so that we can import it into a DAW (digital audio workstation) and even take it into a professional studio environment.
What elements can we export and why is this useful? You can export every audio track recorded as a full-quality WAVE file, every drum track designed with the Groove Designer (also as an audio file), as well as MIDI files of your drum tracks, markers, lyrics, arrangement data, notes and a full-resolution mix of your song. These assets effectively contain the DNA of a song created in Songzap, and the option to deconstruct and export them individually means that they can be reassembled, further edited, enhanced and professionally mixed using more advanced studio workflows. You could, for example, re-record a lead vocal in a professional studio using a dedicated vocal microphone, trigger different drum sounds using the available MIDI data, hire a session drummer to play parts inspired by your programmed beats, or collaborate with further musicians, a studio engineer and a producer. All you have to do is tap on the Export button (either from the Home screen or from the top-right of the menu bar in the Groove, Arrange, Track or Mix page), and then tap on Archive (rather than Share). This will open up the Archive Audio Files pane, where you can select to export the Final Mix, Tracks 1-4, Groove Tracks and MIDI & Lyrics to iCloud. In the video below, I’ll take you through a step-by-step demonstration, archiving the song recorded in the previous post before importing all of its assets into Logic for further work. You’ll see how easy it is to line everything up in the DAW, where I’ll take advantage of its more advanced editing capabilities to clean up my recordings, edit some parts of the performance and prepare a new mix (and master) using plug-ins. The Advanced Mix_Master.mp3 below is the result of this process – feel free to compare it to the mp3 we shared directly from Songzap in the section above. Not bad, hey? It’s great to be able to instantly share both your demos created entirely on a mobile device, as well as having the option to perfect them professionally once you get people interested in further collaboration. The way I use Songzap is as a sketchbook that allows me to practise and capture ideas on the go, safe in the knowledge that the seeds of these ideas can lead to fully-produced tracks for future release!