mixing keyboards

moog voyager

So look, it seems easy.  You print the stereo output of your keyboard, synth, whatever and throw the faders up along with the rest of your mix.  But then you find that it sounds weak, out of place or takes up too much of your sonic “landscape”.  Why is this?  Well, put simply, that keyboard sound wasn’t programmed to fit your mix.  In fact it was probably programmed to make you buy the keyboard.  You can tweak it in the synth, or you can make it your own at the mixing stage.  How do you do that?

The first mistake most people make, as I described above, is to just throw the stereo keyboard track up as though that’s the way it’s suppose to be.  But this puts you at the mercy of whoever designed the preset.  For example, synthesized orchestral string sounds typically add way too much treble in an attempt to make them sound real.  A synth bass typically has way too much stereo content for the low end of the spectrum.  But who said you have to stick to their idea of what the sound should be?

Filtering is a great idea and a powerful tool.  There are some great filters out there, both analogue and the plugin variety.  But don’t just slap your stereo keyboard through a stereo filter or I’m going to think you’ve got no imagination.  Filter those two channels independently or filter one and leave the other as it is.  Then, don’t be tied to hard left and hard right panning positions; move those channels about until it’s sounding right in your mix.

Of course these principles apply to all kinds of effects; delays, chorus, reverb, gating… you name it.  Well-known mix engineer Dave Pensado typically dumps one channel of a stereo keyboard sound so that he can find something interesting to do with the other, limitation being the most creative force.  And let’s face it; his success in his field is kinda hard to argue with!

For example, how about original sound left, reverb or delay right?  Or chorus.  How about two completely different effects on the two channels?  But how about an amp simulator?

And it is there, dear friends, where we reach the holy grail of keyboard sounds via two options.  But before I launch into those, let’s have a bit of keyboard history.  Well, there have been electronic keyboards for a long time!  Mankind’s ingenuity in moving beyond the relatively simple but nonetheless wonderful sound of a piano is legendary.  However, the quality of the technology available to designers hasn’t always been as well matured as it is today.  So a lot of early keyboards – and especially analogue synthesizers – typically have lots of peculiar artifacts in the audio from their circuitry.  Now I’m not disrespecting their designers because, honestly, I have a very long-standing and intense love affair with old synthesizers.  But I am pointing out that the components and designs which were available back in the day added something to the sound.  It’s similar with analogue versus digital EQ; a plugin will only ever be a set of tables and algorithms whilst an analogue equaliser is a physically interactive machine with components that were probably selected through a compromise of price over performance and which are never exactly the same (that’s why designers refer to a component being “within a certain tolerance” i.e.; how close it is to their ideal).  So when you tweak your treble, the circuit makes something happen in the bass end too; that’s what analogue circuits do.  It’s just the same thing with those old keyboards; those artifacts which were inherent to the sound in those days were a GOOD thing!

synth

So, getting back to our two options, first consider RE-AMPING your keyboard through a guitar amp or, heck, even your granny’s stereo.  Re-amping artificial sounds adds resonance, air and size and can even make a tone which is lacking in dynamics seem much more lively (and let’s not forget, by the way, that synthesized sound sources have NOWHERE NEAR the dynamic range of real instruments).  You may need to fiddle with the input level a bit because the line-level output of a synth is way louder than the signal from a guitar or microphone.  However, there are a number of solutions available for this specific purpose and my personal favourite is the Radial Engineering JD-7 “Injector” which allows you to go through up to seven amps at a time.  Also, don’t be afraid to mess with the amp settings, move the mic about or change it entirely.  You can get some REALLY interesting keyboard tones this way.

However the second option is, in my opinion, even better.  The one thing that was inherent to “phat” old synths and is largely absent from modern versions is DISTORTION.  Those early analogue circuits had inherent distortion and saturation which made the instrument sound full, warm and punchy.  I was recently working on a dance remix for a client and, I gotta be honest, the VSTi bass tone just wasn’t doing it for me.  I loved the line it was playing and it was a great sound in itself but in the track it just felt flaccid and unimpressive.  The solution was to take a mono send from the stereo track, bung it through a limiter to contain level differences and then feed it into an NPNG mic preamp.  Now, this particular preamp is one of the best I’ve ever heard; Karl Diehl, who makes these things in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., has really created something special.  But one of the more interesting things about his brilliant preamp is that when you crank it, it starts to sound like TAPE SATURATION!  Talk about exciting; real tape saturation sounds incredible!  So anyway, I printed the resulting sound, threw it in behind the original and hey presto!  One of the fattest, most bangin’ synth bass sounds I have ever heard and all because of some real analogue distortion just like those marvellous synths from the seventies.

So when it comes to mixing keyboards and synthesizers don’t just use those boring old presets.  Let your imagination roam and do something INTERESTING with them.  Consider this article as your starting-block and see where you end up.  Maybe I’ll see you there.