CPC Behind the Scenes: Mixing / mastering music for webtoons (Patreon)

Hi everyone! Sorry for this very belated post. Also Happy New Year's Eve!! This will be the last BTS post about music for a while so we can move onto other aspects of how I make Cursed Princess Club! (Thanks to everyone who has no interest in music production for tolerating this rambling haha). So here we go!

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The last step to making music for a comic after I’ve composed a suitable song is to mix and master it. This means basically making the track sound cleaner, clearer, and louder so that it sounds decent on different types of speakers.

WHY DO YOU NEED TO MIX / MASTER?

I kinda didn’t understand this for way too long, and my ears couldn’t really even hear why it was necessary. Basically, if you just made a song in your DAW and then exported / bounced it, it would probably sound much quieter, lifeless, and muddy than music you usually hear. 

Mixing (to me) is basically making certain things you want in your song stand out -- but only the parts you want, because if you just raised the volume of everything in your song, there would be a lot of competing sounds and frequencies that would muddy everything up, like tons of people shouting in room at the same time. Only so many sounds can come out of your speakers at a time, so you basically have a pie chart of all the sounds your song has, and you have to carefully choose / cut out what pieces you want to fill up your pie chart. And that’s basically mixing and mastering!

I have to strongly state that I am in absolutely no way good at this. In fact, I’m pretty sure my mixes are terrible and I'm still pretty new to it all. But I think they’re passably terrible in that they don't hurt people's ears and are clear enough so that people can hear the music -- and that's as good as we need it to be. At least for now. So if you are satisfied with the way my music tracks sounds and you wanna know how I do it, these are basically all the steps I take!

MY MIXING PROCESS

First and foremost, I mix and also master my songs on the same project file I compose them on, which I think many professionals would immediately say is a giant no-no. But my tracks are so small and this saves me very precious time in my week that I need every second of.

I also have a clear objective with my mixing: To quickly make a song that prioritizes headphone listening and mobile speaker listening. This is because a large majority of WEBTOON readers are on their phones, and I don't wanna assume they're all breaking out their headphones just for my comic. So that's what I have chosen to focus my time and efforts on, and this may not be what yours is.

Oh yeah and I mix on my ATH-M50x headphones and then check my mixes on mobile speakers and really bad mixing speakers in my sonically untreated apartment. Another set of no-no's to professionals :(

Ok here we go!:

1. FINALIZE YOUR COMPOSITION AND INSTRUMENTS

Before I start mixing, I just go through every instrument track in my song and make sure that it's the synth that's best for the job, and that all the notes are played cleanly and/or quantized if I want (corrected so it’s on beat).

2. (REALLY POOR) GAIN STAGING

This basically means roughly making sure the volume levels of all your individual tracks are  as loud as you want them to be in relation to each other, and that the master track isn't too quiet or too loud at this point. If your song is too loud right now, you won't have any space left in your pie chart to work your mixing magic on. But too quiet makes things inconvenient too.

There’s a proper way to do this but again, I skip it for time :-\  I just kinda make sure that when I play my composition at the loudest parts, the stereo out track is peaking anywhere between -10db and -4db. If not, I just drag down / up the faders of all my individual tracks / instruments to get somewhere around there.

But if you want to do it properly, google gain staging and use proper level meter plug-ins, gain plug-ins, and all that goodness!

3. COMPRESS TRACKS THAT NEED IT

Compressor plug-ins help when you have an instrument has really loud parts and also really quiet parts. It will smoosh down the loud parts but keep the “oomph” of its timbre, so that we free up some more room in our “pie-chart” of frequencies. I don’t know if this is necessary for every instrument -- I do it for a lot of them though. And Logic kinda slaps a compressor on everything anyhow. 

You can google many videos on how to use a compressor - it will all seem really confusing at first (still is), but basically, just add a compressor to an instrument track and open it. Crank up the threshold knob (see image below) until the compressor needle starts to show a few dbs of compression is happening. Then you can adjust how much you want to smoosh down the loud parts down with the ratio knob. Just make sure to not do it to the point where you hear things sounding clipped or crunchy.

4. EQ EVERY TRACK

Not all steps are necessary for every instrument in mixing, but this is one that you should probably do for every track, and is the most important for making a clean, passable mix. 

EQing is about trying to carve out chunks of frequencies that aren’t crucial to each instrument, so that each instrument in your song kinda has its own pocket of the frequency spectrum to be cleanly heard. More cutting out of unnecessary things in our pie chart, if you will.

So a quick summary is to go through each track, add an EQ, and open it. Then play the song (with all tracks, not on solo mode) and turn on the Analyzer button. This will show all the frequencies this instrument occupies and at what levels. Sweep and lower / raise different parts of the frequencies to listen for what parts of the instrument are unimportant. Lightly carve out / lower frequencies that have unnecessary noise, muddiness, OR you know are being occupied by other instruments.

For example, in this EQ of the bass in "Birthday Boy," I trimmed out the super low-end stuff and carved out a bit of the 500Hz range because I know the pads / keys sort of own that territory and I don't want the bass to steal their spotlight.

Try not to raise things in an EQ much, only cut things out. I think this is a method called Subtractive EQ’ing, if you'd like to Google it.

5. PAN

This step is just fun and easy! You just get to choose whether each instrument should be sit on the left, right, or center of your mix. In general, lead melodies and bass / drums are more towards center. I tend to pan my auxiliary percussion (my beloved wood blocks and bongos, shakers) to the far left and right, and then all the rest of the chords and strings etc. are smattered somewhere in between.

Or try a tremolo plug-in to make an instrument bounce back and forth between the ears of your headphones! (Use sparingly!)

One note is that on mobile speakers, everything is mono, so panning won't do anything there.

6. REVERB AND ECHO

I love reverb. It's fun and it makes things sound big and epic and romantic. I even have a Chrome extension that adds a ton of sloppy reverb to everything I listen to online. But the problem is that not a lot of people feel the same way lol. And if there's even a little too much, it can add a bunch of mud to your mix, and can sound tinny and maybe even painful across certain types of speakers. And because mixing is all about making sure your song doesn't sound unpleasant to most people's ears, I had to learn to cut back heavily on reverb to just the minimal amount I need.

It’s also good at making things sound farther back in a mix. But I’ve noticed that on mobile speakers, this effect is amplified, and can make things sounds very muffled and inaudible, so use minimally.

7. OTHER PLUG-INS / TIPS

At this point, you can just play with any other plug-ins your DAW offers to punch up your track such as distortion / amp plug-ins to add extra crunch to things, chorus and phasers to make things sound spacey, etc.

Here are also two other tips I have for making sure your mix sounds passable on mobile speakers:

1. Low-end frequencies (bass, kick drums) are practically inaudible on mobile speakers. So if it's a priority to make sure your mobile listeners are grooving to your sick bass line, then follow this tutorial’s steps. It basically says that for every bass / kick drum / low-end instrument, you can add an amp / distortion / saturation plug-in that raises and excites the higher frequencies, so it’s more able to be heard on mobile speakers. It will make your kick drum sound more “clicky” and your bass less deep, but I guess you can’t have your cake and eat it too! 🤷🏻‍♀️

2. Cut back on the high-end frequencies. I love love love sparkly sounds on my music as you may have noticed, but on mobile speakers, these higher-frequencies can overshadow everything else in your mix and be piercing to some listeners. So I often end up lowering frequencies in the 2khz+ range for specifically high-hitting instruments like strings or bells.

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And that's it for mixing! Now on to mastering!

MY REALLY BASIC MASTERING TUTORIAL:

Bands usually send their music to professionals to master them for like thousands of dollars, and they sound loud and wonderful and sparkly in all the right places. But I don't have the time or money for that, and I think less people care about that these days (thank goodness).

So all I really do is basically compress the entire finished song I made and make it louder. That’s it! Here are my steps in Logic:

1. On the stereo out track of your project file, add a compressor. Logic has several different types that each have its own flavor. I pick any one, turn up / down the threshold knob (see the sections about compression above) until the needle shows around 3 - 5 db of compression happening. Then I do this very lazy thing where I press the “Auto Gain” button to raise the volume of the entire song to 0db. It just magically makes everything very loud! And if you’re lucky, you won’t hear any clipping / crunching.
If you do, you’ll have to turn down the threshold or ratio knobs, and/or find out what instrument has a frequency that’s causing that sound. It’s usually the kick or bass in my songs, and it needs some more EQ frequencies carved out.

2. Add the Adaptive Limiter plug-in to the stereo out track so that it sits below the compression plug-in. What this does is to limit your now-really-loud song if it ever goes above 0db (because when that happens, songs clip and sound crunchy and bad). So I set the out ceiling to -0.2db to be safe.  You then turn up the gain knob until your the output meter on the left shows that it's hitting your target volume of -0.2 db. But I usually don’t have to adjust the gain because the 1st mastering step above already made things loud enough.

3. In the mixer window (press 'X' to open), I right-click the Master column and click "Create track". This adds the Master track as an instrument so that I can then press 'A' to open the automation view and create fade in and fade out points for the track's starting and stopping points.

4. Bounce the song in whatever quality of media you want (I do AIFF and MP3). I then immediately send the song to my phone so I can listen to it on my mobile speakers. I take out a pen and notepad and I make notes of what sounds awful (there's always something). I also then listen to it on these cheap mixing speakers (KRK Rokit 5’s) that really bring out the muddiness of everything for some reason. I take notes again.

5. I sit back down to my project file and tweak my mix and repeat step 4 over and over again until it sounds passable on both my mobile phone and those muddy speakers. Not good, not great, just passable and not painful. I feel like if it sounds fine on those two extremes, everything else in-between is generally fine. 

And that’s when I call it a day!

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Thanks for reading this drivel, if any of you made it this far! If this helps even one person feel less intimidated about trying their hand at some mixing and mastering, then I will feel very relieved! Please feel free to ask me any specific questions about anything -- I tried to stay very basic with all of these steps.

Lastly, I just recommend watching and reading various tutorials about mixing. I don't follow one person's advice religiously, but over time, the best advice just kinda sinks in for your situation, and it will all make sense.

Hope you guys have a safe and fun end of your 2019 and a joyous start to 2020! :3