Two Ways To Keep Your Mix Dynamic

People love to hear dynamics whether they know it or not. Dynamics give a song life and personality. It allows a song to surprise the listener and separate the chorus, verses, and bridge from each other. However, in today's day and age of loudness wars, we are losing more and more dynamics. Everyone is competing to see who can get their song the loudest and they are sacrificing dynamics.

What are some ways in which we can keep dynamics in our mixes?

Number 1: Don't Over-Limit

One really easy way to lose dynamics in a mix to over-limit your mix. It's real easy to slap a limiter on your mix, push up the volume and watch that gain reduction start slamming your song. The more gain reduction you see, the less dynamics you are losing. If you go back to the early 2000's you can look at mastered songs and see how squashed they were becoming. Mastering engineers were just slamming their tracks and over doing limiting in an effort to get a louder song than anyone else. Although it has seemed to tame back down a bit, it's still easy for us to over-limit. 

So how much do you limit? 

This is sort of subjective. It really just depends on the song. When I use a limiter, I try not to see more than 3 to 5db of gain reduction. At the most, maybe 6db. Once it goes past this point, I feel like you are losing too many dynamics for the sake of getting the song just a hair louder. You also want to keep in mind the difference between small moments of gain reduction and consistent gain reduction. 

For example, you may have a song that hits 6db of gain reduction but only a couple parts for a moment. Maybe the snare is popping through really loudly and so it's hitting the limiter. That's okay. You won't notice a real increase in dynamics because it's just catching some loud parts popping through here and there. However, let's say that you have a really loud chorus and you are seeing it hit 6db of gain reduction throughout the entire chorus. This can be too much. If you are seeing that consistent gain reduction of that much, you are simply squashing the song. We have to keep in mind the difference between consistent gain reduction and the limiter just catching peaks here and there. 

Note: Don't use a limiter if you plan on getting your song mastered by someone else. 

Number 2: Automate the Master Bus

Another great way to add dynamics to your mix is automate the master fader. Now the key here is to be very subtle. You don't want to go on there and start doing 3 or 4db automation. You are wanting to do maybe 1 to 2db. For example, let's say you want a chorus to pop out a little more. Automate the chorus to be 1db louder than the verses. This will be subtle but add just enough dynamics to make the song interesting. You could also use some automation on the bridge and so forth. The point is, get creative! But remember to be subtle. 

We've now looked at two ways to keep dynamics in our mixes. I hope this helps you get more interesting in creative mixes! Remember if you have any questions to submit them via the right sidebar. 

Need mixing or mastering? Check us out! - http://willsterling.net