Mix guitars with strings.

Nuno Filipe

You talkin' to me?
Jul 1, 2009
2,715
14
38
Portugal
I was listening to Lasse Lammert mix with Alestorm and holy fuck that sounds huge. What I want to know is how you guys mix heavy guitars with strings/Orchestral sounds without having the guitars buried/eated by the strings. There are some general tips about this? What frequencies must I boost or cut? and more, how do you pan the strings?

If anyone knows something about this I would be very grateful.
 
I was listening to Lasse Lammert mix with Alestorm and holy fuck that sounds huge. What I want to know is how you guys mix heavy guitars with strings/Orchestral sounds without having the guitars buried/eated by the strings. There are some general tips about this? What frequencies must I boost or cut? and more, how do you pan the strings?

If anyone knows something about this I would be very grateful.

I was mixing Eilera (drums (with two snares, one kick and 4 toms), bass, guitar, 6 tracks of hd, cello, violin, vocals, 2 inear-systems and 4 floor monitors) live last year and I really have to say that strings usually don't get buried beneath the guitars because they work on different frequencyrange in general. Cello works lower and violin works higher.

How to mix them depends entirely on the mix, but if you are using real strings and not some synths, note that guitars are usually tuned to 440 when the classical instruments are always tuned to 442
 
I understand. But sometimes I have a lot of stuff going with strings and that makes too hard for guitars to cut trough the mix. But it must be of my poor skills!lol and also depends on how we use the strings.
 
Never eq the strings to make them fit, that adds an unnatural tone to them. EQ the strings and other orchestral instruments so that they sound as natural as possible by themselves and then fine tube the guitars to fit.

Also, separate each instrument/section, one violin track, one viola, etc etc and automate all those volumes so that the most important part comes out when needed and the strings fall back when they need to. And I just found out, compression really works as well. If you get all the strings to howerer they cut but have certain moments where they are too loud, setting a threshold for where you want the loudest perceived volume and anything louder will fit in to where specified your bass line. Then simple automating will allow you to bring out certain parts that need to cut without killing your mix.

It is real tricky business trying to get the guitars to blend however, work with the guitars tone/eq more. The fatter and warmer the tone is and the more upper end bite and agrssion the guitars have, the better they will sit with the strings.
 
maybe changing guitar/bass tone would help the mix.

Yeah, it´s an a idea.

Never eq the strings to make them fit, that adds an unnatural tone to them. EQ the strings and other orchestral instruments so that they sound as natural as possible by themselves and then fine tube the guitars to fit.

Also, separate each instrument/section, one violin track, one viola, etc etc and automate all those volumes so that the most important part comes out when needed and the strings fall back when they need to. And I just found out, compression really works as well. If you get all the strings to howerer they cut but have certain moments where they are too loud, setting a threshold for where you want the loudest perceived volume and anything louder will fit in to where specified your bass line. Then simple automating will allow you to bring out certain parts that need to cut without killing your mix.

It is real tricky business trying to get the guitars to blend however, work with the guitars tone/eq more. The fatter and warmer the tone is and the more upper end bite and agrssion the guitars have, the better they will sit with the strings.

Thanks for spending some time to give some tips. I eq strings only to give them some brightness and presence because sometimes they sound to bassy and unclear. Yeah, automation can be very usefull in some cases but I try to do all I can when they are just midi files, change the velocities and all that shit to avoid a lot of work with automation.

I see that you use MOTU Symphonic, what are your opinion about it? I tried Miroslav Philharmonik and I didnt like. Some of the sounds like the brasses are outdated, the instruments dont have much deepness, sounds harsh even with reverbs and they dont have impact as orchestral sound. This could be a strange opinion because Miroslav have some very good reviews but I am not convinced. EWQL is not a option because I dont have a big machine to run a such heavy VST. So I might try Motu Symphonic.
 
Yeah, it´s an a idea.



Thanks for spending some time to give some tips. I eq strings only to give them some brightness and presence because sometimes they sound to bassy and unclear. Yeah, automation can be very usefull in some cases but I try to do all I can when they are just midi files, change the velocities and all that shit to avoid a lot of work with automation.

I see that you use MOTU Symphonic, what are your opinion about it? I tried Miroslav Philharmonik and I didnt like. Some of the sounds like the brasses are outdated, the instruments dont have much deepness, sounds harsh even with reverbs and they dont have impact as orchestral sound. This could be a strange opinion because Miroslav have some very good reviews but I am not convinced. EWQL is not a option because I dont have a big machine to run a such heavy VST. So I might try Motu Symphonic.

Personally, I use EWQL Platinum, and occasionally Miroslav Philharmonik, and those pretty much cover everything I need. I also own MOTU Symphonic, but I never use it. It's not bad, and if it was all I had, I'd make the best of it, but I much prefer EWQL and Miroslav.

I agree about Miroslav's brass for the most part. But their strings, despite being an aging library, still sound excellent in a lot of ways. Also, their woodwinds sound great, and it has some nice percussion too.

I use about 90% EWQL and 10% Miroslav. But whatever your library of choice, if it sounds good to you, that's what counts. To help blend it with guitars, your arrangement will go a long way.

Assuming your arrangement is decent and too many instruments aren't automatically fighting for sonic space, then basic level matching should get you most of the way there.

EQing should help you make up the rest of what's left. You probably already know to high-pass and low-pass the guitars. Don't do it with the guitars solo'd. Do it with the entire mix going. Start with the high-pass. Use a good quality EQ with a solid high-pass, and start running it up the frequencies slowly until you start to hear a change. You should start hearing the low end tighten up a bit as you pull some low end out of the guitars. Once you feel like you've gone too far and the guitar get too thin, back it off a bit. If the point where it sounds right turns out to be higher than you expected, don't worry about it. In the context of the mix is what matters, not solo'd.

Then start the low-pass. Do it in a similar manner. There's a lot of fizz and junk in the highs that don't really benefit the guitars, so you can start running the low-pass down the frequencies, once again with the entire mix going, until you start to hear it working. As you do this, you should start to hear the high end of the mix breath a bit easier. Run the filter down to where it's taking too much high out, then back it off a bit to where it sounds right. Once again, don't be concerned about the number. Just trust your ears.

Assuming you like the overall guitar tone you're getting, you should be pretty close by this point with the high and low passes set. Now you can fine-tune by carving out some room in the mids. Don't overdo it because the mids are where your guitars live and if there's not enough mids, you'll be chasing the volume and throwing off your mix.

Use band filter on a parametric EQ, pretty much any DAW should have one, and set it to a somewhat narrow, but not too narrow Q and turn it up several dB, like between 6-12. Sweep slowly through the frequency range and listen for spots that sounds bad, or cheap, or boxy, or too harsh for your liking. If you find any, set the filter to that freq, and carve out a small chunk there. Use your ears to determine the Q width and how much to cut. You may or may not need to do this in a few places.

After you've done that, you should be pretty much there. If you're trying to mix guitars, is it safe to assume that you're also using bass guitar? If so, bass frequencies take up a lot of sonic space in a mix, so will probably need to do similar things to the bass guitar to get it to fit as well. Also, this is another place where your arrangement will really matter. If you're using orchestral instruments and a bass guitar, and you're having the contrabass/cellos and/or other bass orchestral instruments do one thing, and the bass guitar do another, you're having a huge nasty conflict in the low end.

Good luck, hope this was helpful.
 
Yeah, it´s an a idea.



Thanks for spending some time to give some tips. I eq strings only to give them some brightness and presence because sometimes they sound to bassy and unclear. Yeah, automation can be very usefull in some cases but I try to do all I can when they are just midi files, change the velocities and all that shit to avoid a lot of work with automation.

I see that you use MOTU Symphonic, what are your opinion about it? I tried Miroslav Philharmonik and I didnt like. Some of the sounds like the brasses are outdated, the instruments dont have much deepness, sounds harsh even with reverbs and they dont have impact as orchestral sound. This could be a strange opinion because Miroslav have some very good reviews but I am not convinced. EWQL is not a option because I dont have a big machine to run a such heavy VST. So I might try Motu Symphonic.

don't change velocities as they change the samples that are being used to something heavier or softer. I have my velocities maxed out to 127 and then render each instrument to audio and then open up the audio in your session, then you can split the tracks and shift the volumes around, usually 3-6 db always works for certain sections, don't touch your guitars though, you want those to remain consistent. The idea is to automate the orchestras so that when added all together (in your orchestra bus) the RMS is consistent throughout the entire song so that when you match the orchestra volume with the guitars, all the different passages will have the right amount of cut. Of course you can drop certain sections of the orchestra so that the RMS drops about 3db so that they cam down to the point to let the guitars come out .

MOTU is pretty decent for the price but to tell you, VSTs bog your system down when you upload to many samples to your RAM. Its the amount of RAM you have that dictates whether a VSTi will bog your system down, if you have 2GB or more you should not ever have a problem even for massive samples. So EWQL will work as well, as it will only bog down your system when you upload too many different instruments. The only downside is that EWQL is a larger library so it takes up more Hard Drive space, but that is it. I hear the playback engine is a little buggy. Anyway, MOTU has been pretty stable for me minus my interface being a buggy piece of crap.

Take a look at my sig, it has my band's myspace, if you take a listen to the soundclick widget one has the song "For All Life to Seize" and the other has the Orchestra only, take a listen to them, relatively natural, my only complaint is that the brass section while being real instruments weren't recorded too accurately as opposed to the brass section in EWQL, but MOTU's brass is deeper. The Convolution reverb that comes with it is really good as well
 
don't change velocities as they change the samples that are being used to something heavier or softer. I have my velocities maxed out to 127

I'd have to strongly disagree with this. Unless you actually want every instrument to be playing every note Fortissimo all the time, you'll really want to utilize the veloticy layers to create a more realistic performance.

You can still use automation after the fact, but if your sample collection offers velocity layers, take advantage of them and the added realism they can bring to your arrangements.
 
Matthias King and Thewintersnow thank you so much for offering some of your knowledge:worship: There some things that I already know but some others could be very usefull in the future.

Thewintersnow I heard your music and yeah Motu sounds very good. You have also great compositions, it´s always pleasent to hear some like that.