Layers - front/middle/rear

[RainbowStorm]

Hi all and happy weekend!!

I have not yet got a wooow effect when it comes to stereo mixing in layers. For this reason I am still not very convinced about the importance of it. What about you, do you find mixing in layers important? What kind of approaches do you have when it comes to mixing such that you target different layers differently to enhance the perception of the depth? What's your view on what it means, soundwise, to have a good perception of a foreground, middleground and a background layer?

My understanding of depth is this. When you increase the track volume the sound source becomes bigger. When you decrease the track volume the sound source becomes smaller. With a high dynamic range the perception of the depth is noticable due to the volume difference/contrast produced by the transients on sustained tones (sound fading away). For this reason one would think that sound sources with a long decay/reverb should be kept uncompressed to enhance the perception of the depth. Sound sources on the foreground layer, like lead vocals, should be compressed and set loud in the mix. Instruments in the middle should not be EQed, instruments in the back should have some high mid frequency cut (to enhance the perception of objects being in front of them). To further enhance the depth, the mix as a whole should be kept uncompressed. Any other ways of improving the depth?

[danasti]

Happy weekend to you too.

I agree with most of what you said up to the eq of middle ground and compression of reverb. In an ambient field something louder sounds closer, and something quieter will sound further away but that's either related to its own starting point or the level of another sound. Increasing loudness sounds like it's coming forward and decreasing volume sounds like it's going further away. High and low frequency extends the top to bottom perception, depending on the speaker's and listeners positioning. Width is controlled by panning but also defined by the quality of the stereo buss, room and listening position. Of course there's a finite amount of space that you can fill up, i.e. headroom.

I can't find any hard and fast rules that stand up all of the time. You can increase the high frequency, cut the lows/mids and fade the sound back to your middle ground, making it sound like it's going up and away. So wouldn't that be an eq'd instrument in the middle ground? And compressing a reverb could make for a pumping depth effect. It all comes down to the equipment quality though.

As long as you get the listener to hear whatever it is that you thought up, you have been successful, right?

[RainbowStorm]

Originally Posted by danasti

Happy weekend to you too.

I agree with most of what you said up to the eq of middle ground and compression of reverb. In an ambient field something louder sounds closer, and something quieter will sound further away but that's either related to its own starting point or the level of another sound. Increasing loudness sounds like it's coming forward and decreasing volume sounds like it's going further away. High and low frequency extends the top to bottom perception, depending on the speaker's and listeners positioning. Width is controlled by panning but also defined by the quality of the stereo buss, room and listening position. Of course there's a finite amount of space that you can fill up, i.e. headroom.

I can't find any hard and fast rules that stand up all of the time. You can increase the high frequency, cut the lows/mids and fade the sound back to your middle ground, making it sound like it's going up and away. So wouldn't that be an eq'd instrument in the middle ground? And compressing a reverb could make for a pumping depth effect. It all comes down to the equipment quality though.

As long as you get the listener to hear whatever it is that you thought up, you have been successful, right?

Thanks for your reply! What you say makes sense. Volume automation must be useful in this context. When a foreground layered instrument increases in volume and a background layered instrument decreases in volume that should add some feeling of the depth, at least temporarily. I guess you could also group the tracks to different layers and use automation on these. It seems like you need to create differences between these layers to add depth, one way of doing that is to work on group tracks so that each layer gets a certain characteristic and then use volume difference to create the depth ratio.

I have to go to a restaurant now, have a nice evening! thumbsup

[Kiwiburger]

Who was that masked man ...

[RainbowStorm]

Any other comments?

[Kiwiburger]

Compressing reverb can give greater depth, simply because it dynamically raises the level of reverb.

Think about how distant sounds arrive at our ears. Compared to the same sound right in our face, the distant version is:

Lower in level
Duller, due to loss of high frequency energy from friction in the air
Compressed and Diffused, due to the shock-absorber effect of travelling through air,
Varying in pitch and phase, due to currents in the air (wind, heat convection)
Multiple delays, with dense clusters from specific large surfaces/buildings/mountains.

Also - the further away, the more mono the whole mess will appear to be.

Any artificial reverb or echo will provide some or all of these effects.

True stereo recordings are rare, so for most musical purposes we are looking for pschoacoustic tricks to fool our brain into perceiving depth that really isn't there.

There are so many ways of achieving these illusions of depth, but they all come back to the basic principles above.

Sometimes, something that can't happen in nature still sounds very cool and ear-catching. Like non-linear reverb, or through-zero flanging. But our brain still percieves these artificial effects as depth illusions. Like those Escher optical illusion drawings, that appear to have paths leading somewhere far away (depth) but they connect up with something in the foreground in a way that is impossible in real life.

So how do you like them apples?