Abubilla Music

How To Guide: Mixing Beat Boxing 1.0

Written by Mikey

This is from Mikey, our resident beat boxing and the heart and soul of Invading London and Sat Out the 15th.  He was teaching Jimmy how to mix Invading London and provided the following: 

So, I’ll give you a quick primer of how I generally start mixing beatbox and then the things I generally tweak after that.   Recorded beatbox generally just doesn’t have the same boom and pop as it does in real life, so the whole goal is to increase both to let it drive the song, the way that actual percussion does.

Compression: 

Solo the beatbox track and set the ratio around 8:1 – 10:1.  Bring down the trigger threshold (slowly!) until you can hear the bass drum and snare sounds triggering the compression.  The snare noise will basically change from the sounding like a wet sneeze/fart to sounding like you’re smacking the top of a table.  Since you’ve both lowered the average volume and limited the max volume of the track, bring the gain up a ton so that the beatbox really starts to rock.

Unsolo the track and you can start tweaking the ratio/threshold/gain to continue to increase the punchiness.  Not punchy enough?  Try upping the ratio a bit, pulling down the threshold a bit and upping the gain a bit.  Watch though, because too high of a ratio kills all of the attack of the snare and you lose that cracking sound.

EQ:

Put the beatbox on with a really minimalist mix—maybe just rhythm guitar and lead vox.  The easy part is the low and high.  Boost the low low end (maybe 200Hz – 500Hz) over a wider Q a decent bit (+3 to 4 db)and you should start hearing some oomph come out of the bass drum sounds.   If you boost the higher low end (~1kHz, +2dB) with a narrow Q, you should start hearing some more punch coming out of the attack of the bass drum.

Head to the high and a nudge up (just a dB or 2) a large section of the upper range (maybe 10kHz) with a really wide Q and you should start hearing some shimmer in the hi hats and cymbal noises.  (This isn’t always appropriate with faster more intense songs like Invading, but could add some really nice shine on Sat Out.)

The mids are a lot more challenging, but this can be extremely valuable.  You want to cut pieces of the 1.5kHz to 4kHz range out.  There are no real guidelines here, so you’ll just have to use your ears and find something you like.  Start by dropping around 3-4 dB from the 2.5kHz range, medium Q.  Then start sliding it around between 1.5kHz and 4kHz.  You should hear the snare drum becoming ‘colder’ and ‘warmer’, for lack of better term, as you do it.  Sounds abstract, but you’ll hear what I mean.  You may have to scale back the cut to just about -1-2dB, but you should always start heavy on this particular EQ cut so that you know what you’re listening for.

Look at the graph below for an intensely crude diagram of what the beatbox EQ curve should roughly looks like.

It will definitely be a challenge as you add other instruments back in, because you’ll lose the sound you’ve just developed, but just trust your ears and the beatbox can really rock out on CD.  When I get home, I’ll send you a few clips of some things I’ve recorded with beatbox to give you a benchmark of what I mean.

That’s it.    Off to mix Invading London and Sat Out to do Mikey proud!

(Jimmy) for Mikey