Summing in a Mix within your DAW
Summing in your DAW, how to manage gains and frequencies for maintaining headroom and clarity.
Gain Staging
Purchase to view this tutorial
By purchasing this tutorial, you'll get immediate access - your purchase helps create new and exciting content and this site survive!
£1.00Add to basket
Summing in a Mix within your DAW is a detailed video tutorial explaining what summing is and how to avoid it when mixing.
One of the biggest problems facing producers, all producers, is that of summing. A clear explanation is needed to understand what happens to audio in a mix project when summed and I hope that I have provided that both with the description below and the supplied video tutorial.
Summing
When identical frequencies that exist in two different layers (channels) are combined, you invariably get a gain boost at those frequencies.
If you take two sine waves of the same frequency and amplitude, and sum them you will get a gain increase of 6dB (example below).
The waveform on the top is at ‑9 dB, and when duplicated and summed into a new single mono file we get a value of ‑3 dB. This is important information to take on board and nail into your brain: you can imagine what happens when you have a mix with a huge number of channels all summing and clipping the output simply because shared frequencies are always summed at the output.
The subject of Summing – why it happens and how to manage it- is too complex for some to grasp. Let me simplify it for you and get you managing your gains in no time.
In the Summing in a Mix within your DAW video, I show you how you can determine which frequencies are shared and which are summed. I explain how we use the GUI of DAW channel eq to tell us what is happening where in the mix. I explain every step of the process using a working mix.
The plugin used in this video:
Topics covered in this video are:
- Summing within your DAW
- Metering for Control
- Gain Structuring your Project/Mixes
- Loudness Compensation
- Clashing and Smearing Frequencies
- Peak and RMS Control
- Managing Gains
If you found this tutorial helpful then give these a try:
Avoiding Masking and Summing of frequencies by Panning
The Pan Law within your DAW explained in detail
Total and Partial Phase cancellation
Stealing Transients – Maximising Loudness
Gain Staging using True Peak Meters