.SuperJAM! Tutorial: The Mixing Grid

Please note that there are a gajillion exceptions, caveats, and twiddles to mixing, and in fact quite a few books have been devoted to the subject. All this tutorial hopes to do is give you an idea of what you can do with the SJam Mixing Grid, and how to do it.

SJam's Mixing Grid is very easy to use, and gives you a great deal of control over the "feel" of your music. It allows you to set each of the Band Members to an instrument in the General MIDI instrument set, to shift each instrument's pitch up or down as much as four octaves, and to adjust each Band Member's volume (loudness) and pan (left-to-right position in the stereo field) by moving them around on a grid. Band Members at the top of the grid play louder.

Open the Grid and Meet the Band

To open the Mixing Grid, double-click on your Band (in the Keyboard window if you want to mix for the whole song, or in a Section window if you want to mix for just that Section).

Your six Band Members are represented by icons. These do not necessarily have anything to do with the MIDI instruments assigned to each Band Member, although they often are of that instrument type. Think of them as fulfilling a need, rather than playing a specific instrument, and you'll have a better idea of how SJam works:

• The Lead Player -- the horn icon actually represents a bit of a misnomer: it's your tertiary melody as far as AudioActive is concerned. The Lead Player is not used much by SJam, which gives you a ready space for your own lead lines and solos.

• The Strings Player -- support and texture. Synth pads, horns, and woodwinds are useful here, but be careful that the sound doesn't get too muddy. The wrong MIDI instrument, in combination with "too many notes" in some of the busier Styles, can make your Strings sound like a pack of four-year-olds leaning on a Casio keyboard in a bowling alley.

• The Guitar Player -- your secondary melody, adding rhythm and counterpoint. A good guitar riff can push a song along at a merry pace; a bad riff can sound like, "well, yeah, we thought we needed a guitar here, dude". Depending on SJam's melodic line, woodwinds and other instruments can sound really good here; it's a good Band Member to experiment with.

• The Keyboard Player -- your primary melody. This has the most variation, and the most activity of any track besides Drums. Instruments with a sharper attack (more distinctive notes), such as pianos, electronic organs, and plucked instruments (guitars, harps, etc.) usually work well here.

• The Bass Player -- support and rhythm. Instruments with sharper attack are usually your best choices for faster music; slower songs allow and even encourage less distinction between notes.

• The Drummer -- support and rhythm. Unless you have something specific in mind involving a special drum set, and you're willing to take the time and effort necessary to polish the Drum track in every Section, it's probably best to leave this alone.

Each Band Member has an instrument assigned to them already, but you can change any of them just by clicking on the instrument name. Highlighting the instrument you'd like to use and clicking again will send a MIDI Program Change command to that Band Member, assigning it the instrument you've chosen.

An Octave Imagination

The small down-arrow button to the right of the instrument name is the Octave Selector button. This is useful when you're trying to sort out the key you're working in. If, for example, the song is in the right key for your voice, and the Piano and Strings are perfect, but the Guitar is too rubbery and the Bass sounds more like a regular guitar, you can shift the Guitar up an octave, and the Bass down an octave, and SJam will automatically adjust each of those tracks as they're played.

Thinking Inside the Box

The Mixing Grid itself is a 20x20 box which graphically represents MIDI Control Changes #7 (volume, along the vertical) and #10 (panning, along the horizontal). Just click and drag on a Band Member to where you want it. Towards the top of the grid is louder. Towards the vertical center of the grid is equal signal to the left and right.

Here's a typical mix I use:

The volume of the Drums is lower than that of any other Band Member, because drum sounds have a very sharp attack -- they sound louder than less abrupt sounds of a similar volume. Lowering the volume also makes the Drums sound further away from the "front of the stage", i.e., the lead instruments, and it reduces the effect of the Drums filling the stereo field unrealistically.

The pan position of the Drums is almost precisely centered -- centered because they provide a stronger foundation to the whole song that way, almost because of two interesting effects:

1. Psychologically, they sound better if just a touch off center. MIDI Drums are usually a stereo effect, covering the entire left-to-right field, with different drums at different positions to give the drum "set" the illusion of space. Unfortunately, this sounds as if the listener is sitting where the drummer is. And drum sounds all coming from just one point in the stereo field, especially hard to one side or the other, simply don't work. But putting them slightly off-center gives them an added sense of position, making it seem more likely that there's an actual drummer back there somewhere.

2. Electronically, some synthesizers (both sound cards and external sound modules, such as my Korg X5DR) have a problem with "phase shifting" or "phase clipping" on some drum sets when they're dead center. The effect makes some of your most sibillant drums, like snares, sound like cricket chirps bolstered with AM radio static, and it can be very jarring.

Also, the most prominent melodic instrument (in this case, the Rock Organ, represented by the Keyboard symbol) is just a little bit to the other side of center. This increases the "live" feel of the band, by putting them close to each other on the "stage", but not on top of each other. Note that, because it's close to the center of the stereo field, I can give it a lower volume than the other melodic instruments.

The Bass, further to the right, anchors the Keyboard, just left of center. The melodic lead, symbolized by the Horn, is not used much by SJam (although that does make it available for your own solos), but when it is used, it usually works well somewhere between (in this case) hard right and one-third of the way to the left.

(Note, by the way, that the "Horn" is currently set to Acoustic Grand Piano. As mentioned above, the instruments are not necessarily precisely what's pictured; the icons represent their purpose in the Band more than the specific sound.)

The Guitar, the other melodic lead, works best balancing the Bass on the opposite side. It's lending flavor to the mix, but not necessarily driving it. The Strings, furthest to the left, add texture, support, and ambience. They also work well just off-center; play with the volume a bit to get a pleasing effect.

SAVE, DAMMIT!

Once you're happy with your mix, save it. Specifically, use the Save Band As... command in the File menu, and name your band something appropriate to the project, or at least something you'll remember -- I named the one above tom01.bnd.

When you've settled on a style in the Keyboard window, you can Load your Band, and it will become the "Default" band for this project (assuming that the Band menu in the Keyboard window is set to Default). An important point: If you decide to audition a different Style, you will have to reload your Band if you select a style you haven't yet used in this session of SuperJAM! The Styles you've already used will have a little asterisk (*) next to them.

A Few of the Finer Points

While, in MIDI terms, the panning and volume levels are independent and absolute, in mixing terms they work together. The further to the left or right your instruments are, the louder you can make them and not disrupt the mix. Conversely, the closer to center your instruments are, the less loud you can make them and not lose them in the mix. Note, however, that there is not a whole lot of usable room here. The top half of the Grid, specifically the top seven or eight lines, are the most effective. Below the halfway point, your instruments will be almost inaudible.

The most important use of the Mixing Grid is the obvious one -- making sure that you have as much level for each instrument as you need, and no more than you want. That's why you also have a Grid for each Section, by the way; some songs require a boost here or a pan there.

An example: Remember Meat Loaf's hit, I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)? During some of the slow parts of the choruses, you can hear long, mournful guitar notes that haunt the background. That same guitar jumps to the front for some of the lead lines, and almost blowing out the amps. Most of what the engineer is doing, though, is extremely basic: lowering the volume and upping the reverb during the slower parts, when the guitar is supposed to be in the background, and then raising the volume and lowering the reverb when the guitar is playing lead riffs.

This leads us to another important point: The sequencer functions in SJam are solid, but hardly vast. Many common control changes, such as those adding reverb, cannot be added to a SuperJAM! song. I admit that I haven't found this much of a limitation; if I need that much reverb added to a song, I follow the Very Important Hint below. However, if you really need internal control changes, it's not that much trouble to export an SJam song to a MIDI file, and then edit that file in a more powerful sequencer.

A Very Important Hint Regarding Multitrack Recording

The purpose of the Mixing Grid is to let you easily mix your music internally. If you are doing something more elaborate and professional, and you plan to record each instrument separately in an external sequencer or multitrack recorder, I recommend giving each instrument as much signal as possible by placing each instrument dead center at the top of the grid.

The only exceptions to this would be if you have the drum phasing problem described above (in which case you set the drums just a touch off center), or if the sound quality of an instrument is distorted by its volume, which you can only tell by listening to it as it plays on your sound card or synthesizer.

Recording each track is easy, if a bit time consuming. Just mute all the other tracks, play the song through once while your recorder is on, and repeat for each track. (Consult your recorder's manual to find out how it handles MIDI Sync and SMPTE timing. It also might be easier, if you're used to a particular sequencer, to Export the song as a MIDI file and run the MIDI Sync through that program.) If you have the tracks, you might want to record your drums in dead-center stereo; this will allow you much greater control over their positioning (see below).

Having all your instruments on their own tracks is often vital for professional production. You can't necessarily know how vocals or additional, external instruments will interact with the original mix. Panning or volume problems in an internally mixed MIDI file mean you have to fix the file and rerecord everything. But putting the individual instruments on their own tracks lets you adjust them on the fly, so that if you get caught off guard by an Interesting Special Effect you can do something about it without recreating a huge amount of work. It's also much easier to add an effect to just one or two instruments (for instance, a noise gate to your drums, a wah-wah pedal effect to an electric guitar, some fuzz to a bass, or more reverb and pan to your instruments than to your vocals [which increases the illusion of a band "behind" the singer]).

Positioning of the instruments is also a piece of cake. A little reverb here, and something is slightly behind everything else. A little off to the side, and something else becomes a more dramatic accompaniment. If you've got a stereo instrument, such as drums, recorded on two tracks, you can change not only the position, but the apparent size of the instrument -- panning the two tracks to, say, 15% left and 5% right, puts a smaller drum set behind the "front man"'s "left shoulder", while panning hard left and right fills the "stage" with the drums.

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