Tonal balance control

“Tonal balance” is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot by mixing and mastering engineers as if they’re talking about something as commonplace as water, but for the uninitiated, it can leave them scratching their heads. What is tonal balance, what makes it good or bad, and how does one go about achieving good tonal balance?In this piece, we’ll not only talk you through what tonal balance is, but also show you some tools and techniques you can use while mixing or mastering to achieve great tonal balance for your songs. So, let’s roll up our sleeves and dive in!In this piece you’ll learn:What tonal balance is, and what makes it good or badHow to measure and adjust tonal balance during mixingThe role of tonal balance in masteringPro Tip: Follow along and utilize tonal balance in your mix with a copy of iZotope’s Music Production Suite Music Production Suite 7 Music Production Suite 7 includes the new Ozone 11 Advanced, RX 11 Standard, Neutron 5, Native Instruments Guitar Rig 7 Pro, surround reverbs with Stratus 3D plus Symphony 3D by Exponential Audio, and the Brainworx Creative Mixing Set. It also includes the iZotope Audiolens referencing app. Shop Now Try Now that includes Tonal Balance Control Tonal Balance Control 2 Get decades of mastering expertise in your next session with Tonal Balance Control 2, a plug-in that helps you overcome your listening environment and achieve a balanced mix. View the frequency balance in your track and compare to genre targets, upload your own unique custom curve, and create with confidence that your music will translate. Shop Now Try Now and Insight Insight 2 Insight 2 is a comprehensive metering and audio analysis plug-in that is a core component of award-winning post production houses, music studios, and broadcast facilities. Shop Now Try Now , along with more industry-standard mixing and mastering plug-ins. Get Your Plug-ins What is tonal balance?In the simplest sense, tonal balance refers to the distribution of energy across the range of audible frequencies—about 20 Hz to 20 kHz—usually in the context of a full mix. Very broadly speaking, you could think of this as the balance between bass, midrange, and treble, but of course, we can—and do—get more granular. Thus, when we talk about tonal balance we’re really talking about how the different frequencies and frequency ranges in a mix balance against each other.What makes good

Mix adjustments, the tonal balance curve can provide a great roadmap to guide you toward areas that may need some attention. In our example mix, we’re reinforcing some of the moves we made in the mix, but only by a decibel or two. Conveniently, the vertical scale of the EQ is adjusted so that we can see moves of half a decibel or less. To give you a sense of the kind of difference these types of tonal balance adjustments can make across a mix and master, here’s an excerpt from “Debris” by Iris Lune, first flat, and then with our mix and master tonal balance adjustments.Start mixing and mastering with Tonal Balance ControlAs you can see, the ways in which Neutron, Ozone, Insight, and Tonal Balance Control all integrate together make for a powerful combination that can allow you to speed up your workflow, and provide guidance at the same time. Hopefully this has not only given you some ideas for new ways in which you can use Tonal Balance Control in your projects, but also demonstrated the impact tonal balance adjustments can make.

June 4, 2020 by Will Hunt Listen to iZotope employees break down their favorite reference tracks for mixing and mastering using iZotope Insight 2 and Tonal Balance Control 2. Before the pandemic, we brought a few iZotope employees together to talk about the tracks they use as references for mixing and mastering.Watch iZotope employees share their favorite reference tracks, and discover how the pros use references to think about their own productions. In the video we'll examine the songs with iZotope's industry-leading reference and metering plug-ins Tonal Balance Control Tonal Balance Control 2 Get decades of mastering expertise in your next session with Tonal Balance Control 2, a plug-in that helps you overcome your listening environment and achieve a balanced mix. View the frequency balance in your track and compare to genre targets, upload your own unique custom curve, and create with confidence that your music will translate. Shop Now Try Now and Insight 2 Insight 2 Insight 2 is a comprehensive metering and audio analysis plug-in that is a core component of award-winning post production houses, music studios, and broadcast facilities. Shop Now Try Now —both of which are available to try for free in Music Production Suite Pro iZotope Music Production Suite Pro: Monthly Access the new RX 10 Standard, Insight Pro, VocalSynth Pro, Ozone 10 Advanced, Neutron 4, Nectar Pro, Neoverb Pro, Tonal Balance Control Pro, and Melodyne 5 essential, member-exclusive content, and all major iZotope product updates. Shop Now . Want to use these references with your own projects? You can download all the songs in the video as target curves to use in Tonal Balance Control. DOWNLOAD FREE CURVES

Of Insight Insight 2 Insight 2 is a comprehensive metering and audio analysis plug-in that is a core component of award-winning post production houses, music studios, and broadcast facilities. Shop Now Try Now and Tonal Balance Control Tonal Balance Control 2 Get decades of mastering expertise in your next session with Tonal Balance Control 2, a plug-in that helps you overcome your listening environment and achieve a balanced mix. View the frequency balance in your track and compare to genre targets, upload your own unique custom curve, and create with confidence that your music will translate. Shop Now Try Now on the final insert slots of your master bus. Not only will this allow us to see our overall tonal balance, but it will also provide the ability to see the individual frequency contribution of each subgroup and adjust its EQ, all from within Insight and Tonal Balance Control.Analyzing and adjusting your mixNext up, navigate to a portion of your song that has the most full-on arrangement—probably something like the final chorus—hit play, and take a look at what’s going on in Tonal Balance Control. In our example mix, shown below, we can see a couple of frequency ranges we might like to address with EQ moves. We’ve got some energy buildup in the very low and high areas of the frequency spectrum, along with a bit of a scoop in the high mids. To see if we can pinpoint what’s contributing to these frequency ranges, let’s switch over to Insight, and maximize the spectrogram panel. By clicking on the “Select a source” dropdown, we can choose to view the outputs of our Neutron Equalizer instances—and we can even assign the same colors we used on our mixer channels. Then, when we press play again, we can see how everything fits together and make some choices about where to EQ for a better tonal balance. For instance, we can see that there’s actually some low end clutter coming from our guitars and vocals, that the fundamental of the bass is largely overpowering the kick drum, that the vocals and synths are both fairly scooped in the high mids, and that it’s predominantly the vocal—and partially the drums—that’s contributing to the excess energy in the high end. Armed with this information, we can pop back into Tonal Balance control and begin making some adjustments.At the bottom of the Tonal Balance Control

Outros, solos, etc. If your mix does not appear well-balanced in “Broad” view, we also provide a “Fine” view, which displays a more typical spectrum analyzer view (although things have been level normalized and smoothed in time and frequency to still maintain the zoomed out tonal balance qualities). Fine view can be very useful in deciding where exactly to make an EQ change to better match your target frequency spectrum, and using iZotope’s new cross communication technology, you can control any Ozone or Neutron EQ anywhere in your session without leaving Tonal Balance Control. Dynamics and Tonal BalanceMost of our discussion on tonal balance has focused on frequency relationships, however, one characteristic that we saw over and over again in mixes that “needed work” was out of control low-end dynamics. In situations where the dynamic range between frequency bands is highly variable, applying a limiter during mastering will essentially have the effect of changing volume for only the most dynamic frequency range (typically the bass, a.k.a, low end).For this reason Tonal Balance Control also displays a low-end crest factor meter that measures the difference between the highest sample peak and overall level (e.g., RMS or integrated loudness) in your audio. Mixes with an overly dynamic low end will consistently be past the far left line shown on the meter, and can often benefit from some gentle low-end compression, so final limiting can be much more transparent. This can be achieved with dynamic nodes in a Neutron EQ, which can be controlled inside of Tonal Balance Control, or with your favorite compressor.Additionally, if your mix has a very small low-end crest factor (at the far right of the meter) you may want to dial back your compression/limiting depending on where you stand in the Loudness Wars. Wrapping UpThe unique spectrum analyzer, targets, and communication technology present in Tonal Balance Control can be extremely valuable in mixing and mastering workflows, and provide added confidence that your track will “measure up.” However, attempts at achieving a target should never compromise your creative vision. The goal in creating Tonal Balance Control was not to

What is tonal balance, and how do I tell whether my mix has it? This is probably a question most musicians and audio engineers have asked at one point or another, even if they didn’t use those exact words. Tonal balance refers to how frequencies interact with each other, and is often the main culprit in mixes that don’t translate between listening environments (e.g., a mix sounds great in the studio, but not on a car stereo). A common example of a mix that exhibits poor tonal balance is when you can’t quite hear the vocals, so you turn up the volume, but then the bass becomes overwhelming.Our hope is that understanding tonal balance can help save you from a non-ideal listening environment and speed up your mixing and mastering workflow. To this end, iZotope created the Tonal Balance Control plug-in, which allows you to visualize spectral information in a unique way while also serving as a remote control for any Ozone or Neutron EQs throughout your session. To learn how Tonal Balance Control fits into your audio production workflow, check out this article.To read about tonal balance from a variety of perspectives—musicians, recording engineers, mixing engineers, and mastering engineers—check this blog out.In this post we'll explore the technical details of the approach we developed at iZotope to quantify tonal balance. Rethinking the Spectrum AnalyzerThe spectrum analyzer is one of the most important metering tools in any audio engineer's toolkit, and it works by displaying the frequency content of an audio signal typically computed using an algorithm called the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). While the spectrum analyzer is a great tool for identifying resonant and fundamental frequencies, it provides too much information for analyzing tonal balance. I like to use the analogy of GPS navigation software, where the spectrum analyzer is showing you the equivalent of detailed maps at the street/neighborhood level. To analyze tonal balance we want a zoomed-out view that displays things more at the level of a country, state, or province.In zooming out from the typical spectrum analyzer, we first need to understand the things a spectrum