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.
Ozone’s versatile EQ allows you to add warmth and character with analog matched filters, or precisely boost and cut frequencies with digital linear phase filters. In version 5, Ozone now offers two versatile EQs for placement within the signal chain. IZotope’s Dialogue Match gives your scenes environmental and spatial continuity with just a few clicks from a simple interface. Learn how to best use Dialogue Match in three unique situations.
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To learn how Tonal Balance Control fits into your audio production workflow, check out this article. Slip in djay 2.
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 Analyzer
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The 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 analyzer is measuring that might complicate or confound our ability to measure tonal balance. The first and most important criterion is that we want the tonal balance meter to be level-independent, i.e., we want to measure the overall shape of the frequency spectrum not how loud or quiet a mix is. Additionally, in a typical spectrum analyzer, the view is dominated by the “peaks” in the spectrum, which correspond to the musical notes being played or sung. This means a song transposed to a different key, will look different on a spectrum analyzer, but in terms of tonal balance we’d want the original and transposed song to be similar (assuming everything else is identical). Finally, a typical spectrum analyzer updates several times per second, while for tonal balance we want something that measures overall frequency content, so it should be averaging on the scale of several seconds or even over the entire track.
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Using existing tools, e.g., the spectrum analyzers available in the EQ sections of the Ozone or Neutron plug-ins, you can get a good tonal balance measurement by changing the Spectrum Type to Critical, 1/3 Octave, of Full Octave mode, which can smooth out the peaks from the exact notes being played, and the “Average Time” option can then be set to five seconds or greater.