Below is the most common setup found in most indie garage live concert or home party live band setups. It is because this is the most affordable setup with no expensive mixers required.

However, by carefully crafting the sound, the band can produce a great sounding live performances.

As you have noticed, there is no mixer used in the setup. To get the best sound out of this setup, the following are recommended:

1.) Most of the guitar amps have low, mid and high EQ settings. Low corresponds to the bass frequency ranges, mid for medium frequency and high for treble frequencies.

Tip>
a.) To avoid guitar sound to conflict with the bass frequencies (where kick drums and bass guitars dominate) , turn the low(bass) setting to around 2 or 3 (assuming 10 is the loudest in the knob). Setting this to 0 (minimum) is not recommended as it removes the entire guitar bass frequencies which does not sound nice. Feel free to experiment; start with a setting of 3. If your guitar amp does not have 1 to 10 units, you can estimate it by turning the knob between the minimum and the average.

b.) Next, the guitar sound tends to bury the vocals especially if the guitar is using overdrive or heavy in strumming sound. To make the vocals as clear as possible, you need to turn the MID eq knob of your guitar amplifier to around 3 to 4.

c.) Set the treble (high) section to around 5.

2.) For setting bass amplifers, to compensate the loss of guitar bass frequencies you need to beef up the bass guitar amplifers to make the live performance as heavy as possible. Most bass amps like guitars also have EQ knobs (Bass, Mid and Treble). Set the bass knob to around 7 or 8.

The mid in bass guitar is not so important unless you are doing bass solo targeting higher bass notes. You can trim down the mid knob to around 3 to 5 to give way for the vocals.

The treble section can be set to 5.

3.) Finally the vocals, assuming the vocal amps also have some kind of EQ function (low , mid and high). Set the following:

Low(bass) – 3 or 4
Mid – 7 or 8
High – 6 or 7

Set the echo or reverb setting to minimum. Do not overdo as, extreme reverberation or echo can make the lyrics unclear. Put as little as reverb to make the vocal performance sounds fuller without getting drowned.

4.) How about the drums? Drums do not have EQ settings in live mixing. Unless you are miking each one of the drum components which is often not done (unlike when you are recording tracks in the studio, the drums needs to be miked).

The above suggestions will work best for small, garage band like concerts and home party concerts. For big concerts like in the stadium or complex, the drum needs to be miked and all music instruments will need to be routed to a mixer where the engineer can make adjustments similar to the one discussed above. The mixer output is then feed to power amplifer/monitors to generate as loud sound as possible.

This is a beginner guide, so it means that if you are new to mixing, this guide can definitely help you to get started mixing guitar tracks so that it will would sound a bit more professional. It is assuming you have already done the following:

a.) Recording of guitar tracks
b.) No effects still applied to the guitar wave by the DAW.
c.) You are using a PC based DAW such as Cakewalk or Adobe Audition

Bear in mind that having a well recorded guitar is as important as mixing the guitar. So make sure that you have the best recorded material possible (in terms of guitarist performance and the recording quality e.g recording at 24 bits 44.1Khz or 96Khz depending on the ability of your sound card).

It is highly recommended to avoid any noise removing process of the guitar signals as it degrades significantly the overall quality of the guitar sound. Instead, fix your recording hardware so that it will provide the least noise as possible. Details of guitar recording techniques are not included in this tutorial and it is suggested you will use the website search feature or the related post below to look for tutorials.

OK, lets break down the tutorial into 4 categories. These are the EQ, Panning, Compression and Effects.

Guitar EQ settings during mixing:

The overall goal is to prevent muddiness with the vocal frequencies while still allowing the guitar to shine. You will also need to prevent muddiness of the bass components ( bass guitar and kick drums). So the suggested settings are the following:

-8dB high pass filter at 200Hz (this will roll off the bass frequencies below 200Hz of the guitar to prevent mud with the bass, while allowing above 200Hz to pass, you can use the shelving filter in your DAW to do this).

-9dB 3000Hz Q=1.4 (this will prevent muddiness with the vocals, thus improving the vocal clarity). The amount of the cut in dB may be lower in heavy and alternative rock where vocal clarity is not extremely important unlike in pop and country.

+3dB 400Hz Q=1.0 (for overdriven guitars only, this will make it sound heavy).

+2dB 6000Hz Q=1.0 (for clean guitars only, improves the ambiance and clarity of high guitar frequencies).

Compression: Please refer to this tutorial: Audio Compression Tips for Mixing.

Panning: Recording producers sometimes record guitar tracks TWICE, one for the left and the other for the right, panned at -80, +80 units. This will improve the guitar ambiance. This is called “double tracking technique in guitars”.

Recording this twice introduces some delay that improves ambiance. If you have record guitar tracks only once, you can double track by pasting the original track to the second track (no need to re-record again), then applying “delay” effect (5ms -10ms). Do not overdo delay as this can introduces some undesirable effects in mono.

Effects: I seldomly use reverb, chorus and phraser on DAW. If you will use reverb, I recommend to start with 500ms to 1000ms settings apply only to one channel (either left or right). If that sounds not good for you, you might as well apply to both channels but decrease the overall reverb level.

Do not overdo reverb, as it will make the guitar sound so weak and affects its role in the mix. For chorus and phraser, you might as well use external effects , not directly applied to your DAW for best results (this is done only during recording).

This is a short tutorial on how to properly pan guitar in the mix. As a start, it is important that you will learn first the importance and concept of panning.

Panning is the process of assigning a location of musical instrument in the stereo spectrum. A stereo is characterized by:

a. Left channel
b. Right channel
c. Center

Numerically the center is assigned as “0” while the rightmost part of the channel is assigned as +100 and leftmost part channel as -100.

For example, if you assigned a certain musical instrument at panning setting of “0”, it means that you have assigned that instrument in the center of the stereo.

Panning is important because it is used by sound and mixing engineers to simulate live performance. These engineers vision stereo mixing as musicians playing on stage.

So it means that:

1.) The vocalist is at the center of the stage
2.) The drummer is at the center area also.
3.) The bass man is behind the vocalist and also at the center stage.
4.) At the right most is maybe the first guitarist of the band.
5.) While at the left most is the second guitarist.

The standard for panning acoustic or electric guitar must fall within:

Left channel: -50 to -100
Right channel: +50 to +100

And specifically:

a. If you need the guitar to be more punchy, strong and dominant, I will panned it at -50 , +50.
b. For background guitars which the sole purpose is for accompaniment with lots of instruments involved, you can pan it hard left and right (-100 and +100).
c. If there are 2 guitarist (lead and rhythm guitars), you can pan the lead guitar near to the center to give more “presence” in the mix (-50, +50) while the rhythm guitars will be placed at -100 and +100.

For more spacious, ambience and live feeling on the sound of the guitars, you can even put a delay between the left and right channel. So if the right channel is lag at 2ms from the left channel, this creates an illusion of wide stereo.

For best results with panning, you can record the guitar track twice, first place the 1st guitar on the left channel. Record the guitar track again and place it on the right channel. This creates a nice ambience very ideal for pop, acoustic and country recordings.

Mastering is a last stage of the audio production process, next to mixing. So make sure that before you start mastering, your audio wave must pass the following properties:

1.) It is a mix down wave. This is single waveform, which is summation or the final result of the mixing process. It should only be one waveform but containing all musical instruments mix (vocals, drums, guitars, etc). See example below:

2.) No EQ and Compression is still applied. It should be completely fresh, the single waveform is still NOT being adjusted with any mastering EQ and compression settings.

3.) The maximum amplitude of the audio wave (Peak amplitude) should not exceed -1dB. An allowance is needed for EQ and Compression adjustments in mastering. If the wave is already peaking at the loudest level (0dB), then there is no room for EQ and Compression adjustments.

It is a good practice in mixing that the completed mix down should have some room for EQ/mastering adjustments. You can measure the peak amplitude by going to Edit View –> Analyze –> Statistics.

OK, if your wave has been conforming, let’s start the mastering process.

Step1. Trimming of start and ending. I give a 0.3 second allowance before the start of the audio wave and 0.6 second allowance at the end of the wave. If the wave exceeds 0.3 second from the moment it started playing, cut it. Below is the sample screenshot of the trimmed wave at the start (it was exceeding 0.3 seconds before and I cut it to 0.3 seconds standard).

Step2. EQ stage – The objective of EQ stage is to shape the final sound of the recording, apply presence, boost hi frequencies and lows as well as removing muddiness.

Use the Adobe Audition Parametric Equalizer to adjust settings. Refer to this following good tutorial on mastering EQ using Audition:

EQ Settings for Mastering
How to use a parametric equalizer

Step3. Compression stage – The overall objective of the compression stage is to make the audio wave as loud as possible without creating distortion. In this case, I am using the L2 Waves plug-in for Adobe Audition 1.5:

Go to Effects –> DirectX –> Waves –> L2 and adjust the following:

Under factory preset change to: Hi Res CD Master then adjusts the following:

Threshold: -7.5
Out of Ceiling: 0.2

Click OK, this will maximize the volume of the recording to around -13dB (average RMS power) which is considered OK for master recordings. You can check the loudness in terms of average RMS power by Analyze –> Statistics.

Fine tune the mastering and use your ear. You can use this technique to tweak further the quality of your mastering results: Tips when doing home audio mastering

The good thing is that the OP (original poster) provided all the materials for mixing and a sample animated video. This completed mixed sound is needed to be incorporated in an animated video. When you watch the video provided; the sound appears complex but let’s simplify here. Supposing the sound is mixed with respect to a certain observer witnessing the event (missiles chasing the UFO), of course the observer (a person with two ears) is placed at the center of the event. It is why in movie theatres, the screen is always placed in the center with digital stereo system (left and right to simulate real situations). What if we have a scene that a missile coming from left to right chasing the UFO then the missile explodes in the mountain far right? Then as it explodes, we can hear the sound of the falling rocks. To mix, assuming we use the samples of the OP in the thread .We use three audio samples:

1.) The sound of the missile
2.) The sound of the rock explosion
3.) The sound of the falling rocks.

First, to simulate missiles flying from left to right is to pan it far left (-100 to +100 using your mixing software) to right. Then as it flies away from the observer, the sound volume of the missile decreases; I use Adobe Audition to mix this one:

The green line is the volume line; it starts from the top and ends in the middle. The volume starts loudest then it decreases to -6dB (slanting green line from left to your right means a decreasing volume trend).Also, the pan line starts from the hard left all the way to the hard right (blue diagonal line) (to simulate a real time +100 to -100 adjustments in panning).I did not apply reverb on the missile track as I need to sound like it was very near to the observer.

Second is the bomb, to simulate like it was exploded far right, I panned 100 units right. Then to simulate like it was exploding behind. I apply reverb with the settings below:

The objective of applying reverb is adding more depth to that event and to simulate it exploding from behind.

I also apply some EQ to the bomb, see below for the settings:

The objective of adding EQ is to cut 2000Hz range which is not realistic to hear in actual scenarios; you hear some bass and cut mid range in actual sound.

Third, with the rocks… I panned it also 100 units because it will make sense since the location of missile explosion and rocks are the same. The reverb setting is the same with bombs since they are in the same perceptual location. I also apply some EQ to the rocks , with similar objective to missile explosion.

If you like to see all tracks in the Adobe Audition multi-track view, here it is:

http://www.audiorecording.me/wordpress/postimages/fullscreenshotmultitrackview.jpg

The final mixed sound is this:

So what you will hear is that the missile is flying from left to right and explodes it far right in the behind, with rocks falling from the mountains.