How To Enhance the Shakers in Your Mix

Many different percussive sounds can be used in the rhythm section of your mix, but one of the most overlooked is the shaker. Shakers come in many different varieties. They all sound different. Their name comes from creating sound with them – moving them back and forth in the air rather than striking and shaking them! Most could also be hit for a more excellent accent on specific beats. If mixed correctly, this percussive instrument can introduce a feeling of fullness and make your mixes sound more organic. Shakers often play with a particular pattern of rhythmic subdivision. By nature, shakers might feel too loud, dry, or easily lost in the mix. Therefore, the following tutorial will show you how to get them to sit just right.

We will start by listening to a previously made sequence in our SoundBridge: DAW. It contains most of the elements of a full mix.

Let's add a shaker sequence. We will listen to it solo and then in the context of the whole mix.

We could first introduce latency between the left and right channels to make this shaker sequence a bit wider and more prominent. We could do that with many different effects. In this case, we have chosen the PHA-979 by Voxengo. In the picture below, you will notice how much we shifted the values of the left and the right channels. Bear in mind these values are expressed in milliseconds. It's just a tiny time-shift, but enough to widen the stereo image of the shaker sequence. Let's listen to the difference.

Reverb and Distortion Can Work Great on Shakers

We've widened the stereo image of our shaker, but there's still more to be done with it. For example, we could add a bit of room reverb, which would fit nicely since it sounds too dry. For this, we have chosen the FabFilter Pro-R. As you can see from the picture below, small reverb decay and a bit of playing with reverb EQ is all we need. Let's hear the difference.

We feel that the color of this shaker sequence could be altered a bit as well. Therefore, adding distortion at the end of our effect chai might be good. In this case, we have used the Devilloc Deluxe by Soundtoys. It's a simple but effective distortion unit. The shaker sequence now sounds a bit dirtier in solo, but this is what we aimed for.

Finally, let's listen to our shaker in the context of the full mix. First, the unprocessed and then the processed version.