Mixing masterclass
Hey everyone! Usually we post lessons like this in our blog over several shorter posts, but we wanted to create a master list of mixing knowledge that will grow over time. We want this to be one of the best sources on mixing tip for helping both beginners and experienced producers. First of all if you haven't signed up for our mailing list you can do so at the bottom of any page - we'll send you a free copy of our Mixing Tips e-book!
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Once again this is going to be a living website page, so keep checking back for added content.
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First of all...
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What is mixing?
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Mixing is the art of combing all of your individual audio recordings for a song into a final piece of music. Common things to do while mixing is adjusting the volume of instruments relative to one another, EQing certain instruments to sound better on top of other instruments, compressing tracks so they have a more even volume, and much more. Check the gallery below for some images and videos to get a better idea what mixing music is all about.
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What do I need to start mixing music?
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Computer: Modern music is recorded and produced using computers and software. Long gone are the days of tape recording (except for niche cases). You can get started on any computer but eventually you'll likely upgrade. At Genera Studios we use a $3,000 iMac with most of the options maxed out (RAM, CPU, storage), and we have tons of external drives for more storage. You can get by with a $500 laptop for years though depending on your type of music.
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DAW: A DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) is the software you run on your computer to handle all of your tracks, plugins, recording, mixing, and mastering. You can't even get started without one of these. Here at Genera Studios we've been using Logic Pro for over a decade, but its only available on Mac OSX. If you're on Windows we'd recommend Cubase or Ableton Live - check reviews online to see if either fit your type of music production better. Its important to note that these options are not free, however there are free DAW's online if you search Google for them. Many commercial options will offer a free trial but if you have a Mac you'll at least have Garageband.
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Audio Interface: If you want to actually record the music you're mixing you'll need an audio interface. If you are just having people send you the tracks, or everything is digitally produced using software in your DAW then you may be able to get by without this. At the very least an audio interface will be a hub to handle your studio monitors. We use a Scarlett 2i2 audio interface because its cheap and fantastic, check it out here.
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Studio monitors: If you want to get serious about mixing music you're going to need studio monitors, click here to learn why. Headphones will get you by for a couple months if you have to, just make sure that they come highly regarded in the online production community. You may learn bad habits using headphones. Definitely do not use your laptop speakers or the built in speakers on your computer. KRK Rokit 5's are pretty popular.
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Time and Money: This isn't something you'll become an expert at overnight, and its not typically a cheap hobby. You'll be building your skills over decades but it will take a lot of trial and error, learning, and patience. It is possible to be very good at mixing and music production with almost no money, you'll just have to work a little harder. Most of the expensive tools audio engineers use like 3rd party plugins, acoustic treatment, great monitors, outboard gear are not necessary for the hobbyist. The first 95% of quality can be done with a barebones setup like this list describes, the last 5% of quality comes from either being very good at utilizing your cheap tools or having that expensive gear. The problem is that this last 5% is what can make or break a mix from being amateur or pro. Don't let that get in your way for now.
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Getting Started
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We're going to assume that you already have some music you want to mix since this is a mixing tutorial and not a songwriting or recording tutorial. Getting started can be a little scary since you'll have a DAW full of tracks, it likely doesn't sound very good currently, and theirs a bunch of sliders and buttons to click on which you may or may not understand. We think the easiest way to start is just to only deal with volume levels. Our images are going to be in Logic Pro but the workflow should be similar in any DAW, we bet there are manuals and hundreds of articles online you can find to figure out the equivalent functions in your DAW.
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The images below show two places you can adjust the track levels in Logic Pro. Just start adjusting the sliders until you have something that you think sounds good.
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Pro Tip
It can be helpful to start with all the sliders down (or left), and then fade in the drums. Then start raising the bass, then the synths, then the vocals. Then go back and tweak the volumes more.
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At it's core this is what mixing is all about - adjusting the volumes of tracks relative to other tracks. When you start dabbling with compression you're just modifying the volumes of the tracks in a more controlled manner. When you apply EQ edits to a track you're just changing the volume of different frequencies of the track. When you add an exciter or a saturation effect you're just adding higher frequency content at a particular volume to the track. Everything can be summarized to adjusting volumes of something.
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Panning
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See the knob next to your volume slider (often labeled as Pan)? Panning gives you the ability to control the amount of audio coming out of the left or right for each track. This is also a volume based effect because by default your track will be centered, which causes the volume to be equal across both speakers. When you pan something to the left you're just increasing the volume coming out of the left speaker and decreasing it in the right speaker. Panning can be used to give instruments their own space, increase the clarity of your mix, and give your mix a wider stereo image.
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Typical Examples:
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If you're recording guitars, try recording the guitar part twice and panning one left and one right. This is very common in metal and rock guitars. Don't just copy and paste, you want the minute differences that happen when you dual track a part.
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If your mix has vocals and harmony parts, keep the lead part dead center and pan the harmonies left and right.
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Drums such as toms, hi-hats, and effect hits can be panned to match the stereo image from the perspective of the drummer or the listener. Think of where each drum would sound in terms of left-right if you were playing the kit yourself.
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Effects in the background of your track can be more interesting if they are panned to a certain side, and in particular if you have several effect tracks make them all panned to different places.
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We mentioned before that compression is just a way of modifying the volume of a track in a more controlled manner, but what did we mean by that? Compression is a very simple idea but it can be tricky to truly understand. A standard way to use a compressor is to tell it that anything above a certain threshold in dB will be compressed by a certain ratio. So if you set a threshold value of -10dB and a ratio of 4 then an input of -6dB will be compressed to an output value of -9dB. Why is this? Well since the input was 4dB above the threshold and the ratio was 4, that difference above the threshold is going to be divided by 4. If the ratio was 2 then the output would be divided by 2 and we'd have a -8dB signal output.
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Lets take a look at the main section of the stock compressor in Logic Pro.
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Audio Compression
The first thing you'll notice is that there are more knobs than we've talked above so far, just ignore them for now. This is a standard view of a compressor and this is how the threshold and ratio values typically look. You rotate the threshold knob to your desired value in dB and then turn the ratio knob to how much you want any signal over that value to be compressed. The next logical knob to talk about is the make-up knob. Since we're compressing our audio and reducing the overall signal level coming out of the compressor, the signal may become quieter. Of course you can simply raise the track in the mix but what if you have plugins after the compressor that rely on specific volume inputs? This is why you'll probably use the make up knob to make sure that the input level is roughly the same as the output level.
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Now you can control the volume of your tracks over a certain threshold in a pretty controlled way. The other big important factor of compression is how quickly the compression starts and ends. Lets use the case of a bass drum as an example. For a bass drum the sound is typically very short, so if you set the attack time of the compressor to 200 ms you're going to miss the loudest part of the sound. Alternatively if you have an interesting transient (the very first section of an audio sound that gives it the 'attack' sound), you may not want to compress that sound - so you'll raise your attack so the overall level of the bass drum is compressed but not that initial transient.
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Release works the same except in reverse. If you want the attack of your bass drum to sound the same every time and you have a lot of bass drums in quick succession, then having a 1k (1000 ms or 1 second) release will cause the compressor to not reset back to zero by the time the next bass drum hits. Its really as simple as how fast the compressor resets back to zero after the audio goes under the threshold value.
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The last common knob to see on a compressor is knee. This is how rounded the the slope of the compression curve is around the point of the threshold value. Its much easier to see this in images than describe it.
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The image on the left shows the compression curve for a knee value of 0. This causes the compression ratio to kick in 100% after the threshold value. The image on the right shows the compression curve for a knee value of 1. This causes the area around the threshold to be rounded, so inputs barely over the threshold will be compressed slightly less than the ratio value. This parameter is usually not very important so as a beginner I would just use the default value in your compressor.
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Want to see these parameters in action? Watch the video below on compression where I show you how each knob interacts with the music.
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Limiting
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Limiting is the act of placing a volume limit on your track. In reality a Limiter is nothing more than a compressor with an infinite ratio. While your compress will get the input signal over the threshold and reduce it to a fraction of the input on the output, a limiter will get anything over the threshold and hard limit it to the threshold value. You can also use a Limiter to scale the output signal because of a parameter known in Waves L1 Limiter as the 'Out Ceiling'. The way this works is that whatever your threshold value is will be scaled to be at the value of your out ceiling.
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If you set your threshold to -2.1dB then any signal over that value will be hard limited to -2.1dB. If you kept your out ceiling at 0 or -0.1dB then the output will be scaled up to that output volume. You can link the threshold and the out ceiling so that the true output volume does not change. One big effect of limiting is that it can make your instrument (or master mix) sound much louder. This is due to the instrument having a smaller dynamic range and the quieter parts being boosted. Compression will also have the same effect but it is typically more subtle.
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EQ Your Tracks
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EQ stands for equalizer, and you use an EQ to change the volume of certain frequencies in your audio. Maybe your guitars sound too bassy, so you'll filter out some of the low end frequency content. Or maybe your vocalist sounds too shrill, so you'll find the annoying frequency and cut it a bit. Another common issue is that your bass drum and bass guitar will interfere with another, so the bass guitar kind of disappears when the bass drum hits (or vice versa) - an effect known as masking. For these and many other reasons you'll want to become very familiar with EQ and how it can be used. The image below shows the Logic Pro X stock EQ, and you'll notice some 'humps' pulled below the middle horizontal line. These are where the frequency content at that location is being reduced. The ripply signal below the middle line is the frequency content for the audio currently being played in the track, its used as a way to visualize where the frequency content in your audio file is and how the EQ is effecting it.
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What is frequency slotting?
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There are hundreds of effects you can add to a track but they all fall into several main categories:
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Filtering - This is similar to an EQ, except normally you're applying either a low-pass or high-pass filter to severely modify the sound.
Delay - This effect gets your input audio signal and repeats it back at a reduced volume. The delay is often timed to the BPM of your track.
Reverb - Reverb simulates the sound of a room or a space. Its kind of like delay but with thousands of reflections instead of one domination one.
Phasing - Phase effects include phasers and flangers which alter the phase of your signal and mix it with the original. This can cause unique cancellations at certain frequencies.
Distortion - Sometimes you want your sound to be dirtier or gritty.
Chorus - Chorus will duplicate your signal and slightly detune each duplication. This gives the effect of tracking the same part many times and layering it on top of itself.
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Filter Effects
Filter effects can take on several forms. The three most common categories are low-pass filtering (lo-pass), high-pass filtering (hi-pass), and band-pass filtering. Sometimes people mix up low-pass and high-pass but here's an easy way to think of it: when you use a low-pass filter you are allowing the lows to pass (so you're filtering the high frequencies), and when you use a high-pass filter you're allowing the highs to pass (so you're filtering out the low frequencies). Band pass filtering is just a combination of both hi-pass and lo-pass, so you end up with a 'band' of a frequency range where the audio is allowed to pass. The image below shows what a band-pass filter looks like, where the left filter being applied is the hi-pass and the right filter being applied is the lo-pass.
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Frequency slotting is a common mixing technique where you carve out space in one or several instruments to make room for something you want to stand out in that frequency range. Its never a cookie-cutter technique you can apply the same to every track but the concept is always the same.
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One common example of this technique is in metal/rock guitars and bass. If you don't EQ the guitars or bass at all the whole track may sound muddy and it might be hard to tell the bass apart from the guitars. In this case you might hi-pass your guitars (shave off the low end up to 200-300Hz), and carve out some mid-range on the bass (400-800Hz). Sometimes this can be done drastically but most of the time it is subtle. As a result the individual tracks may not sound as pleasing when solo'd but the mix as a whole will be a little cleaner.
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More Examples:
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Find what frequency your vocal track is most prevalent in and cut that frequency a bit in your guitars/synths.
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On your bass track do a small notch reduction at about 80Hz, and boost that frequency on the bass drum. At the same time cut at 250Hz on your bass drum and slightly boost it on the bass. You may not need to boost at all if the frequency is already very dominant in the main track you want clarity on.
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Get your harmony vocals and cut the frequency that the lead vocals live on, and also pan the harmonies side to side.
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If you have a lead melody in your chorus interfering with your vocals, try cutting the frequency where you vocals live.
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Effects
Remember when we said this masterclass was a work in progress? Well... this is where we're stopping for the time being. Check back in a couple days for more content!
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In the meantime check out our blog posts on recording.