Music Mixing Lesson

Introduction

Okay, so we're almost ready to start mixing. Before we jump straight in, it's worthwhile doing some housekeeping.

Housekeeping Steps

1. Listen to the Drums
   Look, if I just zoom in on this section here and have a listen to this little drum roll. Let's solo the drums. You can hear the bleed of the click track coming through and there's a kind of unpleasant floor tom ring.

2. Clean Up

   • I would go through and clean this out.
   • I'll add a little bit of a fade out here just to keep things nice and neat.
   • There we go.
   • I can get rid of the click that comes in just before here as well.
   • I don't necessarily need a fade in for this.

3. Listen Again
   Let's have a listen to that. Great. So go through all of your tracks. Let's save that and clean everything up.

Importance of Cleaning Up

It adds up because, although that might not seem like a huge amount of noise, when you consider the amount of tracks you might have in your session, it starts to add up and make everything mushy and muddy. This is especially true if you've got things like guitar amps with amp buzz and hum. All of a sudden, you get the space back in your mix. You need to keep your separation.

Starting the Mix

So now, let's start the actual mix itself. The first thing I will do is work on cleaning up my low end.

• Now, it doesn't take much for the low end to muddy up.
• In fact, if you've got more than one instrument in the bottom octave (20Hz to 40Hz), then it's pretty much full.

Choosing Your Bass Instrument

I will pick one instrument; in this case here, I'm going to go for the bass guitar, and that's the only one I'm going to let use that bottom octave.
Pretty much everything else is going to have a low cut filter at at least 40 Hz, maybe even higher. This will keep space available for me to let the bass guitar really sit there and fill that out.

"But later on, I might decide I need to feather something else here."
This is not a hard and fast rule that stays for the entire mix. As a starting point, keeping that clean means you're not going to get too far wrong.

Adjusting the Kick Drum Track

Let's go to the mix window, and I'm going to start off on my kick drum track.

• Go to Plugin EQ1 Band.
• Oh, wrong one. Let's change this to EQ1 Band.
• There we go.

I'm going to try and stick to the stock plugins as much as possible so you can copy exactly what I'm doing.

Managing Pitch Perception

Now, this is not going to cause pitch problems. Our perception of pitch doesn't depend on actually having a low frequency in the signal we base it on. Harmonic spacing seems a little odd, but if you consider how you're listening to a bass line on laptop speakers, you're not actually hearing any bass.

"The speakers can't produce frequencies that low with any significant amplitude. But we can still tell what pitch it's supposed to be producing."

This basically means that I can put a low cut filter on something; it still sounds like a bass instrument, but it's not using the low frequencies.

Setting the Low Cut Filter

So this allows us to do quite a lot of cleaning up.

• I'll set this to a low cut filter, around 20 Hz to start with.
• Well, there are a few ways you can do this. You can play the instrument. Let's solo this.

Adjusting the Filter

Right. Clicking. By the way, remember, it's in a group.

• Bring this up until you start to hear an effect.
• Once you hear an effect, pull it back down a little bit.
  Now, that can work. It depends upon your monitoring setup how good that is.

Using Low Pass Filter

What you might like to do, particularly if you're mixing on headphones, is to change this to a low pass filter.

• Have a listen to this.
• You can hear exactly what would now be removed by this filter.

I've already said that I actually want to get rid of 40 Hz and below regardless. Is there anything there or not? This allows me to get a better idea of where this needs to be. I can then put the filter back to its original position.

Moving to the Snare Drum

Let's move on to the snare drum. Now let's try that again.

• Option drag and then select plugin.
• Reverse the direction of this low thump on a snare drum.
• Not interested in it for this track.

Now I'm starting to hear some of the body of the snare. I've gone too far.
That will do. Reverse the direction and continue the process until you've pretty much done everything apart from, as we said, the bass guitar.

Frequency Balance

This gives you your starting point again. You might end up putting some of the low frequencies back on some of the instruments if they need to fill this out. Maybe your floor tom has a resolution resonance that you want to emphasize. The floor tom won't be playing most of the time in most of your songs, so that's not really an issue.

Conclusion

Great. Okay, so that's our frequency balance sorted out. In the next video, I'll show you how you can get started with your level balancing.