Music Mixing Lesson

Step 1: Housekeeping

So, step one is housekeeping.

Step 2: Cleaning Up the Low End

Step two is cleaning up the low end.

Step 3: Setting Your Level Balance

Step three is setting your level balance.

Just getting a rough mix level will allow you to work from there. This is something that's really important to get right as the foundation for your mix.

The Importance of Context in Mixing

You can't start EQing and adding effects to instruments individually and then expect them all to work together.

Think of this as analogous to making a curry:

• You don't go, "Oh, that's delicious. Chili powder."
• "Oh, that's delicious. Turmeric."
• "Oh, that's nice. Cardamom."

You have to taste how they work together to get some idea of how they're going to work in context, and know how else to flavor it. The same goes for your mixing.

If I EQ my kick, then EQ my snare, and then do my guitars and bass, I can't expect everything to suddenly fit together as soon as I bring up all the levels. So, we need to do these things in context, and a level balance will allow you to have this context.

Mixing by Ear vs. Using a Trick

Now, this is something you can do entirely by ear. Just lift up the levels until you're happy with it. But let me show you a trick that's actually quite useful.

1. I'm going to start off in the mix window for a second.
2. I'm going to turn on all groups and then turn everything down completely.
3. Now, I'm going to turn off not just the all group but I'm also going to get rid of the drum group as well, this will prevent distractions.

By the way, you can see I've continued to add the low cut filters to everything apart from the bass guitar.

Creating a Pink Noise Track

So back to the mix window, and I'm going to stay here for now, sorry, the edit window.

1. I'll select the vox comp track.
2. I'm going to go to Track > New and select this track to be placed underneath.
3. I will name this Noise.

Then, I make a selection going from the end of the track to the beginning. Go to Audio Suite under Other where we have Signal Generator, and I'm going to set this to Pink Noise and hit Render.

What is Pink Noise?

Now, pink noise is random noise, but every frequency could occur. It's also weighted so that every octave has the same amount of energy, it's a 3 dB per octave low cut filter with no high cut filter. Essentially, what this means is that every octave has the same energy.

I can use this for my level balancing because if I can turn something up so it's just audible above pink noise, then it will definitely be audible above everything else in the mix.

Using Solo Modes Effectively

We'll see as we go. I'm going to be doing this using soloing modes. Now, I want to be able to solo things individually while still hearing the noise.

1. To make my Noise track immune to being soloed, hold the command key (control on the PC) and click on the solo button, it will grey out, making it solo safe.

If I solo something else, you can see that all of the mute buttons go brown on all of the tracks apart from the noise track.

This is something we tend to do on auxiliary tracks, whether using them for effects or for subgrouping, as we'll do later today. Also, I'll quickly mention the solo mode.

Now I've got this set to the way I like it called Xor. So if I solo something and then solo something else, it turns off solo on the previous track.

Just to give you an idea, you can choose whichever one you prefer. Go to Options > Solo Mode and if you set it to Latch, it will behave as you're probably used to. Myself, I prefer Xor. If I want to solo two things at once, I can just hold the shift key when soloing something else.

Managing Solos

To clear those solos, one way to do this is to go up to the solo menu and click OK. I'm going to stay in the mix window, but I'll scroll up to the top and let's navigate to somewhere where the kick is actually playing.

I can do this in here because I have the IO view available. If I click here, you can see I get the fader control for the kick track. If you've forgotten how to access this, remember we can do it by going here and making sure IO is selected.

Setting Up Level Balance

This means I can navigate to sections of the track where the instruments are playing when setting up my level balance.

1. If I hit play, I can hear pink noise.
2. As I turn this up, eventually I can just hear the kick. I'm happy with that.

Let's repeat the process with the snare. Solo it until it's just coming through the mix.

Working with the Toms

I'll need to make sure I find a part where the tom plays. Both toms play quite a bit just here in the song. So this will just loop for me, and I'll go through everything one at a time.

As you can hear, I'm setting it so I can just hear it. Maybe just a mile longer.

Moving to Other Instruments

Okay, let's go to where this track plays. It's a little reverse guitar effect.

• Mid-late guitar part.
• Lead plays most of the time.
• Lead double part.

Oops. Remember I said before how sometimes the smart tool can be a little annoying, just a quick example.

• Bass guitar, and we're done.

Handling Vocals

You might think, "Well, what about the vocals?" Well, the vocals don't sit in a mix in modern pop production. They sit on the mix.

This isn't going to work for vocal production, they're going to need to be considerably higher. If I click here, listen to the vocals at this section; they're going to be hidden in the rest of the mix. We're probably going to need to push this up quite a lot.

Let's right click in here, hide, and make it inactive. You never know, we might need it again later.

Final Mixing Adjustments

We'll pop to the area where the vocals are playing.

• Pop back to the mix window, un-solo this and let's see if we can get our vocals to be sitting at the right kind of place.

The same goes for the backing vocals. But let's have a quick listen again to this.

• Not bad. We're able to hear everything cut through the mix quite nicely.

If anything, I think the kick is a fraction too high. The bass guitar probably needs to come up a little bit, but these are things you can fine-tune afterwards.

You're not 100% stuck with the pink noise mixing levels, but that's a really quick way to get things the way you want them.

Conclusion

Well, there's not much better I can think of. So try this for yourself. Take the track, give yourself your own level balance, and make sure everything is cutting through only just in the mix.

Don't do what I did and for some reason leave out the bounce guitar part here. We should have something that is a good starting point.

Okay, see you in the next video.