10 Mixing Tips That Changed My Life

hey guys these are 10 mixing tips that changed my life now i know the title of this video is cheesy but i promise you these aren't just any old 10 mixing tips that i threw together to make a video these 10 tips played a huge role in helping me develop my professional sound quit my day job and start my music production career so if you're looking to develop a sound so professional that you can start making money at it you won't want to miss any of these tips let's get into it tip number one is to remove the sub based frequencies in every instrument besides the kick and bass even if you don't think there's any sub bass frequencies in that instrument low frequency dirt and mud hides in the most unexpected places and it's exactly these hidden artifacts that can disturb and add mud to your sub bass for example let's take this hi-hat you would never think to low-cut a hi-hat because it's such a high frequency instrument but if we add an eq turn on the analyzer and play this hi-hat there's a bunch of stuff here in the low frequency range if you have too many instruments adding that much low frequency dirt to your mix you're going to lose a lot of headroom and ultimately your sub bass is going to start to sound muddy so what i like to do is i like to add an eq you can use any eq plug-in that you like turn on a low-cut filter and just cut out every low-frequency artifact in between 40 and 80 hertz because that's where your sub-bass is the strongest this type of filter will not take away from the quality of this hi-hat whatsoever but it'll clear up all that dirt so that your sub base can breathe this next tip by far changed my life the most and that is that you have to understand that there is a lot more people out there that like to sing or make music than people out there who actually know how to mix music this means that there's a huge opportunity and demand for freelance mixing engineers to earn some serious side or full-time income before my success on youtube and the success of my other projects like my sound banks and course platform i used to make around six to ten thousand dollars a month just mixing for people as a freelance mixing engineer and it was this type of money that allowed me to quit my bs job at an auto body shop and actually focus on music full time and trust me when i say this when you can focus on music full time that's when you really get good at it and not only that but most artists don't care if you don't have any major credits like you've worked for kanye west or katy perry or avicii they just want to know if you know how to mix a song and that's all the proof that you need so you really have nothing to lose i know i didn't have any major credits when i started my mixing business back in 2016 and it was because i made the choice to step out of my comfort zone and start mixing for people even though i had no major credits or anything that i was able to break free of my old life and start to a music full time with platforms like sound better air gigs and fiverr.com selling your skills as a musician has never been more accessible so stop waiting around and get out there and start hustling my next tip is to use a reference plugin to compare your mix to a professional mix i like to use reference to by mastering the mix there's just no closer way to reference a professional mix to use a reference plugin grab a professional song that's dynamically similar to your song i'm going to use cheat codes sex and drag it in to my reference plugin this song is similar to the song i have here my reference song sounds like this [Music] now here's the magic of a reference plugin it automatically gain matches your song with the reference song so when we play back our song and we switch back and forth to the reference song they play back at the same volume so i can clearly hear now discrepancies in my mix versus the reference mix [Music] and just from switching back and forth right there i could hear clearly hear a couple discrepancies in my mix my base to lead ratio is off so my base is too loud and then also my hi-hat is dismal compared to the hi-hat in this reference track so first let's bring up the lead [Music] [Applause] now that the lead's sounding pretty good i'm gonna bring out my hi-hat listen to my hi-hat compared to the hi-hat in the reference song [Music] [Applause] to make it even more clear i'm just going to solo out the high frequencies of the reference mix so we can compare that to the high frequencies of my mix [Music] that reference mix is so much more percussive so i'm gonna go back into my mix now and i'm gonna turn up this hi-hat and possibly even enhance it let's also boost the hiss on this hi-hat just a little bit [Music] [Applause] [Music] let's unsolo this high band now and listen to our mix [Music] now we could clearly hear that my mix is pretty similar to that reference mix and that's why i like a good old reference plug-in tip number three is to eq your reverbs reverbs are the widest full spectrum sound that you'll ever add to your mix in other words reverb is just a big sound that takes up a lot of room and can add a lot of mud to your mix without you even realizing it it's so easy to add a reverb plug-in to an instrument and just move on and forget about it but you have to eq the reverb back when i started mixing i used to just add reverbs to every instrument and forget about them and i could not figure out why i couldn't get my songs loud and the simple answer was there was too much reverb just going everywhere and taking up too much headroom watch this if we take this font clap sounds like this and we take just the reverb from it and we look at the reverb under an imager and an eq we can see that the reverb emitted from this clap is so wide that it's all over the stereo image and that's fine that's what reverb does is it adds width to sounds but also look at the frequencies that are emitted from this reverb it has frequencies all over the eq spectrum that is a big sound we have to tame this or else it's going to build up and ruin your mix every reverb plugin has an eq module on this plugin this vintage valhalla verb it's my favorite reverb plugin what i like to do is low cut filter the low frequencies out of the reverb this isn't going to ruin the quality of the reverb it's just going to allow the reverb to fit in the mix and i like to do it up to 500 hertz also i'll cut out some of the hiss from the reverb by pulling the hi-cut eq filter down a bit and i adjust that to my liking as well but rarely will i have reverb that's wide open that's just going to take up too much room so if we give ourselves a good reverb mix on this snare it still sounds like reverb but now that reverb will fit in the mix for this next tip try balancing your mix in mono the problem with balancing your mix in stereo is that there is a lot of what i like to call fake loudness in wide sounds in other words wide sounds sound louder than they actually are and that alone can skew your ability to properly balance mix here's a melody that we're gonna play back in mono sounds nice but if i turn this mono switch off and we play it back in stereo [Music] it sounds so much bigger and more lush but it's not actually louder it just seems that way but now what i do to eliminate the illusion of wide loud sounds is i will go to the master fader of my song i'll grab a plugin that allows me to put the song in mono and logic we just go to imaging and then direction mixer spread it down to mono and now my entire mix is in mono and now i can go through and adjust each instrument accordingly yeah and that alone was like a life changer especially with drums that helps a lot with drums for this next tip don't mix your song the same day you made it your brain and your ears need a break after the mental strain of writing music after endless hours of writing songs in front of your computer your eyes hurt your ears are strained and your brain is fried you have to give yourself a break because it's this type of exhaustion that will not allow you to hear the dynamics and frequencies of your song correctly so you're really not going to be an effective mixing engineer so next time you write a song i know you'll be excited to get that song finished and get it out as fast as possible but just give yourself a break go to sleep wake up the next day and set up a dedicated mixing session and i guarantee the results of your mix will be 10 times more lethal than what they would have been if you did it a day earlier on the same day you wrote the song this next tip is to combine any layered instrument before starting your mixing session mixing is a game of organization the cleaner your doll is on your eyes the more effectively and efficiently you'll be able to move through your mixing process for example let's take this drum beat i'm going to show you how i would set this bead up for a mixing session this beat sounds like this if we take a close look at this we can see that we have three hi-hat layers that are doing the same thing this is an easy three layers that i can narrow down into one single layer so now what i could do is i could take these three redundant layers get rid of them and we just took three layers and narrowed it down to one if we look closer into this mix we can see that our clap has a layer on it as well layers are totally fine you just don't need to keep all your layers in there and not consolidated so what i'm going to do is take these claps right click them bounce in place and now we have one stem instead of two so that was just two instruments that we were able to take five whole layers and narrow them down into two but imagine doing this for an entire song and narrowing down all of your layers into as few layers as possible your project will end up looking so clean and minimalistic that you're going to breeze through that mixing process and mix like a star this next tip is fire and i make my most dedicated students do this and they always love the outcome of it and that is to mix one of your songs and then hire a professional mixing engineer to mix that same song and this will tell you where your mixing skills are lacking and exactly where you need to improve on websites like sound better fiverr or air gigs for this example we will use sound better you can go to soundbetter.com click on this mixing engineers tab and just find a plethora of professional mix engineers with some really great credits that you can hire to mix your song this dude here is an old man with 150 million streams he'll probably run your mix through some nice analog gear so you'll get to hear what that sounds like we got some duty mix for ludacris here at bruno mars mixing engineer here dimitri vegas and like mike over here you get the idea hit up a freelancing website hire a professional engineer to mix your song there's really no better way to do it for this next tip if you really want to develop the skill of mixing you have to get yourself a pair of studio monitor headphones or pair of studio monitors consumer grade headphones like apple earbuds or dr dre beats are great headphones for listening to music on but they are not studio grade problem with these headphones and any other consumer grade stereo system is that they do not deliver a flat true sound these stereo systems add processing to music when you listen to it so that that music sounds good out of that stereo system the problem with that is that you're not actually hearing what that song sounded like when it left the production studio studio monitors like my audio technica ath m50xs are the same price as most consumer-grade headphones but they are studio grade and deliver a flat true sound that is completely unprocessed so i'm able to hear exactly what's coming out of my doll and it just makes the whole mixing experience easier my favorite studio monitors are and have always been the yamaha hs8s and i simultaneously switch between them and my audio technica ath m50x studio monitor headphones and i couldn't be happier with this setup here's my final tip mix for other people it's the best way to develop your mixing skill mixing is very logical so it's much easier to approach and practice mixing when you're doing it on a song that's not yours am i saying don't mix your own music no you can certainly mix your own music but the problem with mixing your own music is that you have too much emotions wrapped up in the song so you're not going to be the best decision maker when it comes to mixing that song and too many emotions make any logical process more difficult also i find that when i mix my own songs i worry about pointless little details that nobody else is going to ever hear or worry about and that alone can stifle the overall result of your mix when you mix other people's songs you don't hear those little details so you can focus on the mix as a whole which is how a mix should be thought of and that is as a whole that's the end of the video guys i hope you enjoyed it unfortunately in this video i was not able to cover every square inch of the mixing process i saved that information from my production course students so if you would like to learn how to mix music like a pro as fast as possible check out my course at the top of the description below right now i'm offering a free consultation over the phone to anyone who signs up to my music production course on these phone calls i like to figure out the best way in order for you to approach music production so that you can learn it in the most effective way possible and then we discuss how to start building your music production career if this sounds like something of interest to you i have a link at the top of the description below and i'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: Alex Rome

Views: 876,785

Keywords: mixing and mastering, how to mix a song, mixing in logic pro x, mixing tips, top mixing tips

Id: cU0tHoyJYjo

Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Sat May 14 2022