2 Easy Ways To Make Your Mixes FAT

i'm going to show you two easy ways to make your mixes sound fat and professional so that's my remake of don't keep me waiting by side piece you probably know them from their track with diplo on my mind but anyway i think all of their tracks are a great example of how to make your mixes sound really big and punchy and these concepts can really apply to all genres of music so the first thing is to not use a lot of layers and the second thing is to look at your mix in three dimensions but i'll explain that later let's talk about the first thing people think that adding a ton of new layers and new sounds to their track will make the mix sound big but actually ends up doing the opposite all of those layers are going to compete for the same frequencies which actually makes the mix end up sounding muddy i'll give you an example say i want to add a layer to this lead [Music] i'll try to add this sound on top of it so i'll bring up an eq so you can see what's going on but look at the low mid frequencies before and after i add the layer in [Music] there ends up being a pretty big boost to those low mids around like 300 hertz which may not sound like a big deal now when you're trying to mix the full track later that's going to make the mix sound muddier and a lot of times i see producers doing this with like eight different layers it can be good to layer sounds but at a certain point all the frequencies are just clashing where it makes it hard to mix everything together in the drop of this side piece track all they have is that one lead layer which you just heard then they have the base then the drums and of course the vocals and what they've done by keeping the number of layers in the mix so low is create pockets where each thing can sit in the mix you can see the kick is obviously taking up the low end then it's easy to add in a clap that's taking up like the high mids and an open hat that just takes up the highs then you obviously have the bass taking up the low end too while the lead takes up the mids and the highs when everything's in its own little space you can focus on making each layer sound as professional as possible and nothing's fighting with each other so you can make the whole mix sound really cohesive the second way to make your mixes sound better is to think of them in three dimensions so we already placed everything in the frequency spectrum we can look at that as two dimensions everything there is being plotted by volume and frequency but if we add time as a third variable we can start to think of our mixes in three dimensions who all already do this to some extent let's take an oscilloscope which is just a fancy word for something that plugins like volume shaper do which will show the volume of a sound over time you can see in the window that the kick is taking up the first half of every quarter note and that's why we sidechain bases to the kick drum [Music] when you add the kick and bass together the low end is balanced over time so when you're mixing a track don't just think about how the volume is changing over time think about how the whole frequency spectrum is changing over time so in this track the vocal comes in at certain points and if you look at what frequencies the vocal is taking up and if you compare that to what frequencies the lead synth is taking up you'll notice they're taking up similar frequencies if you're looking at the mix from a three-dimensional perspective you might decide to cut out the lead sound early right when the vocal comes in i think that sounds a lot cleaner than leaving the lead in there underneath the vocal the vocal is already drowning out the lead so the listener won't really even notice if you take that lead out when the vocal comes in another example of this with a different track would be if you wanted to add some stab sounds in between the lead melody so if you're looking at this melody from a time perspective you'll notice there's some gaps in time where nothing is really playing in the lead so that leaves room for something else to fill that void so in this case i'll add some brass stab sounds in there so even though the stabs and the lead sound are taking up a lot of the frequency spectrum they're not fighting with each other because they're not happening at the same time so the mix still sounds pretty clean [Music] so if you can not only focus on where you're placing layers in the frequency spectrum but also focus on where you're placing them in time it can help your mixes sound huge and if you want to dive deeper into that side piece remix i've made i've packaged up the drum samples mix stems presets project file and processing all in one download on my website thank you guys for watching peace [Music]

Channel: Big Z

Views: 40,227

Keywords: how to mix music, mixing tutorial, edm mixing, mastering, how to make mixes sound fat, 2 easy ways, mixing house music, big z, remake, tutorial, masterclass, music production, sound design, how to, make music, logic pro, ableton, fl studio, mixing, presets, producer, dj, serum, sylenth, synth, bass

Id: aWJeG_D_uMQ

Length: 5min 45sec (345 seconds)

Published: Sun May 08 2022