6 Free Mixing Tricks (that don't cost anything!)

hi everybody hope you're doing marvelously well in this episode we're going to talk about six mixing tips that won't cost you [Music] anything so on this channel of course we love reviewing equipment we love talking about microphones mic pres compressors plug-ins and all kinds of other incredible stuff however we all know the most important thing is your skill the way you hear things the way you interpret it and with any daw whatever daw you use they come with compressors and eqs and delays and reverbs and even multi-bands and all kinds of fun things and really your skill set is what is going to set you apart yes there's better compressors and eqs and delays you know made by all these great companies of course there is but in the wrong hands they're absolutely meaningless so let us focus in on the free things the hugely important free things that you can do to make your mixes better listen to music that you love in your working environment this is so important if you walk into a studio that you've never been to or somebody's home setup or somebody hands you a pair of headphones to try for the first time what do you do you put on some music that you love something you've heard thousands of times before to see how they sound might sound so obvious but do that in your own studio environment it's such an obvious thing that people do not do that i have not done if you have grown up listening to whatever song it is whatever artist is listen to it in your environment whether it be the speakers that you use or the headphones or the car stereo get used to how the music you love sounds in the environments that you live and work in that's going to be absolutely massive to you because otherwise how will you know how your music sounds you need to be able to listen with confidence in your room on your headphones with your earbuds in your car whatever it might be and know how to judge your music that you have mixed that you have recorded against other people's music that you know and love huge thing so spend some time every day maybe start off the day put on some great music to inspire you but get used to your room get used to your environment number two listen more and do less i've interviewed snizzle ton of producers and engineers and mixers over the years mastering engineers and they all talk about this at some stage i remember a great interview with howard willing saying that he would get stuff to mix and the first thing he would do is just strip off all the plugins and then do some very minimal amounts of stuff and send them back the mix and they would always be like how did you get it to sound so big and fat and amazing and he just said i did less it's very very easy for all of us now to just continually keep working on something you open up your bass guitar for instance and you're like oh it needs a bit more low end so you boost some low end and then you're like well the low end's a bit boomy so i'm going to compress the low end that's pretty smart but then you're like i'm losing some definition in the track so you boost some of the high mids and before you know it like the high mids are poking out a little unevenly so i'm going to compress that all of that is great maybe your a low synth comes in you know like wow those synths need some room i'm going to cut some of that low end out the base to let the lows all of this is really quite logical if you think about it however you can end up tying yourself in the most ridiculous of knots because you boost something only to cut it to boost it to cut it to boost it to cut it and i have done it and we've all done it where you open up that channel it's like boost compress cut compress boost compress cut compress and before you know it you've got a really bad version of the original signal it's inherently kept what the recording was trying to do and all you've done is make it sound worse you're not alone we have all done it and we will all continue to do it but the first thing you could do is just open up your session and get all of those levels right get all the panning right you'll be amazed with the level set well and with the panning set well suddenly you're looking at it as an overview and you're making decisions based on elements that need to be improved here and there as opposed to just going straight in there and just building this massive drum sound and this incredibly massive bass sound and before you know it it's just a wall of sound and there's no dynamics left there's no groove or feel left either because some of those grace notes some of those uneven notes that you've now evened out and compressed mean that instead of it kind of having a little bit of movement it's now just we've all done it i've done it a million times where i've gone in there and i made everything sound so fantastic and if you solo every instrument you're like wow this is incredible i love the sound of this bass i love this guitar put it all together it's just blah it's just hitting you in the face and where is all that sensitive interplay that the musicians played where the guitar player is like chad janet all these like dead notes and these little slightly softer things that fit around a groove on a base it was like dancing around and sounding really beautiful is now just it might as well just be programmed synth parts all of that groove and feel has disappeared so to reiterate open your mix up don't worry about compressors don't worry about eqs don't worry about any plugins initially just balance everything out pan it where you want it to be then start making decisions listen more do less this is a simple one but it's a big one number three don't be afraid to use the mute button so many times we get things to mix and we got a little carried away with the overdub process you've got this great guitar line and maybe it just feels like it needs a bit more low mids so it's doubled with a slightly different guitar line maybe a different pickup selection you know the high line is a single coil and then the sticker humbucker underneath sounds great and then maybe six string bass comes out and just reinforces it all rather good but there's also a piano line which is playing something fairly similar living you guessed it in the same range as the now added six string bass or the baritone guitar plus the bass line goes higher up there and there's this massive overlap so you've got left hand of piano bass guitar baritone guitar all of this stuff going on at the same time and yes lo and behold suddenly there's a synth pad in there so you just have a whole ton of low mid build up and low end build up now what can you do you can go in there and you can high pass of course yeah do some high pass selective but hmm what exactly you're high passing you're high passing out the low end and low mid of the piano you're high passing the low end and low mid out of the baritone or the six string guitar and the pad and before you know it the reason why those instruments were theoretically added has gone why not just mute a couple of those instruments in that place and let everything speak a little bit better maybe that additional baritone or six-string bass that was stuck against that guitar is unnecessary maybe it works where the piano's not playing aha but when the piano is playing it doesn't work so we've reached for a good friend the mute button i remember vividly a band i was working with early 2000s that was mixed by andy wallace when andy sent back the mixers it was a modern rock band i had put a pair of heavy guitars on left pair of heavy guitars on the right then a reinforced pair of heavy guitars on the left and a reinforced pair of heavy guitars on the right as well so i had this like doubled up heavy guitars i then had this screaming lead guitar part over here which of course you guessed it it was doubled and then i had this half time arpeggio going over it it was fantastic it was like a wall of chaotic guitars i think at one stage in the song there was also a johnny greenwood kind of fast line all going all stereo all loads of effects on and then in the verses there was a bass and drums and a main rhythm guitar and arpeggio line and there was doubles coming and going and it was glorious and he sent it back and he muted the double heavy guitar so it was heavy heavy he muted the double arpeggio line only had it once and then only had the high line come in on the second half of the chorus and boy did it rock it was so much better same thing in the verse bass drums one guitar second guitar came in on a pre-chorus it was like bringing it down and suddenly everything got bigger instead of doing what we were talking about skinning all the instruments down so they all slot together like a really bad lego or bad jigsaw puzzle now suddenly we had this really big beautiful tones the bass guitar had low end on it had some grit 3k and a bit of distortion it was massive and i could tell i loved the bass guitar sound then it had this beautiful single rhythm guitar just playing along in the verse i was like wow this is great before when i did my rafts it was like skinny this down skinny that down skinny this down skinny that down skinny this down and make it all fit together like the big jigsaw puzzle and not only was it loud and offensive it was frankly unexciting because everything was crammed in there i thought it was getting more powerful what it was actually doing was the opposite so don't be afraid to use the mute button if it's good enough for andy wallace it's good enough for me number four automation automation really is your friend it's a beautiful thing going back to this idea of using limited amount of instruments you may only have a pair of guitars going through the whole song you mute one in the verse then it comes back in the chorus nice wide guitars another thing you can do is turn it down simple as that automation can be your friend sometimes instead of like overly compressing every single element just use automation to get that word to pop over sometimes you know in a really dense mix we put a lot of compression on everything to make it all fight for the same place but again think about how we're removing so much low end and so much high end to make everything fit together we use a limited amount of tracks and we just use volume automation and pan automation to get it out of the way of other things suddenly you're preserving the integrity of your recording and everything can get bigger and fatter and just feel so much more satisfying another thing about automation and i think eric valentine is the king of this if you go back and listen to some of his really really big mixes of like the late 90s early 2000s what he would do a lot of in those days is he would just ever so slightly skinny down a verse like he'd take like the guitars maybe just high pass some a little bit higher maybe about 200 250 but with a gentle slope you know just a gentle slope about 250. maybe take the bass and just bring it up to about 70 on a gentle high pass maybe on the kick drum there was a little bit of subbiness just bring the sub down really gently so just the mix didn't really noticeably feel that different but just had maybe just a slightly bit less low end on it just a tiny bit so he's automating the eq's chorus comes in all of those high passing that he did all disappears and suddenly this more satisfying few extra db of low end just comes in and it's like wow he would do the same thing on the high end just skinning it down just a little bit and i'm not talking about doing telephone effects i'm not talking about the most obvious automated like everything sounds like this and it's small and it's a little smash i'm talking about subtle amounts of automation on the high and low end so you just open up the high end just think about it you've got like this tight drum groove maybe some mid-range on that hi-hat little saturation on the hi-hat to make it a bit mid-rangey automated on there maybe just or to make some eq on the overheads just make it a little tinier just a little bit on that verse nice and tight drum sound chorus comes in all of that goes suddenly there's some 12k openness from the natural sound of the overheads comes out in the chorus and it just starts to sound bigger and more beautiful automation is not just volume it's volume is very important i definitely want you to spend time doing volume automation but small amounts of eq automation can be a wonderful thing plus of course pan automation keeps the interest going having things move around taking instruments making them more mono in the verse stereo and the choruses automation is a huge part of mixing and it really does sort out a semi-professional level from a really great professional mixer who really understands how to automate stuff and keep you interested from beginning to end of a song number five use great reference mixers now i've heard many many people talk about taking reference mixes of exactly the same genre that could be a good thing to do but i do remember a mixer once telling me this story and i loved it that they had a producer give them a track that had nothing to do with the genre they were mixing and said i need that low end and that might sound really really confusing but it's not just because you might love like a metallica track and you want those big like fat low end of the guitars that's fine however the recorded guitars may rely more on the bass than they do on the guitars for that low end so you'd be foolish to apply low end to guitars that wasn't there and then skinny down a bass to try and copy what they're doing what you need to be able to do is listen to reference tracks purely as that as references as reminders of how it can sound being able to listen to a great mix like some of the best mixers in the world and go oh wow i love how much low end is on this track being able to think about it in those terms or or like you love the openness of the top and find a way to recreate that by enhancing what you have as opposed to copying it is a much much better way of going and you will get a better result i have tried so many times and failed miserably to copy something that wasn't recorded like that so using reference tracks is really really good and it's great to get the best in the same genre what you're mixing metal find a great metal sounding track but remember you're just trying to create the feeling of it the low end of it not copy exactly how they did it because the recordings may not be there for you to copy it that way you may have to approach it and create it in a different way again you'll probably find if you enhance what you've got there you'll do a heck of a lot less than trying to like build again the lego blocks or the jigsaw puzzle so using great reference tracks helps me maintain some perspective and it also keeps me excited about what i'm doing so do that have a way of just quickly clicking over and listening to something beautiful and remember to try and level match as well because there's nothing worse than listening to something twice as loud and thinking it's better good level matching is a great point all right number six last but no means least and this is the quickest one of all take really frequent breaks take a lot of breaks because when you're too focused in on something that's when you start applying too much eq too much compression you start doing all kinds of crazy multi effects on something to make it sound interesting the reason why you want to make it sound more interesting is because you've got bored of it because you've been obsessing about one sound for an hour so you need to take frequent breaks and just as importantly not only taking frequent breaks but remembering to put something down like the last thing you want to do is send your mix off at the end of the night to the artist without hearing the fresh ears the next day because you've been obsessing about that mix all day and you think you've got it and you send it off and then you wake up in the morning to a hail storm from the artist going what the heck were you thinking on that mix and of course you open it up and it's the brightest loudest thing you've ever done in your life and you've destroyed all the integrity of the performances because you know you've been doing all of these like extra compressions and eqs and saturations and you've got so carried away that you've lost the original integrity of what was recorded so take frequent breaks and please give yourself a break to come back to it fresh ears a night of good sleep will give you lots of time for your ears to recover and come in in the morning at a much lower level and listen to it and really know that you've got something great so that was a lot of fun most of these are fairly obvious but you'd be surprised you know i'm guilty of all of these things myself i have over my career of the last x number of years mixed a lot of great music and some of it i go back to and listen to and i absolutely love and some of it i go back to and i enjoy it to a point what i have found especially over the last year or two is the stuff i'm loving was the stuff i recorded better and mixed less and i know that everything out here is all about mix mix mix mix mix i mean there's whole businesses with the name mix in them it's all about the mixing and this idea that everything is rescued in mixing it's just a bunch of baloney we've talked about this many times before all of the great great records the ones that we name check as being the greatest records of all time barely had another mixer on them and then the handful that do make it into that level were mixed by just a handful of incredible mixers bob clear mounting being one of them let's spend more time concentrating on getting our recordings to speak well to capture them with great performances and and and the best tones we possibly can so that when we come to mix we do less and when you get stuff to mix that you've been handed by other people try to spend more time listening and see what their original intention was rather than just instantly opening up your template and applying all your eq's and everything goes through my compressors and my stuff spend more time listening to it you'll give yourself a lot better chance of sending back something to them that blows them away that you understand what they were trying to do and you enhanced it as opposed to just employed your usual this is the way i mix everything mentality thank you ever so much if you've got any free tips stuff that doesn't involve spending any more money on fancy plugins or gear please leave it down below thank you ever so much for watching it's always marvelous to have you here thank you all of you incredible people for creating such a wonderfully supportive community and we'll see you again very very soon [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 60,111

Keywords: Warren Huart, Produce Like A Pro, Home studio, Home recording, Recording Audio, Music Production, Record Producer, Recording Studio, Free Mixing Tricks, Mixing Tricks

Id: K6fYQE_0N_o

Length: 22min 21sec (1341 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 07 2020