How to mix EDM like a pro with this simple beginner mistake avoided

hey guys it's Luke from mixamade simple and today I want to talk about one of the most common things that I hear when I hear a track that just sounds amateur or that's not mixed very well and that is lack of depth but before we get to that I'm going to ask you for some help right now I'm in the process of doing research for a course that I'm developing that's going to help music producers get better at mixing and mastering as fast as possible so if you're a music producer and you're making tracks that just aren't at that professional level yet or you're you feel like your mixing could just be at another level look in the description below and go ahead and book a zoom call with me I'm just going to be asking you a few questions it takes about 20 minutes and it's so that I can create like the best course possible basically going to get some info from you that's going to really help shape this course so go ahead and do that it'd be really helpful and I appreciate it okay so when it comes to mixing we can basically view a mix in a 3D stereo image right so the way we can look at a mix is we can look at it tall deep and wide and so tall meaning the frequency range wide meaning like the width so like panning you might pan something hard left pan something hard right have like the kick drum in the middle things like that and then depth is how close a sound is to you and how far a sound is from you so for example the vocal in any track is most likely going to be right in your face and then some pad like a synth pad or something is probably going to be further back or you might have the kick drum that's like right there in front and then you have a Shaker Loop that's going to be further back and so I'm going to go ahead and jump in the Daw here and I'm going to show you the difference it can make and some couple tricks that we can use to be able to place things up front and then also place things in back so using EQ for example you know because I think a lot of times new producers what they do is that they start adding stuff to their mixed through their production and everything sounds so good that they want you want to you want to be able to hear everything but the reality is you have to have certain things are going to have more importance than others and so let's jump in the doll and I'll show you exactly what I mean by this okay so I've got this track here um and it's the beginning section where there's a vocal and some strings and then there's this piano part that's in the background and it's in the background on purpose and so first what I'm going to do is I'm going to play a section of it and I'm going to play the amateur version and I'm going to play you like the more professional version and I'm gonna show you the differences between the two and basically I'm gonna explain how we can use compression and EQ to push things further back in the mix and so let's go ahead and take a listen to The Amateur version right here [Music] I feel [Music] okay so the piano sounds cool right it sounds like a good nice cool little Melody and the piano sounds good but it's just too loud it's too up close and it's interfering with the vocal and we don't want that and so if you have a slow attack and you're compressing something um the transient's really going to pop through and a lot of times that's what we want but in this case we've got the some Crush compression here we've got I have um some compression over here that's also catching like the louder Peaks and then the EQ I'm eq'ing out the lows but I'm not EQ out any of the highs and so that's something to pay attention to so so that's how this is set up right here right okay and then um this is just side chains not being affected and then I've got some Echo boy some delay so now I'm going to mute this now let's listen to the uh more professional sounding version [Music] come take me anywhere just as long as I'm with you okay so you can hear that you hear the piano it's more subtle it's pushed back in the mix the vocal really comes through nicely it just sounds a lot better um and so what I have here is the way I'm compressing this is I didn't really change much except that I have a faster attack and so I didn't want to have some such a fast attack I'm completely squatching the transient but it's smoothed over the transient a bit and so I'll go ahead and I'll so first I'm going to bring the attack up a little bit so you can hear a slow attack so you can hear what it sounds like with the Trans is coming through and then I'm going to bring the attack down so you can hear what it sounds like with them much more smoothed over laughs [Music] so here I was kind of popping through a little bit more now let's check this out I'm going to make it just really fast [Music] so it's kind of subtle but you can hear that the fast attack is just kind of smoothing out those transients and it's just smoothing it over which actually is a good thing it's shaping the sound that way it's going to be pushed back further in the mix but I don't want it to be that fast attack I like I'm going to put probably around like five maybe ten and then like I said this compressor is just really catching some of the higher Peaks that come and now this EQ this is really important so you can see what I have here is that I have filtered out the high frequencies and so if you're a beginner or new you might not think about doing this to sounds like especially this it looks like it's pretty extreme so let's go ahead and take a listen and I'm just going to go back and forth with this so you can hear the difference [Music] [Music] okay so obviously when I pull this up and I let all the highs through it's a lot more crisp and you hear like a lot more of it which sometimes that's the sound we want if we have if we are EQ a vocal we're going to want that but in this case we want it to be pushed back and one way you can think about this is that when you hear a sound that's far away it's the the higher frequencies are going to sound more muffled so you're basically creating like an artificial way to make this sound like it's further back so like I said you think about the mix tall deep wide depth we want this to be back um because we want that vocal up front but we want this playing off the vocal because it's nice and we still want to be able to hear it but we just don't want it like way up front like in your face and so when you're making your music think about this think about your the depth of your music and think about using compressor compression and EQ as ways that you can push something back so a fast attack compressor is going to smooth out the transients and you can really compress it and push it back EQ if you wanted to feel sound like it's further back in the mix you can like filter out those high frequencies and it's literally going to sound like it's farther away and if you want something up that sounds like it's up close then bring up more of those high frequencies make it really pop especially like something like a vocal so I hope that helps like I said that's really like when I hear you know if I go on Reddit and I hear someone's wanting feedback and they play their track and if I just hear something where there's just like tons of stuff right in my face I instantly know okay this person's just an amateur level producer um so just keep that in mind and then listen to a lot of reference tracks just you know pick out one instrument and then listen to the whole track the entire way through and then sit there either with your headphones or your by your speakers and like try to mentally place where it's at in the mix and then use reference tracks and um and yeah that's how you'll get better at producing high level music and also being able to mix at a high level so I hope that helps if this if you like this video go ahead and like And subscribe it's going to really help my channel grow and like I said before if you are a music producer who is struggling to get their music at a professional level and you want to uh help me with my course I'd love to hear from you go to the description below book a zoom call with me and these have calls have gone really well so far it's helped me a lot I'm gonna have a really high level in-depth course come out soon and I just need your help to be able to craft it make the best course possible so uh that have been said I look forward to talking to you and I will see you next time

Channel: Mixing Made Simple

Views: 146

Keywords: music production, edm production, mixing edm, edm ableton, music production for beginners, music production tips, music production tutorial, music production tricks, music production software, music production course, ableton, fl studio, how to learn music production at home, learn music production faster, music production tips and tricks, ableton live, how to learn music production fast, ableton live tutorial, music production tips for beginners, edm tips, edm tutorial

Id: UCBX-_WXin4

Length: 9min 53sec (593 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 30 2023