PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Recording, Mixing, Performance and Production Mixing is what is in the way of me releasing music and I am not getting any better.

I have been producing for just a little bit over a year and my goal has always been to start releasing music. Production wise (all the elements, arrangement and the execution of it) I have actually been at a place for a while now where I feel like I am good enough to at least start releasing but when it comes to mixing my whole flow is killed and the songs end up left behind every time.

I am definitely not approaching mixing in the right way because my productions have truly grown while my mixing has stayed stagnant. I don't know how to approach the "training of" mixing and have not really understood how to practice this skill in a direct and practical way. I make songs and then I just sit down and mix it ending up disappointed in the end because It does not sound as professional as everything I listen to. I think that it has felt a bit overwhelming for me so I have not approach it in the right way to truly make progress.

I know the fundamentals of mixing and I definitely know that with practice comes progress but I don't know what I can do day by day to get better and this is where I would love some advice from others.

Nobody can tell you some magic trick that pulls it altogether for you — even if we had a clue as to your setup that we don't know.

There are many thousands of turorials online and videos that purport to reveal all. Most are crap but there's good stuff here and there.

I will say that, without a good mixing environment, it doesn't matter because you can't trust what you hear. The Slate VSX is inexpensive and pretty good—it really is possible to mix in headphones. The Platinum Edition is actually the better buy since it includes any future rooms that may be released but the $299 Essentials package does get the job done. Does it replace my high end studio monitors? No but I do check my mixes in VSX and find it helpful.

Steven Slate Audio VSX System

There are many plug-in suites that promise the moon but if you don't know how to use the tools to get the mix you want, none of them are worth a damn. iZotope has a ton of tutorials plus a zillion more from 3rd parties and armchair experts on how to use those tools.

I'm now going to let you in on the worst kept secret among audio professionals: When bought through resellers, iZotope has no way of checking previous licenses. If you purchase an upgrade, you will get current, fully valid licenses. In this case, I recommend this upgrade to Music Production Suite 6. It has Ozone Advanced 11, Nectar 4 Advanced, Native Instruments Guitar Rig 7 Pro, Neutron 4, RX 10 Standard, Exponential Audio Neoverb, Tonal Balance Control 2, Insight 2, Exponential Audio 3D Reverb Bundle, Audiolens, Brainworx Creative Mixing Set, and Native Instruments Effects Bundle. AU for Mac and VST3 for Windows—no more VST2. There are workarounds for using VST3 in BIAB which does not yet support it.

iZotope Music Production Suite 6 Upgrade

Anyway, I got over the fact that this is my standard upgrade price–and less expensive for me than upgrading Ozone Advanced and Nectar 4 alone. I've been using these plugs for decades now since Ozone 1 came out in 2001 and own everything they offer.

When starting out using a reference song is a good approach. Pick a song you like and has the general feel of what you want to accomplish for your tune. Listen in particular to the panning and the volume of each track. EQ, reverb and compression per track can come after you get a feel for establishing the sound stage. And like Mike said there are a world of resources on the net. Also the folks on the User Showcase Forum are very helpful in offering production advice when requested for a BiaB based song posted per forum rules.

And I'm fond of saying that mixing is never finished just abandoned.

Best to you,

Bud

Mixing is not a science it is an art and every song is different and a challenge.
What really helped me and in fact is still helping me is to post a song and ask for comments. You will never get a "that sucks" response but you will get the advice of some very talented musicians.

On a side note we can be our worst critic. You may not be as bad as you think you are.

Definitely watch some of Henry Clarke's YouTube videos.

Henry explains mixing with BiaB and goes into some reasonable detail that I think you will find relevant.

You've already got some excellent advice from some people who are very skilled at mixing.

Keep in mind that you're comparing your mixes against work that's done by some of the best in the field. You can't expect to get that kind of results without years of experience.

But you can get "good enough" results if you've got an idea of what you're doing, and understand the tools that are available to you.

My mix philosophy is to keep the listener focused on whatever is happening at that point in the song. Usually, that's the vocal. At any given point, there should only be one focus. Anything that's not the focus needs to be supporting the focus. Sometimes that means taking the volume of a supporting instrument down a notch, having it play something more simply, or even removing it.

If that sounds a lot like the description of a good arrangement, that's exactly what it is. A good arrangement makes mixing almost trivial.

Anyway, feel free to post an example with specific questions for a more useful response.

This is the simplest starting point I know of in mixing. Very old, very basic but gets a novice on a good start .. a lot of the other links on this site are great learning tools too, like the page on Compression (what it does), etc.
Surprised it's still alive after all these years.
http://audiominds.com/mixing.html

It's a site I worked on with Mac after we first met and it was left in the dust ever since but is a treasure trove of Mac's knowledge and 'Mac-isms'.
He contributed a ton of the content.

Learning how to mix and get a pro sound takes time. Just study and practice.

Just using plug ins and "mastering software" without knowing what you're doing and why it needs to be done, is going to end up as a mess.

Do the work, study and keep learning and mixing. Post on forums where you can get good advice. And specifically ASK for the advice.

Amen to that!

One of the reasons I recommend iZotope is that you will receive regular email inviting you to live tutorials where you can ask questions.

A few tips that might help:

Reference often - multiple times an hour. With a reference track that is sonically similar to yours.

If you are doing electronic or hip hop or any genre where kick is the loudest element, try setting the kick to peak at -11dB. Turn down all the other channels to -64dB. Then bring them back in one by one, in order of importance (bass, vocals, leads, etc - will depend on genre) and set the volume based on the kick's level. Most important sounds will end up 3-6dB below the kick. Do this with your eyes closed, and you will find that you can place many sounds much quieter than you originally thought. This should build some headroom to push your whole mix louder.

Set a limiter on the master and make it so that the mix kisses the limiter here and there, but never does more than 1 dB (as you don't want to start colouring the sound too much). This will ensure you can compare your mix to your reference.

Reference some more.

Lots of pros use saturation and clipping and transient shapers and compressors to get loudness. Especially on drum bus.

Research using busses to add group processing, to help gel the mix together while making it sound louder. Common bus setups: kick and bass together OR kick and drums together (with bass on its own), FX, instruments (guitar / piano / etc), leads.

Kick and bass relationship has to be PERFECT or else they eat up too much headroom and muddy the mix. Some people spend hours perfecting the relationship.

Hey There,

There is an awful lot of self-puffery that goes on in some threads (occasionally) and I don't want to add to that but I feel I need to validate what I'm about to say in some form before I say it.

I've been having quite a few things picked up for sync these days so I must be doing something right in terms of mixing and mastering, so I'll tell you what I've learned.

This is pasted below as a sample and example, but I also paste it here because this reply is long.

https://m.soundcloud.com/david-snyder-guitar/barcelona-baby

First and foremost, less is more, everywhere and with everything.

I am a huge fan of the Xtra styles sold here because I feel they're a little quirkier, and a little more catchy than some of the, well, shall we say, run of the mill styles.

The other thing that I like about them is that they come almost premixed: that is to say, the balance and panning of the instruments right straight out of the box is pretty close to a radio ready presentation, with the rich and warm audio quality of the tracks and the minimal amount of reverb they apply to the drums and so forth.

So when you take these stems (as just one example, I assume that you may also add in some of your own instrumentation or play the guitar or piano or something like that) the first question that should come into your mind as a mixer is this: what am I going to add to each individual stem as an effect or an EQ and why?

The sound of a master begins at the individual stem level in the mix phase and the application of effects begins at the individual stem level.

The first question at that individual stem level always has to be: why am I putting this effect on this track? If you don't have a really good answer for that, don't do it.

A lot of the effects and plugins that are available today both for the individual track level and the overall mastering level are dangerous because they tend to make things very brittle and squashed and people tend to go overboard with effects and vsts really fast.

A simple example would be acoustic guitar tracks that come out of BIAB. They may not be perfect but they do sound like an acoustic guitar. The minute you begin to apply effects, for no reason, and using the wrong effects, you begin to destroy everything that the instrument is doing right and you ruin it, and it no longer sounds like an acoustic guitar.

There seems to be an incredible amount of pressure even on some of the forums here to constantly buy and purchase new vsts that have just hit the market and once you do that the temptation is, well I paid $79 for it, so I should use it.

No you shouldn't use it unless there's an extremely good reason.

Stop buying. Just listen. If you've been at it long enough you probably have a hundred times more vsts and effects than you actually really need.

As you begin your learning curve in mixing I think a good place to start is take some of the best styles that you have heard in BIAB, take the stems, put them in a DAW as is, set the panning and faders at exactly the same places they are in the band in a box file, play them back, listen carefully, and say to yourself, what needs to change on each track and why?

From this point on anything that you add in terms of an EQ or a plug-in should be done with extreme care and caution.

Less is more.

Once you get used to producing and mixing a perfect sounding and aurally pleasing bed with the bare minimum of effects that are necessary to create the sound that you're going for, then you can move on to adding vocals.

Vocals are in a world of their own and so that's probably left for another day.

But that's where I might start if I were you and I were a newbie.

Just my own thoughts. Not claiming to be an expert but I am getting some decent traction with my stuff right now using the principles that I talked about above.

Last night, for example, I just got another pleasant notice that the song below, which I first posted here on the form in 2016, was just licensed again, after having been licensed many other times already. I am not sure if the SoundCloud version changed that much for the album version.

It doesn't have any effects on it that I can remember. I probably used Ozone 6 for the master, but if I did, I used only the slightest most infinitesimal finishing touch, probably one of their more gentle presets and that's it.

The main guitar is me on nylon and the rest of the tracks are BIAB tracks as is.

https://m.soundcloud.com/david-snyder-guitar/barcelona-baby

Spoken like a pro David. You might consider capturing your wisdom in a book, or at least an e-book. If so, it would be useful to have links to audio examples that first show how not to do it, then the same example showing it properly fixed. For me, mastering this craft will be a lifelong endeavor.

As for Barcelona Baby, I haven't been on this forum for 7 years so this was my first time hearing it, great guitar work. I also liked how all the percussion came thru in the mix.

PS> Feel free to critique any of my mixes . . . I need all the help I can get