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-babyFirst 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