Original subtitles

Hi and welcome back from Module 2 of Mixing breakthroughs.

We're going to talk about the most fundamental foundational aspect of mixing

setting balances.

This is the mixing part of mixing, right?

Making sure that each element can be heard, that your featured elements sound

featured, and that all the supporting elements can be heard clearly without

detracting from the featured instrument or masking each other.

At this stage, I'm going to walk you through a stepbystep process that's going

to help you mix, I think, faster than you ever have before, with even better

results. This is going to require you to force a

couple of limitations on yourself, but I think you're going to be very glad that

you did, and I think you're going to end up with a process for mixing that's

better than the approach that you've been taking in the past.

In fact, a lot of mixers go into mixing in the beginning without any real process

at all.

Instead, they're kind of floundering

around, you know, guessing at what they should do next, what they should try next

oh, should I get a good drum sound i think it's pretty good now I'll check out

the vocal, maybe it's the guitars without really thinking through and having an

established process that seems to work each time or at least a road map that'll

give you some direction in getting from where the mix is now to where you know

you want to go.

I think you also start to discover a

couple of big secrets of mixing, and one of them is that getting there is not the

hard part. Knowing where to go and figuring out

where to go, that's the hard part.

And that's what this approach, this

technique, this strategy is going to help you with the most.

Some great mixers are able to just throw up the faders and start working from the

beginning and kind of make it up as they go along and figure out the track as they

go along.

There are actually a couple or few great

mixers who take this very approach, but I think they're in kind of the minority

from the mixers that I've talked to and interviewed over the years.

I think that approach works best if you're on an analog console and if you've

been doing this for a long time, ideally in live settings where you've had to get

a lot of balances really fast.

But if you're really starting to develop

your approach and you want to go from pretty good or OK to really great,

there's a different approach that I'm going to recommend that I think works

much better. These are not just techniques that I've

made-up myself it really comes from a tradition of great mixers in the studio,

all often winding up with some similar approaches that really seem to work for

mixing. So here are the big ideas.

The first is that we're going to start by just adjusting level.

We're not going to dive into E Qing our kick drum and E Qing this and E Qing that

and messing around with our compressors and putting reverb on everything no,

we're just going to start by setting levels.

We're not even going to use any panning at this point.

If that sounds boring to you, the idea of just messing around with levels for a

while, then I'll tell you what you're not cut out for mixing.

Go home right now.

You're still with me, right?

All right, good.

We're just going to mess around with

mixing with setting levels.

And it's important to be able to get

excited by this part of the process.

And I think you can get excited by this

part of the process because this is the foundation of your mix.

And I think that you can get 70 % of the way there, 75 eighty, 85 % of the way

there with just your balance settings, depending on how well the tracks were

recorded when you got them.

So to take this approach, here's one of

the first surprises.

You're not going to start at the

beginning. In fact, sometimes the worst place to

start a mix is at the beginning.

Many intros to songs will be fairly

sparse compared to the rest of the song and if you're anything like me, you found

yourself in the situation where you're mixing a fairly sparse intro you've just

got this acoustic guitar and a vocal or maybe this nice lush keyboard sound

before all the other instruments come in And you start, you know, developing these

really big, luxurious intro sounds.

And then by the time you get to your

verse or halfway through your verse, you realize that you're starting to run out

of space already and you're starting to run out of headroom and you're having

trouble fitting new instruments in around this, you know, these beautiful, lush

intro sounds that you've established.

So then what happens you get to your

chorus, and when you get to your course, my goodness, there's hardly any space

left it off or anything if you can shoehorn another sound and you'd be

ecstatic, but you're starting to run out of room and you're starting to chew

through your headroom and your mix is getting worse as it goes along as the

song supposed to get bigger and more dramatic, your sounds are getting smaller

and tighter and just generally less good.

Well, here's the great workaround for

this, and this is something that a lot of top mixers do.

Instead of starting at the beginning, dive right into one of your most dense

sections. This will usually be your second to last

chorus or your last chorus, when most of the elements of the song have already

been introduced and you're going to start mixing there.

This will allow you to make sure you're in a great place with headroom, and that

you're also able to make things really fit in the most dense section and to make

sure you're working on the hardest parts of your mix while you're still the

freshest and the most creative.

Because I can just about promise you, if

you're focusing on a sparse intro and a sparse verse, all the work that you've

just done there, you're going to practically undo in the chorus.

All right, So here's the second surprise and the second very important thing about

this approach and that is that you don't want to just, you know, bring up your

kick drum and start Eqing it or bring up whatever instrument you know you've heard

you always start with the drums it could be the drums, but I want you to think

instead about what the most important element is in this section, what the

focal point of this section is, What's driving this section of the song.

90 % of the time, this will be either the vocals or the drums.

And I want you to bring up that element to a good level where maybe you're just

kind of tapping the threshold of your bus compressor.

And remember, I'm recommending that if you're going to mix through a bus

compressor, you turn it on early, maybe even at the beginning, and you're going

to bring up this element until it's at a fairly healthy level maybe you're just

starting to kind of tap your bus compressor, and then you're going to

bring in each additional element kind of in the order of their importance.

So your first most primary instrument comes up first, and then maybe your most

important supporting element comes up after that and then another, and then

another. And each time you bring a new instrument

in. The idea is just using balance.

No pant, no reverb, no EQ.

Make it sit well with these other

instruments. Every once in a while, you'll be

uncertain about exactly what level a new instrument that you bring in should end

up at. And that's OK.

Here's one of the other secrets of a great mix, and that is that it's not

about finding one static fader position.

It's OK if that fader position changes

over time or from section to section, but right now, remember we're just focusing

on one dense section and we're looking for a good kind of default baseline fader

setting that's going to work pretty well throughout that section.

If you are a bit uncertain about what that exact fader setting should be,

here's a trick I really recommend think about instead of finding the right fader

setting and landing on it, think about honing in to the right fader setting.

If you're a musician, it's almost a little bit like tuning a guitar or a

drum. I'm going to recommend that if you're

unsure where this fader should wind up, overshoot the level a little bit.

Push this fader up until you know that it's too loud and you'll know when it's

too loud. Trust your gut.

Once you have the level too loud, then bring it down to a place where it starts

to sound reasonable cool.

That's your hot level.

Now take that fader and bring it down till the sound is too low.

All right, now push it up until it again starts to sound reasonable.

Now you've kind of established a window, a setting that's, you know, kind of on

the hottest end that you can get away with and kind of the quietest end that

you can get away with and you know that your fader setting should end up being

somewhere there in the middle.

If you end up with a very small window,

that's pretty cool.

You probably won't even have to do much

additional processing on that sound.

If you end up with a really big window.

Well, this instrument might be a prime candidate later for some kind of e q or

compression, maybe to reduce this dynamic range, or to help keep other instruments

from masking it, or to help it poke through the mix a bit more.

But for now, we're not going to focus on that.

We're just going to try to get it in a good place in this window that seems to

work for that sound.

And here's one of the other big

realizations about mixing is again, it's not about establishing 1 fader setting

that works for the entire song.

If you end up with a setting in the

chorus and a separate setting in the verse, that's okay.

In fact, in a really ambitious mix in a really large scale production, you might

end up mixing your chorus completely separately from your verse.

This is something that some engineers did on big ambitious productions, even back

in the days of tape, and they'd mix each section separately, kind of in a loop,

and then join them together later.

Well, this is easier than ever on a DAW

with automation, or even on an analog desk with flying faders.

And if you see some of the really great mixers working, you may be impressed

you're by surprise by just how many fader rides they have going on those faders can

really be flying.

They might have one set of balances for

the chorus and a slightly different set of balances for the verse, and there may

be rides between them with different relationships in each section, and that's

okay. But right now we're just focusing on your

very dense chorus and bringing an instrument by instrument or instrument

group by instrument group until you get a balance that really seems to work well.

At this point, there's no reason to ever use the solo button.

What matters is how the balances work in context.

At this point, we're not applying reverb, we're not panning, we're not Eqing.

It's just seeing how far we can get by setting levels.

Once you have the balances established for the chorus, now try going back to the

beginning and mixing through.

Or maybe just back slightly to the verse

and see if you can get away with the same settings or if you need to tweak them

slightly. If you're in the kind of roduction where

your settings for the chorus don't sound right for the verse at all, then you can

tear them down and get a completely different set of settings for the verse.

But on a lot more kind of sparse or traditional arrangements, you end up

maybe being able to do some kind of slight ride, some slight tweaks to fader

automation to have your chorus levels work well for your verse.

But it's OK if you don't end up finding one static fader setting for the entire

song for each instrument.

That's not necessarily what mixing is

about. A mix is like living, breathing Organism.

It has different wants and needs at different times, just like you.

It also can unfold like a story unfolds, and we don't want a static level of

energy throughout the mix.

It's okay for a song to kind of have

peaks and valleys and then peaks again, and it's okay that if overall as it's

doing that, your intensity kind of ramps up bit by bit as the piece goes along.

Also remember that contrast is a big thing in music, and sometimes it's

significant differences that really catch our attention.

Once you've done this and established the levels for your song, now I'm going to

recommend that you finally get into panning, and this is the only other tool

we're going to use for this entire module and this entire exercise.

And when you do your panning, I'm going to recommend again an approach that so

many of the grades used and not that many of the just OK mixers used.

And that is the LCR approach, which stands for left, center, Right.

With the LCR approach, you're taking your centered instruments and you're leaving

them there. Probably your vocal, your kick drum, your

snare drum, your bass.

They'll probably all be straight down the

center, and then anything you want to pan it wide or don't pan it at all.

This is not a hard and fast rule, but rather a guideline, a starting point that

I want to see if you can stick to.

Because a lot of really great mixers get

a lot of width by taking this approach.

So for each element, think should this be

in the center? If not, should it be panned, and if so,

pan it hard left or pan it hard right, And only once you've tried doing that and

you've tried getting a level that really works with these extreme panning

settings. If it's just not happening, and it really

is telling you bring me in just a bit, bring me in from the center, then you

know, do it, but see how much you can get away with doing left, center or right.

This really frees up room in the Center for your central elements to have a lot

of impact for them to really speak without clutter, and it also helps

separate the sides in a way that makes the mix feel much wider.

You also have a much greater effect with this LCR approach if you're putting

rhythmically opposing instruments on either side.

If you just take an electric guitar double and pan 1 double of this side and

1 double of this side, and they're kind of moving together well, that may

increase with a little bit.

It can also kind of add a little bit of

clutter to the mix it can maybe feel more like big mono than true impressive

stereo. Better yet, take two opposing electric

guitars with slightly different tone and playing slightly different rhythms and

pan them to either side.

That'll give you a much greater sense of

width. You can also do this with a guitar and a

keyboard, or a sample and some other element, or maybe 2 percussive elements

on either side.

If they have some kind of difference in

rhythm, where they're playing off of each other slightly, and if they have slightly

different tones, that's going to give you a lot more width than if they're just

doing the same thing on either side.

It'll also feel like it's going to

clutter up your middle less and really draw your ears outwards.

This LCR approach can give you impressive with a really solid center.

I wouldn't recommend it if you're mixing jazz or classical music necessarily.

But for most popular styles of music, whether it's rock or pop or hip hop or

neo soul or e d m or whatever you might be working on, usually a little bit of

hyperrealism is just the ticket and this is a way to get a little bit of that

hyperrealism and a little bit of extra impact in your mixes.

A few more quick notes you should be mixing at low levels and I recommend

having a small set of speakers that you can trust to mix on.

Some of the most popular ones have been the oratones or the Yamaha NS tens

Overtime I'm a big fan of oratones that you can find a small set of speakers that

you know and trust.

Ideally they'll be fairly resonancefree,

and ideally they won't be too hyped up in the low end or the high end.

Keep in mind that your mixes will sound to a degree like the inverse of your

speakers. So if your speakers are a bit on the

bright side, your mixes are going to end up sounding a little dark because you

won't push high frequencies and high frequency instruments quite as much

because your speakers are telling you that information is already there.

Similarly, if you have speakers that are really bass heavy, nice and hyped in the

bass well your mixes, it might end up a little kind of on the thin sounding side

because you're not putting in that extra oomph that you really need your speakers

are lying to you and telling you it's already there.

One of the worst things you can have is speakers that are really hyped up in the

lows and the highs and kind of scooped out in the midrange.

Then you're going to end up with a kind of annoying weak midrangey sounding mixes

with kind of off balances.

Ideally, having a set of small speakers

that are kind of even through the midrange or maybe even push the midrange

slightly forward will help you end up with mixes that are hyped up just a

little bit because they have energy of their own.

You get a similar benefit from mixing at low levels.

The way our ears work, if we're listening at really loud levels, we hear a lot more

bass and a lot more treble than if we're listening at lower levels.

Listening at slightly lower levels helps you make sure that you bring the drama

and the interest and the intrigue and the power from your mix and not from a whole

bunch of hyped up air moving in the room.

So by listening at lower levels instead

of getting hyped out by our speakers will we bring the hype to the mix ourselves

and making sure it has real impact and great balances at any level in general if

you're mixing loud and then you turn down, you might not be that happy with

the results. If you mix on big impressive sounding

speakers and then you fold down the little ones, you might not be that

impressed by the results.

But if you go in the other direction,

working on somewhat smaller speakers at somewhat lower levels, and then fold them

up to nice hyped, big sounding speakers at loud levels, you're going to blow

yourself away and I think your clients away too.

It's a much more fun and satisfying way to work, and I think it'll get you better

results too.

The other and potentially most important

piece of advice here is to remember to listen to your mix away from the mixing

console, away from the mouse, away from the control surface, away from the

screen. Lie down on the couch in the back of the

room. Go take a walk around, put headphones on

and take a walk and hear how the mix sounds that way.

Take it to your car if you have one, and listen in there.

Sometimes we do our best mixing when we're not mixing and you'll find that

with your hands off the controls you can stop fiddling and start really listening

for the first time.

Ideally, you can bring that into your

daily practice so that you're able to zoom out and take the kind of bird's eye

view and then zoom back in without leaving the console.

But even the guys who've been doing this for years and years and years find that

this technique is essential.

Take a break and hear the mix in a

different environment, or just from another space in the room where you can't

touch the controls.

Then you'll find yourself really

listening and coming up with.

Obvious changes that become so clear as

soon as you get your hands off of those controls.

So keep that in mind when you're mixing, and keep in mind that no matter what kind

of speakers you're in, no matter what kind of room you're in, you're going to

have to learn that environment.

And one of the best ways to do that is

referring to references.

So that's it.

Those are the best practices this is the received wisdom of so many of the best

mix engineers. It really boils down to a few things.

One, don't just start your mix from the beginning of the song.

Dive into one of your most complex sections and get your levels happening

there first. Second, do this by bringing up your most

essential instrument first, your focal point instrument.

90 % of the time the focal point of a section is going to be the vocals or

maybe the drums in the rhythm section that drives that bit, it could be another

lead instrument it could in some cases be the interplay between two instruments,

like 2 dueling guitars or something like that.

But much of the time, you'll be looking at vocals or drums first.

But if your gut is telling you, hey, the focal point of this section is the

guitars, Trust your gut.

Bring them up first and fit everything

around them. If you're convinced the focal point is

the vocal, bring that up and fit everything around it.

And this focal point instrument that you brought up first, every single instrument

that you bring in around it is never supposed to mask the level of this lead

instrument you've established.

Now, if you end up with gain staging

issues, you can take all of your tracks and turn them down a bit, or turn them up

a bit if you need.

But if you're establishing a good set of

balances at a low to moderate level, that set of balance is going to work at almost

any other level, whether it's very quiet or very loud.

So I'm going to encourage you number three to listen at moderate to low

levels. This will help you get better balances,

help you hype up the mix instead of just getting hyped out by your speakers, and

bonus, if you're in a kind of compromised mixing environment, mixing at a lower

level will help from exciting room mode, room nose slap, back flutter, all of the

room issues that you might have in your space.

So here's piece number four.

Once you've done this in your most dense

section, now you're going to start mixing your other sections.

You could now go to the verse whatever you think the second most important

section is. Or, in a less ornate arrangement, you can

go back to the beginning, to the intro and start mixing through.

Factor number five is to remember that you can have slightly different mix

settings for each section.

In some cases, you could even have

significantly different mix settings for each section.

All right, number six.

Remember, we're just dealing with volume

here, only level setting.

You're not doing any panning yet no e q

yet, no reverb yet, just setting your level number seven.

If you get stuck on a level, if you're not sure exactly where you should be,

remember it can help to overshoot the level, push things to where you know that

this new instrument is too loud, and then pull it back to where it starts to feel

reasonable. If you're still kind of uncertain about

where this should sit, pull it down until you know it's too low, and then bring it

up to where you feel like it's kind of reasonable again.

Hopefully you'll have a pretty small window between kind of reasonable hot

level and a reasonable low level, and you want to just find something that works

within there. If you've got a really big gap between

level that works that's hot and a level that works that's low, you may need to do

some additional processing of that track, and we'll get into that later on.

But those tracks that have the most trouble finding one static fader position

are the ones where we might want to look first at doing some extra surgery,

whether with e q or compression, And we'll get into that a bit more in future

modules. But remember, we're not just looking for

one fader position where we set and forget, and it works for the whole rest

of the mix.

Fader rides throughout sections and

between sections are okay.

In fact, you'd be amazed to see the

console automation of some of the great mixers and just how much faders are

really flying in some of their mixes.

And the last major takeaway I want to

give you is once you set your balances, now start thinking about panning.

Your mix should sound great and mono and a mix that sounds great mono is going to

sound great, panned out, but I'll tell you what a mix where you start making

things sound pretty good panned out isn't necessarily going to fall down to mono

very well, and it isn't necessarily going to work on all speaker systems you're

going to have a much better time mixing in mono and folding out to stereo than

the other way around.

You're going to have a much better time

mixing at low levels and then listening loud for fun later than the other way

around. And you're going to have a much better

time listening on accurate and flat speakers and often smaller speakers, and

then folding up to the big boys rather than the other way around.

All right, so here's your exercise for this module.

I want you to pull up a mix that you have already completed in the past and want

you to save a new version of this session and tear down all of your favors.

Remember to go through the setup process we discussed in the first module where

you're getting all the technical stuff out of the way first so that you can

focus on being creative.

And then I want you to take one unbroken

hour block of time, 50 minutes with a 10 minute break, and spend that time only

focusing on setting your general balances.

Do that by diving into your most dense section first, throwing up your primary

instrument and then throwing up one after another, remembering that's okay to

overshoot and hone in on the right level, and remembering that's okay to have

different level settings for different sections.

Spend at least 10 minutes doing this.

If it's a relatively minimal track, you

may get much of your balancing done in about 10 minutes.

If that's the case, throw down all your faders and try it again.

This time, start with a different instrument, an alternate instrument that

you think could have been the focal point If you start with vocals the first time,

This time start with drums.

I want you to get into the habit, the

idea that it's okay to tear down your entire mix and start again, and it's

especially okay to do that early on.

You don't want to find yourself

experimenting with what could have been 4 hours into a mix session.

You want to try all of your different variables now the hardest part of mixing

is not getting there, it's knowing where to go.

I want to repeat that one for you is so essential.

The hardest part of mixing is not getting there, it's knowing where to go in the

1st place. And you can only really discover that by

trying different settings and see which resonate with you the most, and at this

stage, which compare the most favorably to some of your references once you've

gotten 30 minutes into your unbroken block of an hour that you're setting

aside to work on this, I definitely want you to tear down your mix if you haven't

already, and then start again.

This time, see if you can get to as good

of a mix as you had the first time.

Even faster.

And I think you'll find you go much faster the second time around because you

already have a better idea of where you want to end up sonically.

And you'll find that once you have that established, wow, getting there is so

much easier. And I think you'll start to recognize

that the vision comes first and then getting there is a breeze.

But when the vision isn't coming, you've got to just start working.

Throw things up, and then, if you're unsure, bring them down.

Start again.

Now, once you're at least 30 minutes into

this session and you've pulled down things at least once.

Now I want you to start focusing on panning.

Start with the LCR technique.

Left, center, right.

Think, should this instrument be panned? If not, let me keep it in the center.

If it should be panned, let's try hard left or hard right.

And remember, the best way to get a really wide sounding mix is to put kind

of opposing instruments on either side.

If you have two guitars kind of doing the

same thing on either side, just doubles kind of going together, your mix may

sound a little bit wider, but it'll be kind of like a big mono feel.

If you want real width, that comes from instruments that are playing off of each

other, maybe slightly different rhythms or slightly different tones.

Having slightly different things going on in each speaker is what really gives you

cues for separation and width.

If you want tremendous width, I'm going

to recommend that any stereo keyboards you have, unless they have a real obvious

stereo like ping pong sound, take one of those sides and just throw them away and

treat it like a mono instrument.

This goes for almost any stereo keyboard

stereo samples unless they have a really obvious clear stereo effect that's super

awesome and part of the sound, you've got to have it take one side and just throw

it away and then pan that element left, center, or right.

Remember, you only get so much with by putting similar elements on either side.

Doubles of certain instruments sure can kind of spread things out, but it'll take

up a lot of space in the mix.

If instead of having two guitars doing

the same thing, you have a guitar and a rhythmically opposing keyboard on the

other side, or if you have two guitars playing off of each other on either side,

ideally with slightly different tones, that'll give you much more width still.

Percussion instruments on either side can have a similar effect and try to find a

level balance that works well with and pan hard left, center, or right.

Only Once that technique doesn't work then you can think about pulling things

in a bit, but try that as your default and I think you're going to be impressed

by the result.

Last quick note I'll give you here is to

refer to your references in this session once you've gotten more than a half

through forty five fifty minutes through, I want you to compare your balances to

some commercially released music.

Now the commercially released music is

going to be compressed and e, q and it's probably going to sound brighter and

clearer than just your balance with levels alone.

That's Okay at this point, just using levels, it might not sound like a

completely finished commercial production, but you'd be surprised at how

close you can get.

With just Level.

You may be able to get your mix 70 percent, 75 %.

Eighty percent, 85 % of the way there, depending on how well the tracks were

recorded when you got them.

So once you've finished one of these hour

long blocks of time, you're in minute 45 minute 50, take your break and then come

back and listen to your mix compared to some of your commercial references, it's

important to level match them so you're not thrown off by their mixes being

louder than yours.

So you may need to bring in your

reference mixes to your DAW and turn them down a little bit.

And I want you to make some notes, particularly focusing on 1st your vocal.

How loud is your vocal where it wound up compared to some of these commercial

mixes? Then how loud is your snare drummer, your

primary driving percussive instrument compared to those in these other mixes?

And what you might find compared to some of your initial balances is that

commercial vocals and snare drums are way louder than you ever realized when you

finally start listening to it against your own work and you might realize,

start to realize just how much you can push some of these central elements and

still have a mix sound really great.

Now at this stage, there may be some

things that you still don't like.

The elements might not have enough oomph

behind them, and it might not be enough clarity.

You could start desiring even more separation.

That's all right too we'll go through a bunch of techniques for getting all of

that and much more out of your mixes much more quickly in the next module when we

start looking at e Q.

But until then, remember to do this

exercise, taking at least one unbroken hour block of time and just messing

around with your level on a session that you've already completed, where you like

the mix okay but weren't completely 110 % satisfied.

Give this a shot following the rules that we've laid out for you here.

Don't be afraid to break them now and then, but try as much as you can to stick

to this framework and see how far you can get doing just this little.

I think you may surprise even yourself.

And by the end of this course, I think

you'll be surprising.

Not just yourself, but me, your peers,

and your clients.

Thanks for making it through this module

with me. I'll look forward to seeing you the next

time when we're going to go into Module 3 and look at e Q.