Mixing is art! It’s a very beautiful, creative procedure that comes after recording. In recording phase we try to record all the instruments we want to enhance our song with. For you though, mixing may be is a very complicated process and is the reason that you skip this step for another time! You don’t have to be frustrated. Let’s see what mixing is in simple words.
You have just completed recording all the instruments for your song. Every instrument is represented by a fader in your DAW’s digital console .Right? Perfect! If you just press the play button and you listen to your tracks ,you will get the feeling that is something wrong. That all instruments have to be in some kind of the right order. According to the genre of each song and the arrangement, some instruments may sound louder than the others. Mixing isn’t so complicated as you think! There are so many techniques and “secrets” to help you get the best sounding result. And the best sounding result for your song is to have a radio edit song.
Many of my students often ask me what does it take to have a professional mix. They keep asking me what is the secret to get a “powerful” mix.I want to share this common but so important secret with you today. The secret to get better mixes is…Recording. Yes, my friend, recording! The recordings are the key ingredient to a very good mix.What do I mean by that? Let me explain with a few simple words and some examples.
You have scheduled to record acoustic guitars for one of your songs and you seem to be out of focus.Many little “mistakes” may happen and you overlook them by saying “ I’ll fix it in the mix”. Wrong! This is the biggest mistake you could ever do in your home studio.
If you have good performance to your recordings then you’ll definitely have a very good mix.You can’t fix everything in the mix.You have to focus on the recording phase , so you won’t have to do so much in the mixing phase.You have to demand the best performance and being more strict with yourself or your friends-musicians,when it comes to recording. Don’t be satisfied with an average recording. Don’t let yourself think “ I can do better than that”. If you know that you could record much better ,then just do it. Grab your guitar and record another take ,so you can get better results. You won’t regret it. Many of you let others to mix your songs and the first thing you may think ,listening to the final mix,is “This isn’t the mix that I was expecting. This isn’t a good mix”.No one would ever say “ There were many false recordings in this project”. Every step of producing a song is important to get the best sounding results.
In mixing , we try to enhance our song using some simple but very handful tools, we get the clarity and the width that every radio ready song has. We clean up some frequencies that gives to our recordings headroom and the right position to the final mix.
We live in a privileged age where technology provide us with the most inexpensive and useful tools to record our song into our computer , into our DAW with countless tracks. Every DAW has its own digital console or mixer. On this mixer all the magic happens!
There will be many tutorials with videos ,blog posts and podcasts on mixing because I want to teach you how you can record ,mix and release your music from your bedroom using only what you have! Less is more!
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