What to do and when to do what can often be confusing when mixing. Equalizing, compression, reverb, automation, leveling, panning, editing, quantizing, and so on. The possibilities are endless. Categorizing different things and making some sort of system can be a great way to make mixing less confusing, more effective, and in many ways more...
Something that is common for all things successful, whether that be a chart topping artist or your neighborhood’s most popular bakery, is consistency. The magic of showing up every day, every week, or every year, and delivering what you promised to the people you promised it to, is often a bigger factor to success than...
Being innovative in music might seem like a difficult task. Trends are hard to predict, and understanding what will work and what won’t is something simply no one can do for sure. Great artists and innovators have been rejected for years for not being good enough or trendy enough, before making a major breakthrough and...
Working with music, especially working with digital music and DAWs, is at least as much about visual stuff as it is about audible stuff. Slick design, cool interfaces, endless amounts of knobs, dark modes, dB meters, audio analyzers, layout, workflow. The list goes on. It’s easy to get too caught up in what’s going on...
One of the most important skills we have as humans is the ability to imitate others. As newborn babies, we learn to copy facial expressions from those around us. Then we learn to talk by looking and hearing at how others do it. And as we grow up further, we look at how others behave...
When you’re mixing, it’s not uncommon to treat all your tracks individually, following classic procedures of first mixing the kick and bass by themselves and then the snare and then the individual vocal tracks and then the individual instrument tracks, and so on. Starting out, that’s the most logical thing to do. In order to...
Mixing and mastering have a lot of technical and theoretical aspects, and it’s not uncommon to get caught up in doing everything correctly and by the book. While knowing the rules and norms are very important in order to achieve your desired result, they are not always the answer. Music is a very complex concept,...
Audio and mixing can many times seem overwhelming and confusing. That’s because it is. To see things more clearly and get a better overview of different concepts and how sound works, it can help to break it down to the basics. All you do in audio and mixing is based on four relatively simple concepts,...
Making a great-sounding recording or mix is a lot like making great food, it all starts with good ingredients. If your vocal sounds muffled and boomy already in the recording stage, or your kick sounds thin in the production stage, EQs and compressors will many times be of little help in the mixing stage. So...