One of the most common mix tip suggestions is to use distortion to enhance your tracks. When used correctly, distortion is great for making tracks sound fatter, warmer, and generally more pleasing to listen to. But it’s easy to overdo it when working with distortion, which can cause your tracks to sound harsh, shrill, and...
Today we’re going to talk about EQ’ing guitars. In particular, you’ll learn to add definition, reduce boominess to make room for the bass, getting it to cut through a mix by accenting a specific frequency, and then finally adding width in the sides to make them sound wider without getting in the way of the...
Yesterday I squashed some of your fears about EQ by telling you that you can use it however you want as long as you like the end result. To recap: Subtractive EQ isn’t better than boosting. It’s just one way of using an EQ to get a good mix. You can boost and cut as much...
As someone who has been studying EQ for over 15 years now, let me bust one of the most annoying myths in music production: “Cutting is Better than Boosting and Boosting a Lot is Bad” This is what I think about this advice: Sure, subtractive EQ is a great method for getting rid of annoying...
This week’s mix tip video features the song “Simon Taylor Denver Cash” by The Promise is Hope, and it’s a beautiful singer/songwriter-style folk song with acoustic guitars, dual lead vocals and spacious reverbs. I mixed and mastered the song and I thought I’d help them promote their release by doing a quick Youtube video to...
Mark writes in with a question about mixing philosophy I thought you might find interesting: “I’d love to know your philosophy for what to start a mix with? Drum kit first; introduce the bass, build from there – end up draping the vocal on top? Or get the vocal sounding how you want and mould...
If you’re using Dropbox, WeTransfer or any other similar service to send mixes to your clients or colleagues – stop. There’s a better option and it’s designed exclusively for audio people like us. It’s called Filepass and it was created by Brian Hood of the Six Figure Home Studio. Brian and I have been friends...
If you’d like to dive into an in-depth Q&A session on the mixing process, I recently took my regular Live Happy Hour sessions over to my friend’s Youtube channel. Chris Selim is a French-Canadian music producer and he runs the popular channel Mixdown Online. Watch our conversation below for a boatload of info on mixing,...
If you want to make your bass cut through on small speakers, this week’s video will let you in on a little secret. If you use a parallel bass track, with some EQ and saturation, it’ll add that extra dimension in the high-mids that helps your bass get heard when you play it on standard...
Roger is the “audio guy” in his band. There’s always one. He told me that he hadn’t mixed all that much before. He’d only done rough mixes for his band but they were always lacking clarity, punch, and separation. Maybe the mixes were good enough to create demos for the band to listen to, but...