Muddiness in your mixes is a frequent problem. That’s why I wrote my Six Steps to Fix Your Muddy Mixes guide. But it’s especially annoying when it comes to vocals. We all want clarity in our vocals. We want the vocal to shine through the mix without the low-end cluttering it up. It’s such an important...
How good are you at managing your time? Like really…if you had to be honest with yourself. Is every minute used to its most optimal effect, or do you waste a bunch of time doing nothing? I bet you’re the latter. You try to be productive but then you get drained and start watching those...
I’m working on an atmospheric folk track for a client right now. Pedal steel, Dobro, two acoustic guitars, a bunch of vocals. It’s a lot of fun and with a sparse arrangement you get to experiment a lot with space in your mix. However, I always strive to make sure everything can be heard clearly...
It’s 5 plug-ins week here at Audio Issues as I’m reopening the Mixing With 5 Plug-ins course (http://www.mixingwith5plugins.com) so I thought I’d give you a quick refresher on some ways to create depth and space in your mixes. Just like we put instruments from left to right with panning, we need to position elements from...
As far as mixing processors go, compression is the second in command after EQ as far as I’m concerned. EQ is simpler, and as we went over in yesterday’s post, a concrete approach and method to EQ’ing usually gives you some pretty good results. However, compression is a bit more complex but it’s also more...
Here is the final installment in the One Minute EQ Series, it’s about lifting up your drums a little bit. To get your drums to the cymbals. Simply take the overheads and boost from 10 kHz or so. Sometimes a slight shelving at 10 kHz does the trick, sometimes you have to go higher. Simply...
One of the big challenges with mixing is knowing when you’re done. You can keep slapping plug-ins on a mix until your CPU breaks down and starts crying in the corner but if it’s not making your mix any better why bother? It’s insecurity. You want to make absolutely sure that nothing you have in...
I get a lot of questions from people interested in joining Mixing With 5 Plug-ins. I’m sure you share some of their curiosity so I thought I’d answer them for everyone. Is this a beginner’s course? I would say that this course would fall into the “intermediate” category. It’s not simply for beginners because I expect...
Yesterday I promised you a quick saturation tip to use on harsh electric guitars. As you should know by now, saturation is the fifth plug-in in my five plug-in series that I think are the most important to master to make an awesome sounding mix. Saturation does a lot of cool things: Thickens up kick...
Like I told you in yesterday’s post, you can only get so far in a mix without adding some space to flesh it out. EQ and compression will make everything really tight and separated on the two-dimensional plane but to really add some extra reverb and delay. So continuing on down the five plug-ins I...