The Simple Trick to Make Your Raw Recordings Loud Enough to Mix

As you might know, a few weeks ago I was talking about what I was learning from mixing the Dueling Mixes metal song.

Well, after that post I sat down and watched Joe’s video on how he mixed his version. (In case you don’t know, you get to watch two different mix engineers mix the same song and they show you all their mixing tricks).

You see, I was having problems with the tracks in my mix.

They were pretty quiet and it was difficult to get them to sound loud enough.

I ended up tweaking the input and output gain on my channel strip plug-in to get the volume right.

When you’re when you’re mixing heavily distorted guitars and screamo vocals you might not always notice it’s not supposed to sound like that.

Joe had such a simple solution to this problem I thought I was an idiot because I didn’t think of it myself.

So I followed his tip and automagically made everything louder.

However, because I’d done the previous mix with very dubious gain-staging techniques it threw all my levels way off.

The input gain to the compressor was off.

The send levels to my busses were WAY too loud.

So whatcha think I did?

I started over.

Deleted all my plug-ins and set everything to unity gain.

Why?

It’s better to start with the best source material you can. You’ll end up with a better mix.

To see what Joe did and to learn all the tips and tricks in this month’s Dueling Mixes you can join here below:

www.audioissues.com/duelingmixes

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