Audio Production School – How To Mix Music

Audio Production School, learn how to professionally mix music. Mixing is basically combining and polishing tracks into a finished song. Here is a rule of thumb; if your sound is poorly recorded forget about fixing it in the mixing stage, you won’t get the best results…Garbage in…Garbage out, that’s how it works.

This is how I mix my music: I first start with the kick drum at -10db then add the snare followed by hi-hats, overheads and toms. Add the bass and then add the rhythm instruments such as rhythm guitar, keyboard rhythm, then add lead vocals followed by lead instruments finally I will bring up the background vocals and then percussions.

This way you will create more space in the overall level and to create even more space pan your individual tracks, and be careful, you have to consider the panning of each track in relation to the rest of the tracks. Use reverb not only to create space, but to create tonal colour.

If a track does not sound good on its own but sounds good when playing with other tracks then there is no need to do anything to it, always remember that mixing is all about the entire song not an individual track/instrument. Quantizing individual tracks can sometimes suck out the life out of them. Use a room reverb with a low end cut on drums to add natural acoustics.

If you have a deeper sounding drum (Tom) be careful because it will make it marshier, so to avoid that use a small sized reverb with a short decay and a fast pre-delay you will get more space and depth in your mix. Glue your drums together by compressing them as a whole (group them into one channel).

Group all your similar sounds together. Keep your drums together, your guitars together, vocals and so on. When it comes to vocals use a subtle amount of reverb, too much will make your vocals sound distant whereas you need them to be upfront so try using a delay instead. Use a de-esser to get rid of plosive sounds (“s”). When using an eq use a wider Q factor when boosting and a narrow Q when cutting and remember that less is more when using eq.

Send everything to a bus/group channel and send it to a distortion or bitcrusher effect to give your mix warmth. It’s worth the time and money to invest in a proper mastering job, avoid, if you can, mastering your own music! I really hope these guidelines will help you on how to mix your music and achieve favorable results.

Grab my free music production course here http://musicproduction-and-djing-lessons.blogspot.com it is absolutely free, there is no catch and you will get free tools to get you started right away. See you on the other side.

Happy Mixing!