It’s crazy to think that a month has already passed us by since we began this challenge. If you’ve been taking the challenge with us, you should be pretty far along at this point. Ideally you’ve got all your tracks recorded, cleaned up, and ready for mixing. If not, no worries, these videos aren’t going anywhere so you can go at your own pace of course.
Today we are going to cover some basic mixing techniques. Now, mixing is a complex art that can take years to perfect, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t jump in and get after it! All of today’s popular DAWs (Pro Tools, Logic, Sonar, Cubase, etc) come with a wide array of professional mixing plugins for you to use, and they sound great. So fire them up, watch this video (it’s in two parts) and make it happen!
Just a reminder if you’re just joining us…below are the 5 weeks of this challenge with links to each video. Enjoy!
- Starting Your Song – Creating a session, setting tempo, initial recording
- Rhythm – Using loops and drum machines to fill out the track
- Virtual Instruments – Using MIDI tracks to enhance your arrangement
- Editing – Comping vocals and overall cleanup
- Mixing – Basic mixing tips and technique
Part 1
Part 2
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[...] Week 5 – Basic mixing tips and technique. [...]
Fantastic. Thanks so much for giving away such priceless knowledge.
One question…
will you be doing a video on how to master your own recordings any time soon?
i’d love to see what you have to say about mastering tracks.
Joseph – My pleasure. Just encouraged that it’s helping people! To answer your question about Mastering, I don’t have a video planned right now as Mastering would take more than a 10 minute video to explain. I will try and find a good way to go over it though. Thanks for the thought!
Hi there, great stuff, Graham.
Would you also recommend the high pass filter for Rhodes piano?
How would you go about mixing a particular track that is more Rhodes/pad/Sample
driven?
Thanks again.
Max, thanks for reading! If you have bass and drums in your mix as well, then a high pass for the Rhodes can definitely help. As far as mixing a track that is more pad driven, I wouldn’t do much differently other than begin mixing with that track(s) in mind. Make sure all the other tracks simply enhance your keyboard tracks instead of distract from it.