13 - 4 tips for Musicians mixing themselves and Engineers Starting out
This episode is a solo episode from Jon that's focusing on advice for musicians who might be recording or mixing themselves and will also be appropriate to new engineers and producers who want some advice on areas to help their career when starting out as a producer within the music industry.
Order of the day
You don’t need to buy that expensive upgrade,
A lot of the consumer technology today is pretty amazing, you don’t need to sped 2 grand on a new sound card and 1,000 on a microphone. As your career develops this can be useful
Welsh clwb work experience - learn to work with what you’ve got
Try put off buying the thing you want for another another week, another month.
Audient ID range mic preamps have been lifted directly from their consoles and its a great preamp which we use all the time, in fact their8 channel preamp can be bought for amazing value second hand. We use this all the time in the studio
Musicians won’t care about the gear you’re using, they’re more interested in the sound you get.
Try working with what you have, a good monitoring environment and a decent set of speakers don’t have to break the bank.
Your room is more important
When mixing or recording, the room you’re recording in will have the biggest impact on the overall sound of the recording. In the mixing sense sometimes it can colour your mix, a small room when recording drums buyt there are tools that can help you here. The investment into your room will provide the biggest response.
Acoustic filters - When these first came out, I used to use it all the time thinking it was helping with my room. We’ve recently seen townsend labs bringing out modelling mics that let you compensate for using these…. Long story short, I’ve stopped using it. The reason being was it was more effective to put panels behind the person recording than it was implementing it.
Acoustic treatment - try to avoid the foam stuff panels if you cna help it,DIY and self made panels are great and a company like GIK acoustics will make your room sound a lot better. There are usually room packs
Room correction software, this can be great on its own but even better when combined with treating your room. The idea behind the technology is it will measure the acoustic response of your room by sending a frequency sweep of some kind to a measurement microphone and allow you to compensate for peaks or troughs in your room and blend .
Mixing - Turn it down
So we’ve started with the room and equipment now let's jump into the mixing your tracks. This is the most common issue I see when helping students in the past.
The most common issue I see all the time is mixes in Logic hitting a +10 on the master bus. Most of the time people have done this because they’re listening on laptop speakers or the monitoring environment isn’t loud enough. Everything sounds exciting but this will get rejected by a mastering engineer or DSPs if we’re uploading them to Spotify/CD Baby.
As you’re mixing, keep an eye on the master bus, and try to make sure you’re not clipping, there are a couple of tricks we can do to automate this in a mix and keep the balances set which we may come back to in another podcast.
Do the opposite of what you want to do
The final part of this episode links back to previous point and is recommended whether your in the studio or in live sound and that is doing the opposite of what you want to do
If the drums are too quiet, turn the guitars down
If you want to turn the vocals up, perhaps have all the instruments group together and bring them down.
If you want to brighten the overall sound of an instrument, try cutting the opposite areas and managing the tone this way
What we’re trying to do here here is to stop ourselves ending back in the positing of everything being louder than everything else and ended back in the last point where the master bus is back at that +10.
Everything sounds like a smush and sounds worse than when we started.
Final bonus point - Mixing
As you change one element of the mix, it’s going to impact another area of your mix, if you bring the vocals up in the mix, it could bury the drums or guitars. If the bass becomes louder, it could overpower the kick drum or you lose some of the body of the guitars. This is okay. Knowing when the mix is finished is difficult, for me its usually when I find myself dancing or bobbing along to the track that I’ll record the mix/bounce it out and go and check it. Sometimes just taking a break and coming back to your track with a fresh perspective can help you.
Summary
You don’t need that extra bit of gear
Spend that money on the room instead
When mixing, everything doesn’t need to be louder than everything else
Try doing the opposite of what you want to do
And be okay with the fact that mixing is cyclical.
Let me know what you guys think, are there any bits of advice you stick to when mixing or approaching your sessions. Have you held off from buying gear, leave me a comment below or send us an email on podcast at session recall
Nick and I will be back next week, we’re in the process of arranging interviews for the podcast which we’ll hopefully be able to start rolling out in the coming months.
Thanks again, I hope you enjoyed this episode and my only ask today is that if you think this episode would benefit someone please share it with them. See you all soon.
