MusicRadar

Software mixing is now extremely popular.

View in gallery

It’s all very well having great ideas and getting them recorded and arranged, but if you want your music to sound professional, you’ll need to blend everything together successfully at the mixing/processing stage.

Unfortunately, the pitfalls when you’re doing this are many, and getting all the elements of your track to sit together is difficult. Fortunately, MusicRadar is on hand to give you 21 pearls of technical and creative wisdom…

1. There’s a very practical reason that you should start with heavy elements such as the kick drum and bass when mixing – headroom! Set your kick and bass levels so that they only register about a quarter of the way up the level meter when it’s set to 0dB. This will leave lots of room to boost later – and you’ll always want room to nudge your kick up!

2. Try to keep your master output level well below 0dB – peaking about halfway up the meter is fine – so as not to risk any digital clipping or distortion. In these days of noise-free digital mixing, you can always raise the level later before limiting it.

3. You can help different groups of sounds to gel coherently (drums or vocals, for example) by routing them to a bus and processing them as a whole. It’s also useful for keeping the CPU load down and makes gating and compressing the group easier.

4. Mixing is the one part of the creative production process where you need to have the volume quite loud, as you won’t actually hear the proper relationship between sounds otherwise – this is particularly true with dance music. Work in spurts to check this, though - don’t just leave it loud all the time. You can’t fix broken ears.

5. Be careful of any effect that makes a signal louder, as the volume increase alone can give the illusion of a ‘better’ sound. Compression is a good example of this. Louder isn’t necessarily better, so always be sure to A/B your new and old settings to make sure that you are actually improving the sound rather than just boosting it.

6. If you compress the life out of all the elements in your track then that’s exactly how your finished mix will sound too. And while this is a standard technique in dance music these days, even in that genre there are limits. So dial back the settings a little sometimes, and use sidechaining to add some bounce and life.

7. In the analogue mixing days it was common practice to place a compressor on the main output to keep the signal below 0dB and add a bit of weight, but with modern digital mixing you can keep things low enough not to peak and still preserve the range. Don’t risk squashing the life out of your music – leave those sorts of decisions for the mastering engineer.

Around the web: