We now recognize that all of these sounds need to compete in terms of their levels and also within their frequency range. If we have two electric guitars playing at the same time, you'll either want to differentiate them by their tone, maybe their style, maybe one is strumming, and the other one is finger picking. Maybe their register, maybe one's playing down here, the other one's playing up here. It's it's really kind of like choreography. You either have dancers doing complimentary stuff, or they are in unison, but it's one or the other. If they are in unison, then they need to be tight, right.

Same thing with double pots, whether they be guitars or vocals, if they're in the same space, they should be really tight to give you that wall of sound. But if they're not doubling each other, then they really need to differentiate themselves so that don't just come muddy up the mix together. The trouble with guitars and he's a big one, and a lot of other instruments is they live In the same almost the same frequency range as the human voice. So sometimes it's worth pulling a few DB DBS out of a guitar track rather than a one to two k range to help you vocals have a little bit of breathing room. This is called scooping and it can be really handy to make some Sonic a room for certain elements in your mix. Now in terms of how to do this, you'll need to make the EQ curve fairly wide and take out just two or three DPS to help maximum space.

Let's look at where each instrument lives. In the tonal spectrum you can see that we have basically 10 octaves here in a measuring piano, the represent the range of human hearing. Now a real piano actually stops right here. Now I've shaded the fundamental frequencies in dark and the overtones and harmonics in a lot of color. And basically we can divide the tonal spectrum into four major segments billows from 20 to 200 hertz The low mids 200 to 1000 or one K, the high mids from one K to five K and then the highest from five k on up a check out each instrument here and where they live. You can see the fundamentals of each instrument really don't go much past one K, basically everything about that is harmonics and overtimes.

But these areas are very important in the character of these instruments. So don't just think you can just pull everything out above that fundamental remember when he pulled out 80 hertz and below from a vocal when you might look here at the female vocal and say she stops at about 1.4 K, why can I just take everything from that point above and just check it out? No, because you're gonna lose a lot of the past the character that really make that it sound if you want to centralised certain frequencies, then I would make a semi wide curve and boost just a few DBS. A flag reminds the boost a little two k on the kick drum to get that kind of smack out of the beater. Now you might think this isn't the vocal range, well it is but the kick drums transient is really short, and it won't get in the way too much.

But the really valuable thing about boosting the smack of a kick drum is that you can actually make the kick drum sound so much more present and louder without boosting up the fundamental volume, which takes up a lot of power to do that in the low frequency lowering the elements like kick and bass had to move a lot of air. So if you can increase their perceived loudness by boosting some of their higher frequencies over time, then all all the better. Now the snare is sounding a little bit thin, I'll quite often bring up a little around 200 hertz with a kind of a heaviness that snare lives. A vocalist can sometimes stand to have a fight. k 14 k boosters to give them a little air of a bunch of tips and tricks and EQ recipes on the bonuses, feel free to try them out.

And but don't boost, you know too much, there's more than just a few DB or your start to introduce some brand new problems you have to deal with. The whole purpose of really building a mix is to have each part heard. But sometimes you might need to make a judgment call. And you know, just a sec, just pull some instruments out. If two instruments are playing within the same frequency range at the same time, one will tend to mask the other you can try to change the tone of one of those instruments with EQ. Maybe, I think probably the best thing to do is put your arranger hat on and go back and rerecord when those tracks they play off of each other.

Not exactly at the same time. Not orchestral pieces have been written this way for absolute centuries. Look at all these different instruments and half the people are playing at the same time. Look at them. There was kind of sitting around. But the only exception to this is that when everything prizes to get up a wall of sound check this out right about now, too many guys coming in, here we go.

Everybody starts playing it tries to get after that war sound playing off of each other, right? So think about that I mean just be acoustic guitar need to place with a whole song you record all the way through there. How about taking a leaf out of these guys book and kind of understand that instruments can play off of each other, don't just grab a guitar and just play it through the entire thing. So don't be afraid of using the mute button and just muting some of these particular channels as you're playing through. So that will really help you with some of these masking problems. Okay, I had a rough mix.

Let's stop posting that up and look at my Oracle. I remember, if you remember back in the karaoke example, I had a favorite effect or multi effect down here effect patches dynamics voice, and it was vertical shell. Now, if you have a hardware device, you may have some favorites there. But basically use some of those favorites because they've been made by some pretty bright people. And rather than just going through and kind of making all those dynamics Nick choose by yourself. But actually, having said that, let's go over to our dynamics and check out a few things in the compressor.

Basically, I want to adjust the threshold so I have a little bit of gain reduction right there. I think I've got a 41 to one compression ratio that looks about right, let's turn the gate on and adjust that threshold so that basically the gate will close on I'm not seeing an open when I am now let's look at the high pass filter. bring that down to about about at about 80 hertz. That means that nothing below that channel below that, and that channel worked out well. So now that I've worked on that particular channel be really nice if I was able to use that on all of these backing channels here, and there's a way to do that in software, normally is right click in here, we can copy at Channel Settings, all of them. And then we can go across to the next one.

And we can paste. All of those channel settings are the gates that EQ basically everything just gets duplicated across you. So now we have all those guys copied across all day and everything's kind of starting to come together. Okay, so now let's go across To add EQ on the first channel, which is add drums, let me just boost up just a little bit, just a couple of DBS down on the low end on around, say around 100 hertz like that. And we could do the same thing on our bass channel. just bump up a little low end.

It'd be good, right about there. And then we could go over to our acoustic guitar channels, and here's want to do a little bit scooping. So remember, we could scoop we could either set up just you know, fairly wide Q. And we want to put places in the book range and just scoop out just a couple of DBS. So vocals can have just a little bit more area to work with. So again, just a couple of DBS, not much there, but that'll just help the vocal sit in the mix.

I remember being winded and I remember. Okay, having done that, let's start messing around with smart fix outs, turn on a plate reverb to all of these vocals. I remember I remember how I would say, I could never say funny now. It's a slap here. Like to really ramp it up so I can hear the effect and then bring it down so you can barely hear that effect. Okay, it's time to come together.

So once you have finely tuned, your MCs many times, this will just be enough to forget it. But there may be times when you want to maybe a drop down some instruments at a certain point in time and maybe echo just a word or two over the others. But any of these scenarios, we need to have a mix sheet that has maybe some of these notes that you write down what to do at a certain time make of a mix sheet in Excel, that will help you create notes to prompt you while you're mixing down. Now if you're lucky enough to have a recorder that has automation, then you can record all of your changes with within your mix down so that you can record them once and those changes will happen automatically. On mix now it's really a great way to go as it's like having a million hands at mixed down with no missed changes.

That is why I really recommend having a hybrid hardware software solution. Because you know, there's nothing like the ease with recording with hardware, right, you have all the transport buttons right there. And you can take that record at anywhere. But it mixed down here software is really, really great. You have basically unlimited effects. And most of the time, you have automation as well.

Now, the actual process of doing this, this actual mixer will be different depending on what product you use, you normally have to go into some sort of mix down mode. I know that with some products, they might call a pre Master, just look in your manual and the mix down and you'll see the actual buttons to press. But basically, we're just kind of like it's really like bouncing the output of all of your tracks with all of the EQ all the effects right down onto a single stereo file. Now, if you're adept at using computers, there are a few audio analysis solutions that really can make visualizing your mix in terms of how each part of your mix is coming together across the tonal spectrum really, really easy, it's actually pretty cool to see that the tonal fingerprint of your mix and how that's shaping up, and perhaps where you're getting a little bit too much congestion.

Here's a demo of an analysis tool that I really like. This video is intended to give you a quick run through some of the features of the Newton audio visualizer plugin. The user interface is available in two sizes. You can switch between these in real time using the double ended arrow at the top of the interface. The company allows you to keep an eye on the various analysis without taking up too much precious space. All the visualize options are available in both compact and expanded visualizer is capable of displaying many different audio analysis.

You can switch these views on All using the View Selector controls down the right hand side of the interface. As you do so, visualize that will automatically resize the content for the graphical display to best represent the information you would want many views allow you to zoom and scroll to some specific areas in more detail. any point in time can be captured using the snapshot memories, which are datasets not many screen captures. This means that you can zoom and scroll a snapshot or even examine views which would not have to capture the link function is used to allow the same parameter to be adjusted because many views this link can be consumed both the spectrum analyzer and especially to get switching off the link. You can adjust them independent all the time. have numerous individual controls, which can be accessed using the control tab selected.

Let's take a deeper look at some of the parameters beginning with the Level Meter at the top of the drop down menu several useful presets. If the exact specification you bought is not available, many parameters can be individually adjusted. The custom sector Level Meter can be viewed either horizontally or vertically. The spectrum analyzer allows several different funding options, which can be selected independently. By deactivating the link to a spectrum analyzer. You can also take advantage of a snapshot function to compare two sets of data at the same time.

Turn on the tone option on the stats We can use the right click mouse to generate a reference to the level of frequency. Now, let's take a look at spectrogram. As well as allowing scrolling, you can also slide the color banding against the testicles. To see the material you can choose from a selection of bands with both smooth and sharp transitions. To best display the audio comes in to most messages and posts selected using the drop down list. You can select the autism to display the data request section.

Leave it off features like rapid and longer term leaving the correlation meter. The most obvious feature is the history. This allows you to switch off the history preserved screens switches to examine the correlation. You can also adjust the color correlation to highlight cells of interest. Finally, we have the status and Setup tab. Here you will find several settings optimizing the way visualizer responds to your audio as also click counter which runs in the background, even if the tab is closed.

And that concludes this run through the visualizer visualizer demo is available new Gen audio.com. You can also find other documents and video guys to help inspire audio Introduction Let's speak briefly about the importance of monitors monitors are crucial to the way that you mix. Look at it this way, imagine you bought some big bad 15 inch three way speakers back in the 70s. And years love how much low end they have a new start mixing on those guys. Well, here's the deal, you'll naturally want to pull back, your kick drum and your bass guitar or the low end because they're reproduce so well on their speakers. And it'll sound great in your room.

But look at your mix your mixes all messed up because you're really relying on those monitors. Same thing if you are going to mix on something that's very low bass light, like little computer monitors or something, something like that. What are you going to do? You're going to want to crank up your low end instruments to make it sound decent on those monitors. But then when everybody else plays it back on no regular speakers Look at your mix, it's totally out of whack. So how do you do this, you need to get the most accurate monitors that you can afford.

There's a lot of different monitors out there a good place to kind of check out reviews, things like that is Pro Audio help calm, we have some ideas and some some recommendations in terms of monitors. So get the best ones that you can afford. If you can, you can get the self powered one that works out well because the amps and the speakers have already been matched by the manufacturer just makes things a lot easier because then you just take an output out of the monitor extra in your powered speakers and you're good to go. Now, another thing that we'll talk about with mastering is that as you make new mix, here's the here's the paradox here is that we want to get some accurate monitors. But you know, the people who are going to be listening to your stuff, they're gonna be listening to everything from Little earbuds to little computer speakers to you know, big five dot one You know, home theater systems, you really don't know what is going to be played back on.

So here's how to kind of fix that. So you don't have any heartache. I would mix down, make some sample mixes, go out to your car, pop it in your car, listen to it. On your click No clock radio, if you have a little iPod, pop radio there, listen to it on the most different playback situations as you can to kind of get an idea of how it will sound and all those different scenarios. You certainly won't be able to make it sound perfect on all of those. But if you can listen to a whole bunch of them, then you'll make better mixing decisions.

So we've heard a lot in this section and it is a very, very crucial one doesn't really matter how great your original recorded tracks are. Your music is ultimately going to be heard in its final mixed down form and you really don't want to rush this part. Maybe take a day or two off to kind of end Do you head all of the recording process and come back with a clear head? Like I said, Paramount mixed down tradition is to clear the studio of all the loose cables and jank kind of dim the lighting down and prepare a mood so that I'm relaxed and I can have fun with a cup of tea or something like that. Certainly keep it non alcoholic who will go to bed thinking it was the best mix in the world have you wake up and know here it's not such a good one.

Now in terms of monitors use the best ones. Like I said, you can afford perfect apps or preferably with a built in app position of slightly worse than the wall and equilateral triangle like in this diagram. Now remember to fix the problems first soloing the tracks cleaning up the signal with processes in gates if need be. Then bring up a rock mix starting with your rhythm section first. Then use EQ to scoop out a shallow wide curb to make room for your style which is your lead vocal and and also boost certain Over time to make certain elements just pop out of the mix, use reverb and delay to add some depth to tracks typically using a fixed loop to give differing amounts to each track. You know, you can echo certain phrases by ramping up the sand on that track just momentarily.

Automation is a great way if you haven't to record all of these changes in your mix down. Or if you don't have automation, then a mix down sheet with notes will help guide you through that process. And by the way, a lot of research has been done most notably with Fletcher Munson on how sensitive he is artists, particular bandwidth, and the main point is this. If you mix at low volumes, you won't hear much low end and you'll overcompensate by cranking up your bass. If you mix it too high volumes then your ears will get tired so around 80 to 90 Db is a good level two mix that and if that disturbs your neighbors and maybe if you live in an apartment, then I would recommend mixing down In the middle of the day, when you won't get many complaints that if you do the midnight thing at really low levels, just know that your mix is going to be really bottom heavy as your ears are not sensitive to that low end at that volume