Hello, and welcome to the master class in mixing. My name is David Rose. And I'll be your host throughout this course specifically on mixing now while I have smaller sections in both the ultimate home recording school and also the ultimate live sound school, this is my first master class on this subject. And it's a big one if you if you think about it in the audio world, we tend to isolate each sound source as kind of one piece of kind of like a jigsaw puzzle but really doesn't make sense until we mix all of that together. Now in the recording world, there are multiple tracks multiple takes musical performances, played days apart with musicians who may not have even you know, met each other but it's your job to build together a musical soundscape and bring all those parts together. Now in the live world, we have everyone playing together, but we also have a have different elements as well.

And we still need to add the benefit of rewinding or looping a section to work on a particular element. You have to get it right. The absolute first time. So what are we going to be learning in this masterclass? So we're starting out in the introduction, we're going to learn things like monitor placement and basic things like that, then we'll actually get into the overview of what mixing is like what are we doing when we are mixing. Also various housekeeping things like organizing your tracks, color coding, all those things that might seem like kind of minutia, but they can really, really help you get a lot quicker in your mixes and a lot more confident in your mixes, and really go to places that I like to do all my housekeeping at the beginning so I can get in a creative zone kind of after that.

Anyway, after that overview, we'll then get into the tools. And some of these you'll be familiar with things like EQ and compression. In fact, we have master classes. EQ and compression. But there may be some other ones that you're not the certain millia with in terms of maybe harmonic generators or, or transit designers or something like that. And then we'll go on to routing.

Now, everybody kind of knows the basic types of routing, your stereo routing from all the channels down to a stereo mix, or maybe some orcs and things like that. But in various da W's the way you do this routing, and also more advanced routing, like vcas DCs and groups and things like that can get a little bit tricky, so will really show you exactly how to route and you know, the mode, the more basic ones would just affect sends or inserts to the more complex ones. And so these three there, the overview, the tools and the routing are what I would call kind of the theory part of the course. Now once we've gotten to really understood the theory part of the course then we'll go on to the practical part of the course. And you'll actually look over my shoulder and we'll go through to Songs from start to end.

And the great thing is that you'll have access to all of these tracks so that you can follow on on your own. Now once you have the tools, the trade like the back of your hand and the mixing process will become second nature. And it's probably an obvious thing, this thing to say, garbage in, garbage out. To quote the old saying the quality of your mix will really just absolutely depend on how good your source material is. Now, by the way, I know some of you are working on standalone hardware recorders like those made by task cam Roland, and zumo. While I'm a big advocate for them in terms of recording tracks, I would highly encourage you to to explore during the mixing of your tracks in a computer bass, da w like reason Pro Tools, logic or even GarageBand da Ws have much more mixing tools than your average hybrid recorder.

So look at your literature, the camera, the hardware recorder, and learn how you can export those tracks either through USB or memory card or something to get them into a computer base da w there's nothing wrong with recording in a hardware record, I just highly encourage you to mix in a DA w get much more bang for the buck here. So, let's set the stage for your mixing environment. What's the most important piece of gear around here? for mixing? Absolutely your monitors here, I would suggest that you do not skimp on your monitors. Now that we can save just so much money compared to the past in terms of what you need to spend to build out a studio I mean think about used to have to buy probably 1000 bucks with a cables and patch base racks and racks of outboard gear.

Pretty much all of this is included in your hardware recorder or computer based da w so you can afford to spend a little to Ching on your monitors. I would recommend about a third of your budget on your monitors spend as much as you can MIT. Now one thing to consider is that I think it's best to wait for a while Until you can afford the you know your pair of dream monitors because it's great to build a great relationship with them to really be able to absolutely trust in them so that what you're hearing is the real deal. You know, I was actually talking to one of my customers this weekend he was talking about, he mentioned a particular type of monitors, I won't mention what they are, but I would put them in the ear candy category. In other words, they predominantly make that they make great stereo playback, consumer speakers, that features all the lows and the highs that we love to hear that but they really don't accurately reproduce what's coming out of the tracks.

If you're hearing some speakers, MSM Man, these are some fun speakers. I'd say kind of away from that and really look at very accurate the most accurate ones you can get so get the best monsters you can afford. And probably Spend some time on some review sites like Amazon or Sweetwater sound and hear what real folks are saying about the monitors that are on your shortlist. So when you think about the importance of monitors and where your head should be in comparison to those in relation to those monitors, think of a triangle and equal lateral triangle. In other words, as far apart as your monitors are, that is about how far your ears should be away from those monitors. And you should be dead in the middle between those monitors as well and and in terms of height of those monitors, you want to make sure that they are up at your level, you definitely don't want them to beat your chest or over your head, you want them to be a level in this equal equal lateral triangle kind of configuration.

Now in terms of your monitors in a with their bass heavy or bass light, or whether they are true Mars's. Let me give you an example. If you had some very bass heavy monitors, imagine a friend of yours said, Oh man, I got these monitors that awesome f 15 inch drivers, they really kick Pat, right? That sounds great. You know, that'd be fun to listen to. But here's what's going to go on.

You'll want to scale back your low instruments like your kick drum and your bass guitar because they're so well played back on those monitors. Because you're hearing them really cranked up in those monitors, you're down and back and then they'll sound great on those monitors but look at the lower part of the screen. And you can see that we are very bass light down there because we've kind of compensated with Mrs isn't the same thing happen. If you have very bass light monitors, like some little computer speakers or something like that. Here's what you want to do. You'll be wanting to crank up those low instruments, your bass guitar and your your kick drum.

And so that so that it'll actually sound nice on those smaller mouse's and You know that'll sound fun on there, but when you take that mix someplace else, look at the mix down the bottom of the screen completely out of whack. You'll definitely need to get the nicest misers, you can and the most accurate or flat monitors that you can that you can afford and really don't spare the expense if you're going to spend some money, spend it on monitors. Okay, so let's move on to the overview of the mixing process.