Create, Mix, Share -How to Produce Your Own Songs at Home Using Reaper DAW

1. Introduction: You do not need to spend thousands of dollars at a commercial recording studio, or wait to be signed by a major label to release your songs to streaming platforms. Hi. I'm Jam. I'm a musician, music producer, and the owner of Dink Studios, located on 30 wooded acres in beautiful Southern Virginia. My whole life has basically been music. I've been a musician since I was 10-years-old, and am really passionate about making music production accessible to people like me. Women, non binary, and the LGBTQ IA community. I'm a professional mixing and mastering engineer who specializes in singer songwriter, Americana, and Brock music. I have taught recording, mixing and mastering, to musicians like you very successful. Home recording can seem so intimidating. But that's just a lie told to you by people trying to gatekeep centistry. You don't need expensive gear. All you need is the proper workflow and a gradar. So in this class, you will learn how to record, produce, mix and master your very own song so that it's ready for any streaming platform. Throughout this process, we will cover how to sound treat your room, what gear you need, and what gear you don't need. How to use mite in your productions, How to use a digital audio workstation. Or Da to record, mix, and master your songs. And finally, how to distribute your music without a major label. This class is for anyone who's constantly asked, Where can I hear your songs? And your answer is nowhere. Whether you've never recorded a song before, or you have a little bit of studio experience, this class is for you. There is tons of information out there on mixing and producing pop music. But there's a serious lack of education on Americana, singer songwriter, and rock music. This is why I wanted to create this class. To provide you with the skills you need to make your music sound great. By the end of it, you will not only have a finished song you are proud to share with your fans, but a consistent workflow that you can replicate over and over again to create quality music from your bedroom and put it out into the world. I cannot wait to hear your songs. Let's get started. 2. Orientation : Hello, and welcome to my class. I am so excited to share my years of knowledge on recording, mixing, and mastering with you. I chose this topic because making music is so much more accessible now than it used to be. You no longer have to spend thousands of dollars in a commercial recording studio to get great sound and release your music to all streaming platforms. Now, with a lot of practice and a little investment, you can make great sounding tracks right from your bedroom. This class is for beginners and intermediate folks who feel empowered to release their own music on their own terms. By the end of this class, you will have a fully recorded, mixed, and mastered song ready to be distributed on all major streaming platforms. I have also prepared a class guidebook that will have links to every piece of gear and every plug in that I use throughout this class. You can upload your song to the project gallery at any time. I highly recommend that you upload in each stage, rec, mixing and mastering. This will allow me to help you throughout the process, to make sure that you're getting great sound, that your recording levels are proper, that you've mixed it properly before going into the mastering stage. I have great ears, and I'm happy to help you stay on track to make the best song possible. I hope that you enjoy this class as much as I enjoyed making it. Happy recording. 3. Picking Your Spot : Picking a perfect place to record is crucial to having great sound. You want to pick a spot in your room that has very little noise. So you wouldn't want to pick a room that's right by a busy street or next to a highway. One of the best spots to pick is your bedroom. For a few reasons. One, you probably have some curtains in there, a bed, a bookshelf. All of these things help with reflective sounds that you don't want getting into your recording. On top of things that are already in your bedroom, if you want a little bit more sound dampening, you can invest in things like base straps for your corners, or you can get things called acoustic paneling. That helps really deaden the sound. I also recommend if you're able to walk into your closet where all your clothes are and shut the door, that's going to be the best spot to record vocals because all of your clothes are naturally going to dampen that sound. You could also purchase some acoustic foam or things like that to hang up on your walls. If you have a book shelf, you can go ahead and arrange the books so that it's a large book, little book, large book, little book, and sing directly in front of that. It acts as a natural sound effuser for your vocal. Try to incorporate items in your room that you already have so that you don't have to spend a lot of extra money on sound treatment. The more cushioned or soft items in your room, the better your recording is going to sound. If you do live in a place like New York City where you can't help street noise, things going on around you constantly, you can invest in something called a dynamic microphone. And what a dynamic microphone does is it only picks up what's right in front of it. And now that we've picked a nice, quiet, well treated space in our home, let's get to recording. 4. Guide To Gear: In order to start recording at home, you're going to need some gear. Here's a list of things that you're going to need to get started. First thing you're going to need is a computer. You can have a desktop or a laptop. It doesn't really matter. I do recommend getting a computer with at least eight gigs of RAM so that you can run all the plug ins that we list throughout the course. The next thing that you need is a digital audio workstation or D, such as Logic, Pro Tools, garage band. The one that I'm going to be using for this course is reaper. It's very affordable at $60 for life. The next thing that you're going to need is a set of headphones. These are the one Odio DJ headphones. There are 39 bucks on Amazon. They work great. The next thing that you're going to need is a microphone. I highly recommend getting condenser microphone because they're best for vocals and multiple instruments. You're also going to need a pop filter. This helps keep plosives and unwanted mouth sounds from entering your microphone and makes for really clean vocals. The next thing that you're going to need is an audio interface. An audio interface basically just takes analog sounds and converts them to digital. So that things that you're playing on your guitar or other instruments, your voice can be taken from the real world and put into a virtual sound card into the computer. For this class, you'll only need a one to two preamp audio interface with 48 volt power. If you're going to be doing a lot of work with Midi, which we'll explain later, you're going to want to get yourself a keyboard or midi controller. Any keyboard with a USB port that you can plug into your computer works as a mid Controller. You don't need to spend a bunch of money on fancy stuff. I use a $89 Cassio keyboard as my Mt Controller. We will also be using a lot of slate digital plug ins throughout the class. So you can go ahead and grab the slate all access pass to use the same plug ins that I'll be using, or you can use similar plug ins that come with your dw. And now that you know what gear you need, let's get going. 5. Introduction to Reaper DAW: Now that we have all of our gear, let's learn our digital audio workstation, Reaper. When you open reaper, this is what the screen is going to look like. It might seem intimidating at first, but it's really easy to use. I'll show you. The first thing that we're going to do is go to options, preferences, audio device. Then we're going to look at our audio system here. And we want to pick ASIO. Then your audio interface driver should be available here. You want to select the correct driver for your audio interface. All the inputs should automatically be appropriate for your particular audio interface. We're going to hit, and we're ready to go. To get started, you can just double click anywhere here or here to create a track. Once your track is created, you're ready to record. You can pick what input you want to record from on your audio interface by clicking in this black section here. You're going to go down to input mono and select which input you're going to be recording from. Most of you are going to be recording from one or two. So we're going to select one. Then all you have to do is arm your track to record by hitting this button here. And when you're ready to record, you're going to go ahead and hit this record right here. To create another track, all you have to do is double click anywhere in either of these sections. To remove this track, you just click on it. Right click, go down to Remove Tracks. If you want to remove multiple tracks, you can click on it, it Control, click, click, Right click, and remove those tracks. Let's look at some of our project settings. You can hit this I for information, and it will open up your project settings right here. You can change your sample rate. Most people are fine to record 441 or 4,800, just depending on your preferences. 441 is perfectly fine, pretty standard, 48 is a little bit clearer, and captures the sound just a little bit better. So we're going to select that one. You can change your project's BPM here or your time signature if needed. And then we're just going to hit. You can also change your beats per minute later in this section here by either tapping here and typing something in to change it and hitting Inter, or there's a tap feature. So if you want to tap along to your song to find out how long it is, it will change the BPM as you tap. Up here is your metronome. If you right click on this, you can see all of the settings for your metronome. You can turn the primary beat volume up, secondary beat up or down. You can choose the pattern. So if you wanted to go beet, boop, boop, boop, or beet, boot, beet, boot, either one of those is controlled right here. If you have a midi device to set up, you can go to options, preferences, Mi device, and select which medi device that you'd like to use and hit K. To change the input to the MDI device, click here, Input Midi and select which medi device that you'd like to record from. To undo something you've just done, you can click here for or if you undoed by mistake. To save your project, you can hit Control S or File Save Project. This is the basics of reaper that you'll need to get started. We'll go into some of the more advanced features as we go through the class. Now we'll see it in action in the next class, recording at home. 6. Recording: Now that we know how to use our digital audio workstation Reaper. Let's do some recording. We're going to start by recording acoustic guitar. Recording acoustic guitar is super easy. We're going to put the condenser microphone about 1 ft from the 14th threat. We're going to take it and we're going to angle it slightly towards the hole, slightly. You don't want to put your microphone in the hole of the guitar because that creates a lot of that boomy sound and takes away from the brightness of the guitar itself. We want to make sure that we're not wearing any bracelets or anything that's going to make a noise when it clicks against the guitar. My necklace sometimes can hit. And you don't want that to happen. We're going to tuck that in. We're going to make sure that when we strum the guitar, our levels are between negative 12 and negative 18 DB on the meters. If we find that the guitar is too loud or too quiet, we can turn up the gain or down the gain by using the knob on the audio interface, not the meter itself. We're going to play along to a click track or Metronome. If we want to add any instruments such as drums or mite, we can do that. This is what it looks like while it's recording. If you can, try to double your rhythm guitars, which means playing the part completely Then creating another track and playing that exact part again. This will help you a lot in the mixing process to have wider sounding guitars. If you're unable to do this, don't worry. I'm going to tell you a mixed tip later on that can help you have wider guitars without playing the doubles. But if you can, play your doubles. For electric guitar, you have two options. You can plug your electric guitar directly into the audio interface using a quarter inch cable like this one, or you can use your microphone to capture the sound of the amp. If using the same condenser mic that you're using for everything else, simply aim the condenser mic to the center of the amp, and pull it away until the levels and sound are to your liking. When recording vocals, you'll want to use a pop filter and a condenser microphone together. Simply put the pop filter about one fist away from the condenser microphone, and you'll want to sing just a few inches from the pop filter. Sing in the song for skill share. You're also going to want to keep your levels between negative 12 and negative 18 DB while recording. Make sure while you're recording that you're not clipping. Clipping simply means that you're singing or playing your instrument so loud that it's going beyond the level of the meter into the yellow or the red zone, causing distortion, harsh noises, and not great sound. We'll worry about how loud it is later. It's better to record a little too quiet than a little too loud. Now that we know how to record at home, let's learn how to mix it. 7. Using MIDI: Let's talk about Midi. Midi is just a term for using virtual instruments that live inside of your computer. You can program drums, violins, synthesizers, even guitar, by using this powerful tool. I'm going to show you right now how to use Midi to make your songs better in reaper. First thing that we want to do is create a new track. We're going to make sure that our midi Controller is on. We're going to go to options, preferences, Cassio USB My because that's what I'm using. Then we're going to click here, Input M, Cassio, A channels. That's very important. Now when we arm this to record, you'll see when I press a button that it is picking up audio with this yellow bounce, but you can't hear anything. That's because MDI requires a virtual instrument to make sound. All we have to do is go here to our F X, and we can look at the instruments that are available to us. By clicking instruments. The one that I'm going to be using for this example is the A two ultra bundle, which is included in the slate digital All Access Pass. We're going to select that and hit ad. I know this instrument looks a little crazy, but all it is is a bunch of synthesizers. Don't worry. All we have to do is click here and decide what sound we want. We can select any of these instruments here and they will show up as a MD. I like this sound. Let's pick house grand. We're going to close the plug in, and when I hit a key on my keyboard, It makes a sound now. There's two ways to record mite. One is you can simply hit the record button and play along. Or you can program it with your mouse. Select the amount of bars that you'd like to add mit to by holding down your mouse and dragging across until you get to what you like. Then you're going to click here, go to Insert new Mi item, and now you have the Mt mapper. This is your midi mapper. It shows you all of the keys here on this left side, as well as your timing map here on the right. This is great if you'd like to program instruments with your mouse and don't have a midi controller, or if you need to make adjustments to a Mt that you've already recorded. Let's say I want to select this D here. I can just hold down my mouse and draw where I want the notes to be. Then when I play it, It plays those notes. Now let's say I wanted to change a note. All I have to do is hold this down with my mouse and drag it to the note I'd like. Now it'll play that note. I can make notes longer or shorter by just holding up my mouse, dragging back and forth. Now we just close the mini mapper, and the notes will play. Now, let's say I don't really like this sound anymore and I want to make it something different. You don't have to delete your work. All you do is click the F X again and change it to the instrument that you want it to be. Now, let's say you want to add an entire drum kit to your song. You can do that in My as well. I'm going to show you one of my favorite programs. This is the Stephen Slate drum kit, and it's totally free. You can download it online to select a kit that you'd like to play and double click. Hit this grooves button here, and it has a wide variety of fills, drum beats, all kinds of stuff in there for your song. Let's just pick one. You're going to take this, drag and drop. Move it to wherever you want it to be by holding down the mouse and dragging, and there is your drum beat. Let's add a fill for fun. Close this plug in. And there's our drum beat. A. Now, let's say that we wanted to move the kick drum or snare drum around to fit it. We can just double click here, scroll in, and we can use the midi Mapper to change where the kick is. Here's the kick. Now let's say that we wanted to add another one here. All we would have to do is draw here. If we wanted to remove this one, we could double click to remove it. If we want to put it back, we can hit control Z to undo. We could also add symbols, snare, more high hat, whatever we want to do. Super simple way to add really cool drum set to your song. Now you know how to use this powerful tool to make your songs incredible. See you on the next one. 8. Using Plug Ins: Before we can start mixing, we need to know what tools we're going to need to mix. The tools that I will be showing you in this class are called plug ins. What is a plug in? Plug ins are just a digital replica of outboard gear that you might find in a studio. They're a more affordable way to mix music. Analog gear can be very hard to learn and very expensive. So we're going to do something called A in the box mixing, which is just using plug ins to make our song sound great. A plug in can be anything from an equalizer, compressor, saturator, to a virtual instrument like we learned in our intramit. Here's how we open and choose plug ins in reaper. To add a plug into your track, all you have to do is click this F x button. A list of plug ins will pop up. You can either type the name here under filter, or if you see it right away, you can click on it and hit add. This will add the plug in to your track. To remove the plug in, all you have to do is select the plug in you want to remove and hit, you guessed it, remove. Plug ins will always work in the order in which you place them. If you have an EQ and you want to add a compressor, the compressor will work after the EQ, etc, et. Now that we know what a plug in is and how to add it to our track, we can use it in the mixing process. 9. Equalization and Compression: Before we can mix, we need to have some understanding of a few fundamental things. The first thing being EQ or equalization. The next thing is compression, how to use a compressor and what does it do? Let's dive in. The first thing that we're going to take a look at is EQ. Here we have our equalizer. I'm just going to explain to you what some of the stuff means. On the bottom, we have our hertz. The human ear can only hear from about 20 to 20,000 hertz. This is just a measurement of frequency. 20 being very low low frequencies, such as a sub base, and 20 k being very, very high frequencies, maybe like a symbol or a high hat. We need to be able to balance these frequencies to make everything fit and sound really good in the mix. I'm going to play for you this guitar part, and I'm just going to sweep the EQ through the entire thing, so you can get an idea of what frequencies go where. As you can see, as I'm sweeping through, all the low end starts to disappear and you get to hear these really high frequencies. There's a few terms that you need to know. High pass, which means to cut out the low end, and low pass, which means to cut out the high end. There's also, which means to remove a frequency and boost, which means to make a frequency in sod. I'm going to show you an example of boosting. Now I'm going to show you a sample of cutting. As we go through the mix, we want to boost pleasant frequencies and cut unpleasant frequencies. That is Q. Next, I'm going to show you compression. What is compression? All it is is basically taking anything that is too loud and dampening it down and anything that is too quiet and raising it up closer to the volume that you want it to be. Here we have a compressor by waves. This one's a really easy one to take a look at and be able to visually see what's going on. Few terms we need to know first. One is threshold. This is at what volume or what DB, do you want the compressor to start working to start bringing down that volume. Then we have makeup gain, which is, how much do you want those lower volumes to be closer to the main volume in which you want it to be? Then we have ratio. How many dB do you want the compressor to bring down the volume when it hits? If you have a ratio of three to one, it means that for every one DB that that volume is going over what you want it, it brings it down three dB. We have the attack, which means how fast do you want that compressor to actually grab that sound? We have release, which is how fast do you want the compressor to go of that sound. Let's play this guitar and show you how the threshold and the ratio actually work. We're going to bring our threshold just down enough to where you can see the yellow line bouncing above. We're going to take our threshold three to one, which means every DB that I go over, I want to bring it down that much. Then we're going to increase the makeup gain so that those little d does will go back up. Then we decide, we want the compressor to act a little faster. We're going to bring in the attack. Pretty simple. Here's another example of a compressor. This one looks more like an analog compressor or one that you might find in a studio. Everything's exactly the same. You have threshold ratio, make up gains right here, and you have your attack and release. This one, we're going to watch a little bit differently. We're going to pay attention to this meter here. We're going to start by taking our ratio to three to one, and we're just going to move the threshold up until we see this meter slightly grab. Then we're going to increase our makeup game just a little bit. Maybe we want the compressor to act a little faster. We go to turn up our attack. And to get a more natural sound, I'm going to just take the release down a little bit. That's it. Compression is how we increase volumes, turn down things, and make things sound really even in the mix. And now that you understand EQ and compression, we can mix ourselves. 10. Mixing Drums: Now that we've recorded our track, we have to mix it so that it sounds well balanced for streaming services. What is mixing? Mixing is basically taking all of the instruments and the vocals and making everything sound cohesive. So you want to make sure your levels are correct. You want to make sure nothing is sticking out. Nothing is too loud, nothing is too quiet, and everything's blended well together. We also want to make sure there's no competing frequencies, so everything is audible and sounds pleasant to the listener. Don't worry about loudness during the mixing stage. That's mastering. Right now, we're just going to make sure the song sounds good and is well balanced, we'll make it louder later. So let's get into it. All right, here we have all of our instruments. We have our midi drums. We have our shaker. We have a bass guitar, an acoustic guitar, a lead guitar, and a middy synth. We're not going to worry about vocals right now. We'll cover that in the next course. I like to mix like how I read. I start left to right, I put drums, bass, guitar, keys, vocals, all in that order. Then we're going to add in one instrument at a time. We're going to start with our midi drums. We're going to mute everything else, and just listen to our midi drums. Now, we have the Stephen Slate drums that I showed you earlier in the minting course. So we're going to do is we're going to hit this mixed button. And right here, we get control over every single drum. There's a few different aspects. There's overheads, which are the microphones that would be placed over the drum set. Right here, overheads. We have room mics, which kind of capture the sound around the room. And then we have a microphone on each one of the instruments. We also have snare top, stare bottom, snare ring. These are just different ways of miking a snare drum. We have a kick in kick out. So kick in is basically when they stick the microphone inside the kick drum, and kick out is when they place the microphone on the outside of the kick drum. So I'm going to use the mix inside this plug in to mix my drums. And I want to make sure that everything sounds really well balanced. Usually, the settings are pretty good. One thing that I like to do is take the snare bottom and the snare ring if it's down, leave it alone, but the snare bottom and snare top, and I like to pan the snare bottom just a little bit. And then I'm going to turn the ring up just a little bit, and I'm going to pan that to the right. And what this does is it just makes my snare sound a little bigger in the mix. Then the kick in and kick out. I want to listen to those and just see how those are sounding together. If I wanted to be a little bit more boomy, I'll pull this kick out up in the mix a little bit, which I always like a good boomy kick. I'm also gonna turn the overheads up just a little bit. And I'm gonna turn the mic down. The reason is I'm gonna add a little bit of reverb later. Sounds great. Nice and punchy. So what I'm going to do right now is I am going to add something a little something, something to get these to sound more real. So we're going to go with the virtual mix rack by slate digital. Once this is loaded, we're going to go to drums, and we're going to go to drum bus. We're going to go to drum bus tight and punchy. We have thick, we have polish vintage. I'm just going to go with tight and punchy. This is going to add a compressor and a little bit of EQ onto these drums. Now, you notice right away that we're already in this red zone yellow zone. So what we're going to do is, I'm going to close this. I'm going to select all these tracks and just turn them down. This is called gain staging, making sure that all the tracks start off nice and quiet and have lots of head room for when we throw on things like compressors, as you just saw. So now we can open this back up and not worry about the red or yellow that makes it go distortion. All right. So here we go again. We noticed that the compressor isn't moving at all, which means that it's not really doing much. So we're going to up our threshold just to see this knob right here, this little meter bounce. And now that it's bouncing just a little bit, we're going to turn the make up game just up a hair. Those are sounding nice and balanced. Now, one super secret trick that I like to do to make middy drums sound just a little bit more realistic, as I put a saturator on them. What a saturate does is it just adds a little bit of grit. Into the signal, and this causes it to just sound a little bit more punchy and real. This is the Abbey road saturator by waves, but you can use anyone you want. I kind of click this down to the 750 frequency range there. And I'm just going to turn down the post E Q, which means that I don't really want a lot of those high end getting elevated, just the low. And we're gonna hit play, and I'm going to use this button right here to make the kick sound a little more punchy. So you'll notice when I put it a post D Q here, all those highs just start ringing out. So that's what we're listening for when we pull this back down. So that's just making it sound a little bit more real. Now, what I'm going to do is this is the blend cause we don't want 100% of this going in, just enough to make it feel a little bit more punchy. So we're just going to bring this down a little bit. And that's making our drum sound a little bit more real. Now we're going to do something called bussing. Basically, all bussing is is sending one audio to another track where we put an auxiliary, effect, plug in, anything that you want onto the separate track that the original audio is going to. What this does is it allows a percentage of the signal to be affected by the plug in, so that we're not changing the entire audio. We're just changing a little bit at a time. Busing is really important, especially when it comes to adding effects on vocals, and you can use it to create an entire effect for an entire chunk of instruments, if you would like to. So busing is very simple. Don't overcomplicated. All it is is sending one signal to another track in order to have less of that track affected by a plug. To create a bus and reaper, you just double click anywhere in this empty space, and that creates a track. Then we're going to move that over next to the track because it's helpful for organization. It's not required, but it's helpful for organization. Another thing we're going to do is we're going to label it by double clicking and typing drum bus. Then we're going to go right here in this route section, and we're just going to hold this down with our mouse and we're going to drag and drop. Boom. That's all it is. Then we're going to add the plug in to x track. We're going to add reverb to our drum set. We're going to pick this slate digital te classic. We're just going to add that there. And now we have our reverb, and we're going to go ahead and we're going to do a little bit of low pass and high pass, which means that some of those high highs and the low lows, we don't want reverb on them. So we're just cutting them out of the desired reverb. That's all that means. For anything drums, you can mess with all of these two taste. Please do not turn pre delay on drums for reverb. Because what this does is it pre delay means, the reverb is going to come on before the actual drum hit. This can make your drums sound off in the mix, like they have bad timing. You can do pre delay for anything except for drums. With means we want the reverb wider, so it's going further into your headphones. So we're going to make that wider because we want to make it sound like our drums are in a big room. We're going to go ahead and turn the decay down. Decay and rever basically means the tail. How long is the reverb stretching out? We don't want it stretching out too far in a drum set because then things get a little muddled. They were going to hit play, and we're going to use this meter to turn down or up our reverb. And now our drums sound like they're being played by a real human and an actual. 11. Mixing Instruments: Now, here's the important part. When you're finished mixing one instrument, you don't want to mute that one and then mix the next one. What you want to do is turn them on one by one and mix everything together. The instruments do make a team. You do not want to mix one, turn it off, mute it, go mix the other because you don't know if they're blending well together or if their frequencies are competing. So we're just going to unmute our bass guitar. We're going to play the bass guitar along with the drums. Very good. Alright. Don't be afraid to use presets. We're going to be using a lot of presets in this class because it's just an easy way to learn. So we're going to go here and we're going to click this, and we're going to go down to Rock. And we're going to go to base guitar. We're going to go to click that. And that's going to show you typically how a bass guitar should be Eque. We're doing a little bit of a high pass filter, and you're boosting a lot of these high frequencies. These are the frequencies that cut through the mix on a bass guitar. They do exaggerate a little bit in this particular plug in. So I'm just going to bring that down ale bit. But then we can hear that those frequencies are popping out. And that allows the base to cut through. Next, we're just going to add a little bit of compression, which we learned about earlier. And we're going to do we are going to do about a two ratio here. And we're going to move this threshold while it's playing until this meter grabs just a little bit. Then we're going to turn up our drive and a little bit of makeup game. The reason that we do this is so that those hard plucks, dum, da dum, d, dum, dum, dum. Anywhere where the bassist is really hitting it. It takes those, and it just pushes those volumes down. It grabs it and contains it a little bit better. It also makes the bass guitar sound super even. So throughout the entire song, it's just super even. And that's usually all I do to a bass guitar. I also make sure that I'm matching it using my ears to the volume of the drum. You want the bass and the drums to kind of be equal. Maybe the bass poking out just a little bit more, but you want to be able to hear everything that's going on. All right. Now we're down to our acoustic guitar. And I'm going to show you a trick with acoustic guitar that you won't learn anywhere else. So, for our acoustic guitar, we've only recorded one line, right? We want to make sure that our acoustic guitar sounds big and full. And a couple of ways you can do this, as we talked about before, is recording a double. So you would record one guitar part. You'd pan that to the left, you'd record another guitar part, and you'd pan that to the right. Panning just means moving that signal to the other speakers. But let's say that we didn't get that. We didn't do two guitars. We only did one. This is how I create something called a fake double, and it makes your guitars sound thick and wide and lovely in the mix. So all we do is we take this acoustic guitar track, and we are going to first add some EQ. And again, we can just use a preset because we want to make sure that we're learning here. So let's go to rock, and let's go to acoustic guitar. Now, this preset again pushes those highs really high for my taste. So I usually just grab them and just pull them down a little bit. And then we'll watch the frequencies around here. And maybe I do want a little brighter. And we are going to also add just a little bit of that same compression to grab. So we're gonna do two, and we're just gonna move this till this meter bumps. Okay, now that we have our effects. We're gonna go to acoustic atar. We're gonna right click, and we're just gonna hit duplicate tracks. Okay? Now we have two of the exact same track, and we're going to turn off our snap to grid. We're gonna zoom way in till we can almost see every ounce of these wave files here. And we're just gonna grab this by holding on the mouse, and we're just gonna move it over like a tiny bit, like that. Okay? So unnoticeable. When you scroll back in. Then this is how you pan. There's a little button here. You're just going to pull that all the way to the left, and you're going to take this track, and you're going to pan that all the way to the right. Okay? And now our acoustic guitar is going to sound fuller and wider in the mix. And we can even pan it a little less if we wanted to, just to get it a fuller, but you want to make sure they're the same. So this says 88%. You want to make sure this says 88% as well. All right. And here's how that sounds. And I am noticing you can hit control to select multiple tracks at once. I'm gonna pull it down just a little bit, 'cause it is coming up a little too loud for me. Okay. And now we're gonna create a bus for the guitar. So we're gonna double click on this empty space. Drag this over. We're going to name this acoustic guitar bus. All right. And we're going to drag both tracks into that. And then we're going to go ahead and add a little bit of reverb on that bus. Alright. Maybe a little chorus, maybe a little width, decay. We can leave it alone. And then we'll blend to taste. Perfect. Sounding great. All right. Now we have this lead guitar. We're going to keep this shaker for last. Now I have this lead guitar. Now, there's a few things that we can do with the lead. We can do the same doubling trick where we put it wider in the mi. We could choose to just pan the lead guitar off to the left. We could add a virtual guitar amp, which I'm actually going to show you now. Let's hear what it sounds like. And I do notice it is kind of hard to hear. So let's do this first. Let's go ahead and put some EQ on here, because the best way. The best way to get frequencies to balance within your mix is by using E Q. So we're going to do a severe high pass filter on this. And if you want to lead guitar to cut through the mix, you can boost in this three K area right here, so you're just gonna click there. Boom. Boost that up. And after that, let's go ahead and add, 'cause I really want to show you these. Don't forget to save your project a lot. I really want to show you the virtual ams. So let's do one. This is a DI guitar, which means that we recorded it by plugging the chord directly into the audio interface. So a lot of times that sounds kind of thin. So we can use something called a virtual amp. And it shows you all these amps that you have, like, such a good choice of what amps that you want to make that guitar sound like it was actually recorded in an amp. So we'll go through, and let's get something kind of like, here we go. Here's like a marshal, like an old marshal, and it'll say, do you want the amp and the cabin. I always say yes. And then we can go ahead and play this. Miss Solis, you can hear. And it sounds great. It sounds like an actual amp, that we can go down and pick some petals. Like, let's say that we wanted to put a chorus on it or some fuzz or distortion or maybe, like, a tube thing. Let's put that on there, just so we can play with it. And that makes it sound kind of fun. It's like a little lo fi kind of thing. Let's see how it sounds in the mix. Kind of fun. So how we're going to get it to pop out even more is we're going to go ahead and choose a side. It doesn't matter. Humans choice. You can pick it right, left. Just make sure that when you're panning, that if you choose one thing to go right, at a certain frequency, if you have another thing in the similar frequency, it needs to go left. So keep that in mind for balance. But right now, we're just going to pan that to the right about 45%. Sound and groovy already. Alright, next, we have this synth. It is just a middy synth from the ant two. And what we're going to do is because we want this one to not compete with the one coming out of the right is we're gonna pan this one a little bit to the left. And it might not need anything, but we can check. What we're going to do is just add a little bit of EQ. And the only reason we're doing this is anything from like, zero to 100 hertz is going to be boosted in a high five speaker. So any commercial headphones or any high five speaker is going to boost those frequencies. So you really want to make sure that if those aren't needed. So, like, a base guitar and a kick drum needs them. But a high pitched synth doesn't need them. So we're gonna cut them out so that they don't build on top of each other and cause our mix to sound muddy. That's where the muddy sound comes from. It's from not cutting out those zero to 80 hertz on non base instruments. So even though this synth sounds really good, we're just going to get rid of the stuff we don't need. Perfect. Alright, and now we have this little auxiliary shaker, which is way too loud on the mix right now, but I'll play it for you. So all we're gonna do with this one is maybe I'll just pan it a little bit to the left and turn it way down. And that's already sounding great. See how easy it is? It's not hard to just balance bus, reverbs, a little bit of panning, a little bit of EQ and compression. And your mix is almost done. Now, let's do the hard part. Vocals. 12. Mixing Lead Vocals: Mixing vocals is definitely one of the more challenging things about mixing. Takes a lot of practice, but if you keep going and you follow these instructions and you adjust to your vocal style, you'll be able to mix vocals. No problem very soon. So let's get into it. So here we have one main vocal. We have a secondary lead vocal for a little bit of doubling. We have background vocals, three sets of them. So we're just going to listen through this section with these raw vocal tracks to see what they sound like altogether. Then we're going to blend them in one by one, and we're going to start with the lead. I never found my brain back during the story. I know mistakes. I made the fun. So we have a few different things going on here. We have the main vocal and the backgrounds, and we even have this little whistle part in here, so this is very interesting. Let's go ahead and mute all of these vocals here. And here we have our main vocal. Now, one thing we want to do is we're going to take if you hold down the mouse and you move it, you can remove audio. I highly recommend removing any audio that isn't necessary on the vocal. And the reason is because this is where we're picking up a lot of sounds maybe from the room or the computer or things like that, and we just want to make sure that they're not in there. So we can go ahead and click here and we have S for split drag. Real close. And we're just going to do this for all the vocals. S for split, kind of get in there. Me in here. And this might also get rid of some breaths, so we have to be really careful when we're doing vocals that close to one another. We'll just do those for now. Go to play this and make sure that there's no big breaths that we don't want. Sometimes we do want breaths for e motion. In that case, we just take our mouse. We go to the top of the track, and you'll see this kind of angled thing. You're going to pull on it, and that's a fader, and that'll fade in. And then you're going to go to the end of the track, and you're going to fade out. And the reason we're doing this is so that there's no hard pops or clicks when the audio starts coming in, and it also fades the breadths. I never found my way back to the story. Perfect. So we're going to just work with this section. We're going to open up our F X, and the first thing that we're going to start with is you guested EQ. Now, this is where Pop, Americana, and rock all differ in some way. For Pop, you really want a lot of this high air over here. You really want a lot of that, like, shiny crispiness. But in Americana, di, like this song is a little bit more indy. We don't really want to highlight those bright areas. We want her to sound more natural. So we are going to go ahead and not use any kind of preset for our EQ. And the reason we're doing this is just because we are honoring a singer songwriter genre. The first thing that you want to do is you want to create a high pass, and we're going to move that in before we even get started. Again, we're doing that because we don't want any of the mud. Now, in vocal, body is going to be in this hertz here 200-500. This is going to be your body of your voice. If you recorded your vocal and it's a little too boomy, you can cut a little bit here. But if it's not boomy and you want more fullness, you can boost in here. This is going to be kind of your boxy nasally area for about two to five. So if you're singing or you're dealing with a singer that has a little bit of the nasally thing going on, you can cut it there. This is going to be your sparkle area. So shine. It's also your syllas area, which is your hard Ss, your harsh frequencies like Ss and et cetera. So you want to be careful boosting this if you have a lot of ess in your song or harsh sounds. So we're going to listen through, and I'm going to use those EQ tools to EQ my vocal. I never found my way back to the story. I never found my wad. That do the story. I never found my way. That do the story. So she has a lot of low end in the voice, and I really want to highlight that. And then I also want to take out some of this boxiness here. I never found my way. That do the story. Perfect. See, we didn't have to get too crazy with the EQ. Now we're going to add a D S. What a D SR does is it takes those harsh Ss, it removes them or softens them from the vocal. You don't want to DS too hard. So Ss are okay, but you just want to get them sounding less sharp. If you DS too hard, you might sound a little lispy or like they're not speaking properly. I never found my way. That dear the story. So just where she says store, we're bringing this down so that it just hits a little bit over that. I never found my way. That dear the story. We could even ease up a little bit. Let's just do story. Hear the story. Hear the story. Perfect. Easy, pas. Now we're going to add our first compressor. I like this compressor. By waves. And the reason is visually, it's really easy to see what's going on. So this is going to be our first compressor on here. So we just want to make sure that this one is just grabbing the peaks, so anything that's really popping up, 'cause we're going to use multiple compressors to grab different parts of the vocal. It's our first one. So we're gonna do is we're going to take this threshold down. We're going to see a yellow line bouncing up. We're gonna take it just so that at the loudest part, the yellow line bounces right above the threshold. I love story. There we go. And then I like to use a ratio of three to one. I found my way. The story. And I'm gonna leave the makeup game alone on this one. And I'm gonna bring in my release. And what this is going to do is make the vocal seem closer to the listener. I never found my wad. B the story. Perfect. Next. We are going to add the virtual mix Rack by slate digital. This is another one that has a lot of presets for vocals, but most of them are pop. So I'm going to teach you how to build your own Americana singer song writer virtual mix Rack Rack. The first thing we're going to do is just get rid of all of these. We do not need them. Okay. We're going to go down and select a virtual preamp because most of us are not going to be recording with super fancy preamps at home. So I'm going to grab this Hollywood. The next thing that we're going to grab is this FG four oh one compressor. And the next thing that we're going to grab is this revival. All right. And these three do really well in the rock Mercana t type thing. So this one, we're going to create just a little bit of saturation to make the vocal sound a little bit warmer. So we'll probably do like three. And the output is where we're going to get a little bit more volume if we need. For this compressor, we're just going to hit play, and we're going to move the threshold until this meter grabs even further. I found. So that's perfect. So that's about three there. We're going to move this up to 2.5. We're gonna leave the release at fast and the attack a little bit slower. I never found my way. That do the story. And we're gonna increase the shimmer just a little bit and the thickness just a little bit. I vo found my way. That do the story. And if we wanted to increase the saturation amount, we could just turn the output a little bit. I never found my way. That do the story. And that sounds really warm and nice for this genre of music. If you go use the preset, you'll start to notice things like the vocal becomes really airy. It has that, like, pop crispiness to it that we don't really want in this genre. Next thing that we're going to add is our final compressor, and this one's just going to give us a nice smooth, make up gain and really glue everything together. I like the r Vox by waves. This plug in is amazing. All right. This gate right here will take down again, some of that background noise that we eQed out, but I like to put it just a 60 to get that cleanliness of all that under frequency or background noise out of there. And then we're going to bring down the compressor, and if it's a little loud, we can bring down the game. I, nev found Lam. That the story. It's a little loud, so we're gonna bring that down. Ivo found. That do the story. Perfect. And now we have a nice warm vocal that's very present. 13. Blending Vocals: What you'll notice right now is this vocal is actually sitting on top of the mix instead of blending with the mix. We want to make sure our vocal is not sounding karaoke. Like, it's just up here all by itself, and the music is doing something else. So how do we do that? There's a few things that we're going to do. The first thing that we're going to do is we're just going to right click here, and we're going to duplicate the track. Then we're going to leave all of our effects on here like normal, and we're going to add a slate plug in called Metatun. And I'm using this not to tune my vocal. I'm going to be using this just for the doubler feature. I'm gonna be using this not to tune my vocal, but for the doubler feature. You can use any doubler that's available to you. We're gonna turn the tuning down to nothing 'cause we do not want to tune. This is a good tuned vocal. And we are going to take this button here, and you'll see these circles appear. And we're just gonna move these in and out until we get a, a nice, wide double. I never found my. That do the story. I never found my. That D on the story. It kind of sounds like you have three singers. You have two on the side and one up the middle. And that's what we're going for for a blend. So we're gonna close this, and we're just gonna turn this down until it's almost inaudible, but the feeling is still there. I never found my way. That do s? Like that. Then we're going to do you guessed it. Create a bus. We're going to create two buses. One is going to be delay, and one is going to be reverb. We're going to double click here. Move that on over, double click, move that on over. We're going to take just the main vocal, not the doubled one, and we're going to drop it right here into this first bus, and then we're going to take it again and drop it into the second bus. And we're going to automatically just control, click. You can control both volumes. We're going to automatically turn that down just a little bit. This one I'm going to mute for now, and we're going to do our delay. Make sure that you're saving your project a lot. I'm going to say that every time I save. All right, so we're going to go here and we're going to get a delay. And we're going to use the repeater because it's in the slate All Access Pass, and that is what you have access to. Alright, and we're going to click this feedback link so that these go together. We're going to leave this kind of low. We're going to grab this, and we're going to bring it to one 32nd. We're going to click this Ping Pong. And we're gonna do a high pass low pass so that we're just laying the mid range. We're gonna leave the output right at zero. And we're gonna go ahead and play, and then we're gonna turn that down to blend. I nev found my wad. This is what that sounds like alone. I found story. So you can see there's like a little bit of delay. So what we're gonna do is just blend that in. Ivo found my wad. That to the story. Here it is in the isolated vocal. I never found my way back to the store. So you'll notice that when the music isn't playing, you can really hear the delay. But once the music starts, you can't, and that causes a nice blending. Alright, now we're going to unmute this other bus, and we're going to put our reverb on there. This is still the verb sweet from slate digital. We're going to do high, low, and we are going to increase the predlay, because the predlay will cause blending with the reverb. We're gonna increase the chorus, and we're going to increase the width. We're gonna increase the decay just a little bit. We're gonna hit play, and we're gonna blend to taste. We're gonna leave dry wet alone. Okay? I novo found. That Darby. You notice it's very verb. We'll pull that down to taste. I No found. That depo? Maybe a little more. I Nev found. That D M story. We also notice that our vocal is getting a little bit louder with all these effects. So feel free to pull that down a little bit, too. I Nev Found. D Moy. And now we have this really nice blended vocal with our music. Always turn your own vocal up a little bit louder than you think. And if you feel that your vocals are too loud, ask your friend hot tip because a lot of people when they're mixing their own music won't turn their vocals up enough. Most songs feature vocalists and people want to hear what you're singing, so make sure that your vocals are at a good volume. Well balanced, but that you should be able to hear every single word that you're saying. Alright. Now, let's listen to that in the mix. I never found my way. That to the story. I know mistakes. I've played before. Z going. F t f. So one thing you can do here is that big breath. So the rain. Fall. So we can just go ahead and blend that in by again clicking and dragging in our mouth. Z going. We'll leave that one, too. Z going. T f. And give you up. Another one there. We just go ahead and take that out. You can also leave them in the double and blend them if you want a little bit of reality to your song. And go. Just. Now, what we're noticing here is that is kind of quiet, right? So what we can do is we can click this trim button here. And we're gonna click volume. We're going to close that. And we're going to control twice creating two dots. Control on the other side of where we want to leave it, two dots. And then we can grab this. This is called automation. We just pull up. And what this does is it only increases the volume in this particular section. I like to automate vocals because then you don't have to crush them so much with compressors. You can actually just automate. You can do this with your instruments as well. Very easy to do. Snow. Now, we notice that it. It's coming in a little late, so we'll zoom in by scrolling your mouse button, and we can pull this back by just holding on these dots and pulling them back. And that way we can grab it right away. Just sow. We can pull it down just a snow. And if we wanted to do something super cool, like, a delay on in love, and we just wanted to love. And. So that. Man. So right there in love. Man. We can go ahead and hit split. Alright? And we can hit copy items. Now, I like to, after I copy it, hit control Z to undo because it leaves the integrity. We're going to double click. I'm going to drag over next to this lead. A blank track. And right where we did the split, we're going to do control V to paste. And you'll hear just the in love. Love. Just love. I love. Then we can take our repeater, do the same steps, but we're going to leave it at one eighth, and we're going to not put the ping pong on. And we're going to make sure we low and high pass, and maybe add a little color to this, and you'll hear the love delay. I love. I love. We can make it longer. I love. I love. And love. We can make the delay quicker. I love. We can make it longer. And, Now, when we have this delay like this, and we want, L, L, we can always move this audio closer so that the delay picks up right away. But let's see how that sounds together. M. No, no. Alright, let's nudge this just a little bit. La, no, no. Mm. No, no. Mm. No, no, no. We could even move it back to full quarter note. And, no, no, no. And that sounds pretty cool. Let's see how that sounds in the mix. And I can you even turn it down just a little bit. And. And no. So, that sounds really cool. Let's listen to the whole phrase. And you get this really cool love, love, like, delay, which I love doing that stuff. 14. Mixing Background Vocals: Okay, so let's talk about real quick. We have this doubled vocal here. Hi, funds. T the story. What I like to do, just to make my life really easy is, first, I'm gonna save. I I go and open this up, and then I right click here, and I do copy all effects. This is my main vocal. I'm copying all effects here. And then I'm closing this down, and I'm going to go down to my Double here. And I'm just going to paste those effects in by clicking here, right clicking here and past effects. Okay. And now you'll know that they're at the same volume, so we're definitely gonna have to bring those down a little bit. I found have. That story. And what I'm gonna do is just drag and drop this into my River bus here that I had on the main vocal. I found vea. Story. And we have this nice plt. And what I'm gonna do to make it poke out just a bit more is I'm just gonna pan it a. That's like 12% left. I found. That story. I know how do days. I've made the fun. And I do notice it's poking out a little bit, so I'm just gonna drag and drop it to this delay bus here. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna drag this into the Raver bus right there and give it a listen. I sound. That story. Nice. I know I thetas. I've played the fun. And that just sounds really pretty and well put together. We could go in and delay some of those store and other things like that, like we did before, if we feel creative choices to do so. It's fun, have fun with it. Play with it, put the delays wherever you like. Now we're going to stew this background vocal real quick. Back to the store. And it looks like these are just gonna be kind of little highlights. So what we're gonna do is I am Go to duplicate this track, right click, Duplicate track. Okay. And we are going to take 16 and 17 track numbers here. And I'm going to pan them hard left and hard right, and then I'm going to create a new bus. We're going to drag that over. And in this bus, I'm just going to put a few things on here to warm the background up. They don't need to be as processed as the main focal. We're just going to give them a little sparkle, cut out a little bit of boxiness, do a little body boost here. Back do on the star in our bus. And before we continue, we're going to drag and drop these into our bus so we can see what's going on. Ba do on the s. That do on the s. Great. And then we're just gonna add a DSR. And we're gonna hit the DSR on the background vocals a lot harder than we would on the regular vocals because we don't want S's piling up. That's the worst thing that you can do. So we want them to not be piling up. Back to the sty. Back to the sty. Perfect. And then we're just gonna hit it with one compressor, the R Vox. Back to the sty. Back to the star. Great. And this is where we're going to put our reverb on here. We're gonna do pred, C chorus, width. And this is where the dry wet knob comes in handy because we have put all these other effects on here. So we don't want it to be super verb, so we can use this dry wet knob to control the amount of ver. Ba do on the sti. Ba do the st. Perfect. And now, we're just gonna turn them down just a little bit 'cause they're poking out just a little bit. I no sound bad. Back to the story. Well, maybe we'll pan them a little bit less. It's all about choices. I sound my bad. Back to the story. Because we don't want them to overwhelm the main vocal. And that's why I'm just adjusting this volume as I listen. I no sound my ad. Back do the story. Perfect. Perfect blending. Alright, now, let's take a listen to these. T. Now, what I'm going to do is because this whistle is so different from this background vocal is I want to put it on its own track. So I'm going to take this, and I'm going to go ahead, and I'm going to duplicate this track, and I'm going to do split, split with the. We're going to split, split. And we are going to delete what's not a whistle by just clicking on it and hitting delete. And then on this one, we'll delete what is a whistle. We'll just drag and drop this track up, and we're going to name this Whistle. We're gonna do the exact same thing on the second track because I believe. These are both whistles. Is this a whistle? H. Alright, so these two are whistles. We're gonna split there, split there. We're gonna duplicate the track. Do the same thing. Billy, Billy, Billy. Alright, we're gonna call this whistle two. Alright. And now we have our whistle, so we can deal with those totally separately. So here's the background vocal. So, let's go ahead because these need to poke out a little bit more. We're gonna go ahead and actually, you know what? Let's just drop 19 and 20 into that same bus we made for the other background vocals. Make our lives easier. Dragon drop. H i. Alright, now, we're gonna volume match. Hi Hi, novo sound. And then we're going to pan them. Hi novo sound my bad. Hi. Let's just make them a little separate 'cause they're very different. Hi novo sound my bad. Back to the store. Let's check this section. Oh. H. Okay, now, these two are not ah. So what we're going to do is, we're actually going to we're going to do our volume automation. We're just going to turn these up so that we can turn all of these down much easier than automating the other way. Op. And then that way, we can just turn these down. They're very overpowering when you get to the second. We'll take it slow. We'll take it slow. Babyan. And if they go. Alright. Perfect. And there's one last anything goes here, and I think it's this track. So I'm actually going to do something crazy. I'm gonna split this. I'm going to copy this item. I'm going to go up to my main lead vocal. Control V to paste. And then that way I can have it in there. And then I think I'll actually put it in this delay track that we made for. And then I'll put it in this delay track for fun. Make sure it lines up. And we might have to nudge it. Let's just do goes. I think that's this last one here. Perfect. So let's go and just turn this down with our control volume. Pull it down. Perfect. Now we're just going to go through. I'm gonna click on these and bring them back just 'cause there's no sound going on here. And I don't want any kind of background noise, which there is a little bit in this vocal, but that's okay because we record at home. Sometimes there's background noise. And the best way to mitigate that is to just hold the mouse and drag and get rid of any noise at the end when the music disappears. Perfect. Alright, let's do that whistle, and then we'll be ready to master it up. Alright, I think with the whistle, what we're going to do is, we're just going to do some EQ to kind of get out any of that unwanted load end. Make sure to save project. Hi. My you. Oh. So we're just keeping the whistle part. We're getting rid of any of this nastiness down here. And then we're just gonna add a little bit of the ar voc so we can get a little bit of makeup gain and compression. Oh. Oh. A. Perfect. Then we're going to make our lives easier. Just right click. We're going to copy all effects, and then we're going to paste all effects. Okay, and then unmute. Listen. This one's much louder, so we can open this up. You go to bring the R Vox down just a little bit. May ticker cap. Perfect. So we're going to just I'm gonna pan these a little bit so they're not in our face. Mayer cap. And then I'm going to create a bus for them so we can get their own reverb by double clicking, drag and drop. Drag and drop. And I'm going to use a more intense. I'm going to use a more intense reverb called Illustrious plates. It's also included in this late All Access Pass bundle. We're gonna use the platinum plate, and we are going to play a little bit with the levels and stuff once we hear it. Si. So very intense. Si. So that sounds very cool, but we're gonna just go ahead and turn it down just a little bit. And then we're gonna turn down the reverb. Tri Sine that f. And I think the main vocal might be just a little bit too quiet. So we're gonna open this back up. Let's see here. So we're gonna open up the main vocal. I'm just gonna use this to turn it up a little bit. I know the mistakes. I've made the fun. C and phones that fall. And your mom calls let go. And I'm just gonna go pull the virtual mix rack. And I'm gonna turn it up a little bit here. I know how the mistakes. I've made the fun. S C pons that fall. And I'm gonna turn the whistle down just a little bit more, and I might panic. Let's see what a hard pan sounds like. I know how the mistakes. I've made the fun. Sure. So little us. I know all the mistakes. I've made the fun. S f. And that's just what mixing is. You have to play with the levels, move things up and down, make sure that everything is sounding balanced and together. And sometimes that just takes some practice of going through and say, This is too loud. This is too quiet, kind of moving it back and forth. So we have vocal mixing into the music. Sounding really good. You can also go after you make your vocal and say, Oh, maybe the guitar needs to be turned up, et cetera. And that's okay, too. But right now we have a pretty successful song. Let's listen to this loud part just to make sure that the vocals are matching the loud part. And then we'll do one more step for the mixing and go into mastering. Oh. And no Won't give up. And no. Let's take this breath out. Let's just do a split, pull, and make sure to fade. Pull and make sure to fade. And no. We'll take it slow. Baby win. Also, this B and baby is really sharp, so we're just going to do a split, and we're just going to do a little fade in. Make sure to fade out. Baby win B. I go. Cool. There's only one thing that I noticed, and that's the whistle. In this section is all alone on that side. So let's just copy the item, and we'll go ahead and we'll make sure we're dead on here. Control V to paste. And we'll do something cool. We'll zoom way in and we'll nudge it like we did with the guitar. That'll just make it sound wider. And the on. Perfect. Alright, we're going to throw something on our mix bus that I love. It comes with reaper. It's called X comp, and it is a multiband compressor. And what this does is it compresses frequencies instead of volumes, which is pretty cool. I like the super solid two preset, and I like to turn it down to the line there. You'll see me talking on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bring the base down a little bit. And then we'll hit play and make some adjustments. And g. And no. We'll take it slow. Perfect. Alright. Our song is mixed. Congratulations on mixing your track. Now, let's do the final step that you need. And that is mastering. And I'm gonna show you some really cool presets that are gonna demystify the process for you. Alright, Sega in the next one. 15. Mastering: Okay, so our song is perfectly mixed, but now we have to get it loud enough to put it on streaming services. This is called Mastering. This adds just a little bit of umph, a little extra compression, some limiting onto the track in order to make it sound. It's perceived loudness. Competitive with other songs on streaming services. We're going to use a little bit of EQ. We're going to use a little bit of the mix rack. We're going to use a limiter that I personally love in order to make this track sound fat, tight, and ready for streaming services. We're going to do something a little bit different than your traditional master. And the reason we're going to do this is because we're beginners, so we want to be able to manipulate things during the mastering process if needed. We're going to be working in our master bus, which is this right here. You're going to see this right here. We're going to open this up, and you'll see where the effects are. You can go ahead and ignore this re stream. This is how I'm speaking to you right now. You will not need that. And our multiband compressor is already on our bus, so we're good to go there. As I'm putting on mastering plug ins, you might notice a little bit of change in my voice. That's because the rea stream that I'm talking to you on is on the same master bus as the mastering software. So I hope this doesn't throw you off too much. First thing that we're going to add is EQ. We're going to use the infinite EQ by slate. There's some really great presets on here that I'm going to show you. So to get a preset, select here, we're going to go down to mastering. We're going to drop that down, and we're going to click balance. That's the one we want to use today. Immediately, it creates these bands for you. It's doing a little bit of high pass here to get of some of that muck out. It's raising these wanted frequencies here. One thing I do notice about this particular preset is it usually puts in a little too high end, but we're going to listen to it, and if it's too much high end, we'll turn it down. So here's how it sounds. If the fine. Falls that f. And give you monks. So it was a little too much. So all I did was I grab these bands, and I just kind of pulled them down to my taste. Easy, easy. The next thing that we're going to add is we're going to add the virtual mix rack by slate digital. And the preset we're going to use is the mix bus strip, and we're going to decide what we want. So fat just means a lot of base. Punch means a lot of kick, and the mix bus strip is just a generic overall balance. So we're actually going to take the regular one, mix bus strip, because we're not trying to add a lot of things like you would in pop. This just adds a little bit of dynamics and balance into your track. You can mess with these settings if you'd like to, but I kind of like to leave them alone. The only one that I mess with is this one over here. If you turn this output up, you can get a little bit more of low inpush, which usually makes your master sound a little bit thicker. So let's take a listen. I the fun remember that f. So when I push this knob up, that's when you noticed a little bit of low end. So let's go ahead and put it back to normal and then watch me as I push it up and see the increase in low end. If the fine ones that is fine. And if you go. Now, during this process, if you notice anything is sticking out too much, if the drums are too loud or the guitar is too loud, you can actually go into your project and change these volumes, including the vocals. And this is something that you wouldn't be able to do if you're doing a two track master. That's why I'm showing you how to do this. It is a really good way to help you as a beginner. The next thing that we're going to add is our very last item. This is going to be the FG X two by slate digital. I highly recommend this for mastering. It is Wizard. Here we go. Now, I'm going to leave it on bypass while I explain it to you because it will delay my voice a little bit. I'm going to show you all the different things that we're going to use. You can use presets. But again, with the rock in the singer songwriter type stuff, I highly recommend not using presets for these because it's going to push a lot of unwanted frequencies into your music. But we're going to take a look at this here. So if you move this one, the GR width, it is going to be kind of a side chain compressor. It will actually make your mixes sound wider, which is kind of a pleasant experience in the stereo field. So we're going to move that. Then we have this extra compressor over here. You have to be careful with this, especially if you're using real drums and real guitars. Because if you compress too hard, it might sound a little tiny or a little flat. So I'm going to leave it at one ratio because we did a lot of compressing throughout our track, and we have some compressors in that virtual mix rack mix bus. So we're just going to leave that at one. Now you come over here. This is low punch and detail. So this will turn your low end up and make your mix more punchy, so more kick drum more base. This is your detail, which is a lot of higher or mid high frequencies, such as a breathy vocal, tambourine, shaker, anything that you want to kind of stick out. Usually, the detail button I leave at none unless I notice that that vocal frequency needs to come up a little bit, or if the snare is not hitting quite right, I'll move that up. This is your gain, so this is what's going to make your track actually louder. These are your transients. So you can see right there. Negative tin smooths limiting artifacts, and tin increases transient punch. Let me explain that to you. Artifacts are little things like little pops and clicks that might be throughout your song that you don't realize are there. They're not perceived to your ear. But once you turn the volume up, they might come through, such as the sounds that my mouth is making right now. There's little pops and clicks throughout the entire thing. What I usually do is I like to limit the artifacts, but you can also increase transient punch, which means the transients are any kind of echo or anything in the frequency that's kind of lingering around. So if you want to increase a really re verbi song or you want the base to kind of ring out a little bit more, you could increase the transient punch. Drive is your saturation button. So if you wanted to add more saturation to the master, which means like a little bit of distortion, maybe that you would get on a tape, just to warm it up a little bit, you can push up the drive. Now we have your balance. So your balance is, do you want to prioritize low end or high end? Usually, I want to prioritize low end because that's what makes the mix sound a little bit more punchy. You have to be careful with this, because if you didn't during the mixing process, high pass those instruments that are non base, moving your low end up could cause the mix to get a little bit muddy. This is the process where you really have to use your ears and see what sounds good to you. Right here is going to be your ceiling. You want to make sure that it's at negative two, negative three. This is how close to the peak range that we're going to allow this to get. This is like your limiter. If you don't leave this at negative two or negative one, as you turn it up, you mi it clipping in your render, and you don't want to do that. Over here is your loof meter. Loofs are perceived loudness, so how we measure how your ear perceives loudness. For example, a base could have negative six loofs at negative plus 12 dB. Because a bass sound is going to perceivedly be quieter than let's say a high pitch sound, like an alarm. So if you have a kitchen fire and your fire alarm is going off and it's making that horrible, B sound, it could be at the same decibel level as a sub exploding in your TV, and your brain will always perceive that kitchen alarm as being louder. That's LUFS exp. So we want to make sure that our entire track has a good loudness by looking at that meter. I have noticed that this meter isn't the most correct. Usually I aim for negative nine negative eight LUFS on this meter, and that will render to negative 12 to 13 on the reaper render. Most streaming services require a minimum of negative 14 LUFS to be put onto their streaming services. As long as you're going above that, you should be fine. You don't want to get too loud like negative six or negative five because the streaming services will just turn them down anyway. But anywhere between negative ten and negative 14 is going to be competitive with what you hear on Spotify already. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn the song, and I'm just going to move the buttons, and you're going to see how the sound changes. F. Falls, let it fall. And give your mos let it go. Just s and And Okay. Now we've got a good balance. We're just going to make it louder, and you're going to hear how loud it gets, and we're gonna watch this little meter down here, okay? And the fs. And your And we love. And Don't give up. Okay, so as you notice that we get into the louder part of the song, that the LOS meter starts going crazy into like six or seven. So, what I like to do is always check the loudest part of the song to make sure that we're not too loud there. So I'm gonna go ahead and put into the loudest part of the song, and we're gonna turn down the game just a little bit. We'll take it slow. Baby went Oh. And go. Go Okay, great. So now we can go back and play with it and say, Okay, well, was our vocal the proper level, anything like that? How's that working? Blah, blah, blah? Is the kick too loud, is the bass too loud, and we can manipulate it from there since we're beginning. Then the last step that we need to do is render our track. So to show you how to do that real quick. First, we're going to save it. We're going to go to file, render, and you're going to see this screen. This is important. Here I have song for Skill Share, my file name. You can name your song, whatever the name is. You're going to leave the sample rate at default, whatever you started at. So if you started at 441, you want to leave it that. You want to make sure this is stereo here. You want to make sure it is a wave format, and it is either 24 bit or 16 bit. Streaming services will take either one of those. I like 24 bit because it's just a little bit more quality. All of this stuff is just leave it alone. Don't touch it. And then you're going to hit render one file. And I'm going to show you what the rendering screen looks like. I know of. There. I of s. One thing you notice on the rendering screen is the LUFS was at negative 12 at the highest part of the song. There was no red lines, so it wasn't clipping or anything crazy like that. It was the whole project. So another thing that you can do if you don't want the whole project is you can select T selection. I'm going to close that out. And what Tim selection does is you can actually grab just highlight right here, push down your mouse and drag to the end. And now you can control how much of the song that you want to render. So it doesn't just go on in silence, and there's not this four bar intro here. And you can practice that by just touching here and hitting play. It's a good amount of silence. You can go to the end. That silence. And that's pretty good because that's when the symbol rings out, and we can just do that selection only. Highly recommend this when you're rendering if everything doesn't start and end at the very beginning and the very end. So now we have a fully mastered track, and we're going to need to put it on streaming services. How do we do this? We need a distributor. So up next, distribution. H 16. Distribution : So your song is mixed and mastered and ready to be put on streaming platforms. But how do you go about doing that? It's actually really simple. All you need is a distributor. There are many distributors available. They all have different features and things that they offer, but they will put all of your music onto every single platform, including Instagram, Tik Tok, et cetera. There are a few that I really like. One is Distro Kid. You pay a certain amount every single month, and it puts all your music out for you. It allows you to add credits, including production credits, mixing credits, and it allows you to add collaborators if you had someone else performing or singing on your song. It allows you to put credits such as other people that might have performed on your song or if you had outsourced mixing and mastering for that song. It also allows you to have splits. So let's say that you collaborated with another artist, and they're going to be getting a percentage of your song, you can set that up as well. One downside to distro kid is you have to continue to pay the monthly fee every single month in order to keep your music on streaming platforms. So if you're only distributing a few songs a year, I highly recommend you go for a one time payment. If you're going to be releasing a lot of songs, District kid is the best bang for your buck. But remember, you have to pay every single month to keep your music out there. Another one that I really like is CD Baby. CD Baby allows you to pay a one time fee to put your music onto distribution. You pay once, and that's it, and the music is on there forever. You do have to be careful on CD Baby to make sure that you're clicking that you want your music on Instagram, Tik Tok, et cetera. Because it doesn't automatically do it. CD Baby is great if you're only releasing a few songs a year, and you just want to pay the $10 per song to put out the music and not have to ever pay again. When looking for a distributor, there's a few things that you want to look into. There are a few that only let you upload MP three files, which is not a great choice because Spotify and other streaming services sometimes will take that one MP three and crush it to an even smaller MP three, and your music doesn't have the best quality. You want to pick a distributor that lets you upload high quality 24 bit wave files, in order to make sure that your music is being heard in the way that you like it. There are also free distribution services such as SoundCloud, YouTube, where you can put up your music without paying any fee. However, it will not reach ones that most people listen to music on. You can also try uploading your music to Soundcloud to make sure that it sounds good on streaming, which is a little pro tip. Soundcloud adds even more compression than Spotify. So if you put it on SoundCloud, and it sounds good, it will sound good on Spotify. You can also release your music as an independent artist on Band camp where people can go and buy that track from you. It's also a good idea to make yourself a little lyric video or just film some footage of you playing your song and putting that up on YouTube so people can listen to it there as well. That costs nothing. There are a lot of distribution companies out there, so make sure that you do your research and pick one that fits what is best for you. Congratulations on your release. 17. Conclusion : So now you're ready to record, mix, master and distribute your own songs from your bedroom. I hope that you've learned a lot. Don't forget that you can upload your projects into the class, and I will give you personal feedback on all of your mixes. This way, you have a second ear on your project before you distribute. If you need any further help, please upload anything that you need to the class, and I will do my best to answer it. Thank you for spending your time with me. I've had a lot of fun teaching you how to do this on your own. I can't wait to hear your songs. Goodbye.