Music Mixing for Songwriters - From Beginner to Producer

1. Intro: If you thought the creative process of producing a song ends after every track has been recorded, you'd be completely wrong. Mixing is one of the most fun, creative, and vital processes a producer can learn. It's all about carving out and molding a track to shape it into your signature sound. With a few simple effects, I can take a recording from sounding weak, dough, and messy to sounding clean, full, and professional. In this class, you're going to learn to do exactly that. Hey friends, How's it going? I hope you have a great day. Welcome to my beginner's guide to mixing music. My name is Mike. I am a full-time musician and a music instructor from the UK. I've been playing, writing, and producing music for the last 13 years, and I also co-run a multi-award-winning music charity called TIME. We run music sessions and workshops for people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds. I'm also a top teacher here on Skillshare, and I've had an absolute blast making classes here the last couple of years. In this class, I'm going to teach you everything you need to know about mixing music to craft incredible-sounding tracks. This class is going to be beginner friendly, so even if you're totally new to mixing, you better follow along and get around out of this. We'll start with some simple preparation to get things cleaned up and easy to work with. We'll then learn about gain staging and volume balancing to ensure everything is sounding clear and balanced. I'll teach you about using compression to make every track sound punchy and confident. We'll then move on to learning about EQ to curve, shape, and clean up our recordings. We'll break down panning, reverb, and delay to create a 3D space for our song to exist in. I'll also teach you how to manage these effects with automation and buses to give a true professional quality to the mix. And lastly, we'll dip our toe into the world of creative effects like distortion, exciters, and chorus to add flare and interest to our track. Throughout the class, I'm going to be mixing a song myself so you can see exactly how we implement each of these topics into a mix. The only thing you'll need for this class is a basic understanding of an audio workstation. I'm going to be using logic today, but I've made sure this class is appropriate, no matter what DAW you're using. Mixing can feel like a very daunting and confusing subject, so my aim for this class is to really break down each subject into small, bite-sized chunks, and make it the simplest possible for anyone to pick up and learn the fundamentals. I'm really excited to make some music media, I hope to see you in class. 2. Class Project: Hey friends, how's it going? Thank you so much for joining me here on my mixing class. I really hope it's useful for you and you come away with a load of really good information about mixing your own music. Before we jump into the mixing, I very quickly want to talk about our class project. By the end of this class, you're going to learn a ton of cool stuff about mixing, which you can apply in your own songs and recordings, and I would love to hear what you come up with. Anything that you implement from this class into your own work, please feel free to send that into our class project. It's going to be a safe learning space where we can all post our songs or little ideas, and this could be anything from a fully produced mixed song with like 100 tracks, right up to just like a really nice reverb sound that you've made for a guitar. Anything in that stratosphere, feel free to post it in that class project, and yet, which have a cool songwriter and producer can chat about it. I'll respond to every single project send in, so if there's anything you ever need help with too or want to advice on, please feel free to let me know. All you have to do is upload your sound or your track to a site like YouTube or SoundCloud. You can create a private link if you'd like to as well in case you don't want anyone else to hear it, and then just post that link into the class project, tell me a little bit about that your song or what you'd like to feedback on, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Please don't feel scared about posting in there. It's such an important thing to do as a musician or an artist to get feedback and talk to other artists and producers about the stuff you're making. It means you progress much quicker and learn a lot of cool things. Please feel free to post in there, and I'm really excited to hear what you come up with. 3. Important Mix Lessons: Before we dive into the real nitty-gritty of mixing and stuff, I need to just run through a couple, really important lessons that are going to be vital to really understanding and getting the most out of this class. First lesson is, record it right. We can do a ton of cool stuff in mixing to improve the sound and the quality of a recording. But there is no getting away from the fact that recording a sound right in the first place is going to be vital to really getting the best out of that sound. Let's say while you're recording you are listening to some things back, and the room sounds a bit weird or there's a weird buzzing sound, or maybe you just didn't get the take you were after. Honestly, spend as much time as you can in that recording phase, getting the best recording you possibly can. Second lesson, listen to this class wearing a decent pair of headphones or some semi-decent speakers if you can. A lot of the examples I gave with E queuing on compression are going to be so hard to hear from a phone speaker or an iPad speaker. To get the most out of it, I highly recommend wearing some headphones. Lesson Number 3, 1% at a time. A lot of the examples that we're going to go through won't necessarily sound groundbreaking when we start to tweak with them. But my mindset behind mixing is we're just making a 1% difference at a time. If we spend long enough on a track, we make a little 1% here, a little 1% there. Over the course of a couple of hours, we do enough of those little tweaks, those little one percents, and it will amount to a massive difference. Next lesson, if you can, follow along with me is going to be much easier than just watching this class and then trying to remember and replicate some things later. If you can take a track or a recording, and while I'm talking about E queuing or something, if you can be mucking around with it at the same time, you'll absorb all of this way, way quicker than if you were just watching the videos. If it is a song your precious about, save a copy to just totally muck around with and just get really experimental with, and then you can always just go back to your default one if you get a bit lost. The next lesson is going to be, have intention behind everything you do. What we're going to do in this class is really learn about what each mixing technique does. What I really want you to do is ask yourself when you're about to go into a mix, what do I want to change out of this? For example, if you're mixing a guitar, rather than just slapping a lot of effects on it just because you think you should, listen to it really carefully and think, how can I make this sound better? What tools do I have at my disposal to affect it in the way I want it? Mixing is all about listening to a piece of music, identifying what needs to change to get a better result, and then using the appropriate tools to change them. To contradict myself there, the next lesson is, there is no real right way to mix. It's very much a creative process, just like writing a song is. I remember when I first learned to mix, I would get really frustrated at teachers because I just wanted to know what compressor settings do I put on my drums or what reverb do I put on my guitar, but that is just not the way things work. I say it's like an artistic, creative process in itself. How a compressor works on one drum kit will be completely different to another one, and it's very much depending on what kind of song you're going for as well we know if you're doing a vocal and guitar track, the way you compress, and EQ, and mix that track is going to be wildly different to a 10-piece band. It's again about really knowing what all of these tools do. Like we said earlier, analyzing what needs to change and changing it. But I know that can feel a little bit scary to think, oh, I have no boundaries or things to really hold onto. But I think this is where you can just get really weird and experimental with it. Like I said, there's no right way to mix. Often, the coolest tracks come from those that really do push boundaries and don't play by the rules and stuff. For example, one of my favorite albums of all time For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver was recorded in a wooden shack. No sound installation, no proper studio, one pretty cheap mic, and a very, very basic door. The album is full of weird buzzing, and creaking, and room noise, and it would totally go against a very professional way of recording a track. But I absolutely love it, and it's all that weirdness that adds character to it. Once you know how to use the tools, use them in whatever way you think sounds best. I'm going to give you some very basic parameters to go by. But as I say, get experimental with it. You really want to find out what producer, and which mix engineer you are personally, just like what kind of songwriter you are personally. Everyone is going to have a different taste in music and songwriting, just like everyone's going to have a different taste in mixing. To follow on from that, I know it sounds cliche, but practice really does make perfect. Is quite tricky trying to explain sounds with words. Sometimes there just is no way of really explaining something verbally without you really going in and trying these things for yourself. Just like anything else, the more you do it, the quicker you're going to be able to recognize what frequencies don't quite fit right or what compressor settings you like best on vocals. The only way you figure that out is by practicing. My biggest piece of advice to top this lesson off is make this whole process just super fun. Don't take it too seriously, have fun with the process of just mucking around with things. Don't put pressure on yourself to try and mix like the top engineer straight away. Just take however long you need to really work out each of these tools, what they do, what sounds they create. Make it fun, do it regularly, and you'll be an absolute pro in no time. Enough, the yap run-on, let's actually dive into the mix now. I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. The Song We'll be Mixing: To demonstrate all of the mixing stuff we're going to be talking about today. I'm going to be mixing a section of a song that I've been working on with some friends, so to give you a good idea on the track we're going to be mixing today. I'm just going to play it through. We're only going to be mixing the middle section. Just so it's not so overwhelming. Just so you're aware of the song we're going to be mixing. I'm going to play it for you now. Then it starts to go into a slightly different section there. But it's that first bit, money, that middle bit that we're going to be focusing on today. Now, it's worth saying that is not mixed at all. If you could tell the volumes are all over the place, a lot of instruments can even be heard. Actually what achieve play that too, because it's just a bit of a mess. But hopefully that gives you a rough outline and the genre of the song and where we go in. Let's dive in and start to sort some of this mess out. Sherry, I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Mix Preparation: Hey friends, welcome back. In this next lesson, we're going to be talking about mixed preparation, which might sound lame. But trust me, it makes the whole process much less overwhelming, and just in general makes it way faster and easier to mix and bounce around through the track. I always like breaking stuff down into steps to make it as easy as possible. Number 1, this might sound obvious, but pick your best takes. I've already done most of that because it takes a little while. You just want to go through and pick all your best performances. There may be like a verse where the first vocal section you liked more than the second. Or you might want to cut up like each vocal line if you want to get really and great with it. Then the second step sounds obvious, but just delete anything you don't need. Any bad takes maybe some ideas that you are experimenting with that just didn't quite work out with, just go ahead and delete them. Next, we're going to properly label each track. It's really easy to fall into the trap of guitar 1 or instrument 1 or audio input 5 or whatever you know. It means you have to constantly be remembering what track is what. Just spend a bit of time just going through and just giving everything its proper name. Quite like factor, that's fine and Lead, guitar, harmony, and so on like that. Just so everything is really clear and I like to change the icon as well. Just so again, just a nice place to be, a nice, easy way to look through the track. On logic, you can right-click and select your icons from there. I'm just going to spend a minute doing that. We've got a much clearer idea there on what each track is. I guess a little bit more like [inaudible] down here with all these different vocals. But what we're going to do later is like stack these up into a folder. I don't feel like I need to label them too much. But again things like the guitars, the main vocals, and all those sort have been nicely labeled now. Next, just organize the tracks into an order that works well with you. This is different for everyone. Some people like the vocals sitting at the top, other people like the drum sitting at the top, and then the bass and the guitar and they're going like that. Just group them together in any way that makes sense. I've just really just thrown all of the main instruments up towards the top. Then I've got all the vocals more towards the bottom. But to move these, you can just select the ones you want and then drag them up and down. That'd be pretty similar on any Doyle you're using. Next is color-coding. As you can see here, most of the tracks are blue, which is fine. But what we can do just to make things a bit easy for us is color-code them all. This is going to be a little bit different on every Doyle. You might need to do a little bit of Googling on your own if you want to do this. On logic, we go onto Logic Pro, settings and go to display. Then we go to Tracks. Then we can auto assign a 24 color or a 96 color depending on what you want. And is here we can dive into some other settings so we can treat each different track as a different color. If you see there, we've selected it. Then each one is going to assign a different color. Now if we want to say like group all these up in a really easy way, we can just select them all, right-click and then go to a soundtrack color. We can just change them all by groups. All of these weird vocal sessions we just know are all grouped together. We can just go through the track and color however we like. Next we're going to group instruments together and create track stacks. This is really useful if you've got like a ton of vocal stacks you're working with like this track. Or often if you've got like a drum kit recording where you've used like 10 different mics, what you can do is group all these together and treat them as like one specific file and hide them away so that you're not constantly scrolling through like tons and tons of tracks. When it comes to just working on the drums and the vocals, you just dive into that folder and it all opens up for you. In this example, I'm going to use this weird vocal stack. It is going to be a little bit different on every Doyle, but you should be able to stack folders no matter what Doyle you're using. On Logic, we just want to select all of the tracks. We want groups together. Right-click. Then we want to go to Create Track Stack. It's going to give us two different settings. The folder stack is going to be just literally just grouping them all together so we can bring out the folder and shrink it again, which is fine for organizing. But a summing stack essentially allows us to like create effects or adjust the volume on the whole stack. This is really useful on like drums if you want to turn the whole drum kit down, rather than turning each individual like mike down, we can do it all at once. If you're using logic, I'll recommend going for Summing Stack, if you're going to be adjusting anything. We can see here, it's tidied all of those vocals up into this one track that we can open and work on or we can close, and then we've got a slightly neater look in timeline. We can name this stack as well, so like weird vocal stacks. Then yeah, we can adjust the volume to this or the gain or wherever it is and it's much easier. We could do the same for all of these. I know these are all going to be just the verse harmonies. I can create a track stack verse vocal harmonys. That's just shrunk down the sheer amount of things we've had to scroll through. It just makes things more simple and this makes more sense to me now. Next, we're going to delete empty sound. In lots of recordings like this one, for example it's acoustic guitar. There's no sound actually until over here. Again, just to make it really clear where each instrument is coming in and out, I like to delete all the empty sound, not doing anything for the track. If you like a little low-end rumble or something weird, obviously feel free to leave that in. But I liked yeah, delete as much empty sound as I can. This could be as simple as just like trimming down, attract and just finding where it stops. There's often an easier way around this. If we select the track, we want the noise taken away from. Then on logic, we go to functions and remove silence from audio region. Again, there's going to be a little bit different on every Doyle but it should be something similar. Then we just want to adjust the threshold so that we're removing the silence. Now, you can obviously get really like specifically with this. However, I would recommend just being as loose as you can, so you're not cutting out any of the nice resonance. About there is fine it just roughly cutting out the silence. We're going to hit Okay and you can see there that it's just cut out with that silence [NOISE] for us. I'm just going to go through and do the same for every instrument that has that silence in it or we can use the shortcut, the arrow and x, two easy bring this up and just really quickly go through and get that sorted. I would recommend doing it one at a time just so you can make sure you're not cutting out anything on wanted and everything is just really accurate. Again, that's looking much clearer to me now. Now on top of this, we can create crossfades and just in general, fade things in and out. For example some things might come in a little suddenly, like this guitar, like this lead guitar for example obviously cuts out there so rather than just ending suddenly on logic, we can hit Shift Control and then draw a line and it's going to create a fade out. For that one for example needs or even fade out a bit earlier so ends there. We can just cut that back and then hit Shift and Control and draw a line and that's going to fade it out. You see that that line is going to take it down and it's just going to fade out more naturally than just suddenly endings. We can go through and do that to each one if you want to. Don't feel like you need to have every single track, but just any have a bit of clipping or just make a sudden like pop when you bring it in. That's scratchy guitar, for example, we could just do a little bit of just makes it a bit nicer. But what we can also do is crossfade. If you've ever got two takes and you're trying to put them together and there's a weird bit of crossover over there's like a pop or it just doesn't fade from one type to the other very naturally, we can create a crossfade with the exact same technique, so control shift and we could just put a little crossfade in that and it's going to take one and put down while the other ones coming up. They're going to meet really nicely. Just give like a very natural sound. To make things even easier for ourselves you can often just apply a default cross-fade. If you go to the track, you want to insert your cross fades on go to functions and then apply default crossfade. That'll apply all cross fades where they're needed. Next, we can create some sections the top of our track, so we can really easily, know here the verse and the chorus and the bridges are. Is very optional one, but again, helps you just bounce around and speeds things up. On logic, we wanted to show the global tracks here and then you can see this arrangement marker so we can hit plus and you can say it adds a market for an intro for us so we know the intro ends about there. We can just stretch it out and then hit Plus again and it's going to default to a verse. We can just keep going like that and we can rename them just to fit whatever suits. It's like a verse section to hear for me. We just keep going like that and it just makes it really easy to bounce around the track. If you want to you can also get rid of these as well so we can right-click and take away the tempo, the signature marker would get rid of that too so we can just have the sum sections up at the top there. Now, taking a look at this track as it is, this to me is much clearer than where we were at the beginning. It's just going to be way more like fun and accessible to go in now and tweak things rather than just battling between really confusing track names and stuff like that. That's all looking really good but there's one more step I like to take when preparing for a mix and that's importing a reference track. A reference track is going to be super helpful as we go out the mixing process. It's very easy when you listen to attract over and over again to get used to the sound you've made. Unless we're really comparing back-and-forth to a song that's an industry standard, It's quite hard to stay on track and stay aware of what you're aiming for. Have a think of what genre or style you're trying to replicate or work towards and it's often helpful to grab a couple of tracks like two or three but for today I'm just going to grab one. I'm going for a Bon Iver, Phoebe bridges style with this track, and one of the songs that really inspired me while writing this song was blood bank by Bon Iver. I've downloaded that reference track and I'm just going to drag it in to the bottom here. Obviously move it away from track so it's not crashing, but just so that you can nip over and have listened go back to yours. But do keep in mind your reference track is often going to be mastered to the highest volume it can go so just always be balanced and the volume of the reference track in line with the track that you're working on. Don't worry too much about getting up to the same volume right away. That's what more mastering is about but a reference track is going to be super important down the line. Let's clean up their track of yours and once you're ready, let's dive into the next lesson. I'll see you there. 6. Gain Staging: Hey everyone, welcome back. In this next lesson, we're going to talk about gain staging. But before we dive into that, what even is gain? You see gains, the process of getting absolutely jacked like me. No, I'm just joking. Gain, is essentially the level of the input of the sound. Now, it's very often confused with volume, which is the output of the sound. Now, they may seem very similar, but volume and gain, are actually two different things. I like to think of it like a guitar. If you plug a guitar into the amp, you have a gain dial, and if you turn that gain all the way up, you'll get a distorted sounding guitar. You're adjusting the input level so that it's over driven. But you can control how loud that guitar is still with a volume dial. You can create a distorted sounding guitar at a low volume. Although not many rocky distorted guitar players seem to do that, but that's how I like to think of it. Volume controls the loudness, whereas gain controls the tone and the input of the channel. In goes gain, out goes volume, if that makes sense. With that in mind, what's gain staging? Gain staging is correctly setting the balance of gain for each of the instruments in our track. That's either adjusting the gain up or down., so it hits a certain sweet spot, which minimizes noise and distortion. But it also ensures that you're getting the best possible sound out of that recording. It's also really nice because if we gain stage all of our tracks that same sweet spot, it means all of our instruments are sitting at the same level, so it's much nicer and faster when it comes to mixing and adjusting volumes. It's really important to do this step before we do any mixing like any compression or EQ or anything like that, get the gain staging done first, and we've got a really good foundation to work from. Before we start adjusting the gain of each track, we want to make sure that all of the volumes are set to zero dB. As you can see here, we just want to make sure that number is at zero or if we're working from up here, we want to make sure they're all neutral on zero dB. We also want to make sure that none of the instruments are pan, so this dial here that we use for the panning, we're going to come to that later. But yeah, we're just going to make sure everything's central and everything's at the same level. On logic to adjust the gain of any track, we want to just click on the track, we want to adjust the gain on, hit this little i button, and here you'll see there's an option to adjust the gain. Or if you want to, you can head into the mixing section, and we can add a gain unit here, if we want to use it in a plugin form. But I quite like using it on this trip, so that's what I'm going to be doing today. To gain stage, we need to adjust the gain so that the audio is hitting a certain audio sweet spot. Now we can find that sweet spot in two different ways. The best way is to use what's called a dBVU meter. I'll leave a free download link to that in the description. Or you can use your DAW's volume fader to get an idea on where that volume is sitting and do it that way instead. Hi, I'm editing. I'm just going to pop in here and there to add a bit more context to what I'm saying. Just to expand a bit on decibels and dBFS and that kind of stuff. dBFS and dBVU are just different ways of measuring volume. DBFS is the digital modern version. DBVU is more of the old school like analog way of measuring volume. Because they're based on different systems, they work a little bit differently. But all you really need to know is it's just a way of measuring a volume, and the old-school analog way, dBVU, tends to be more the gold standard to aim for when doing things like gain staging. But when working with modern DAWs we'll almost exclusively be working in decibels or dBFS. It's also worth noting that if we go above zero decibel, we'll be peaking the signal, and that often makes distortion and just some nasty sounds. We almost never want to be going above zero decibel. If I play this guitar e.g. you can see the volume meter there. This is reading in decibels or dBFS. Little bit technical, but essentially we're looking at the numbers and the readings on the level meter here. The most accurate way of getting to this audio sweet spot, like I said, is using a dBVU meter. We can download this for free online. At least they're free at the minute. They look a little bit like this. What we're trying to aim for is to get the audio sitting at zero dBVU. Again, if I play this guitar, we can see is actually pretty close. But if we want to adjust this, we can just click on the guitar and head over to the gain. We want to just up a little bit so that it's hitting that zero. On a bit more. Obviously, any instrument is going to go up and down in volume. That's just the nature of any instrument. What we're really aiming for here is to get it as close as we can to that zero dBVU. If it's going over a tiny bit, that's okay. I tend to like to keep it below zero if I can. But that's pretty close to me. I've only had to do a minor adjustment there at 1.6 decibels. That's all we're doing, is we're going through each track and adjusting the gain so it's sittings close as possible to that zero dBVU. Now, if you really can't get your hands on this, or you're just in a pinch, a lot of people also say to aim for minus 18 dBFS, which we can see our volume meter. I find that most of the time we're trying to find the balance that's sitting at around minus 18, and it's our peaking at minus ten. That tends to be a similar range to that zero dBVU. If we take a look here, we take a look at our volume meter instead this time. We can see that we're seeing around 18, a little bit more muscle peaking up around 10, which is about here. That is a pretty good level to me. Keep that in mind. We're going for about zero dBVU, or peaking at minus 10 dBFS. I'm going to select all of our tracks here and I'm going to bring up the dBVU meter on all of them. Just like that. I'm just going to go through one-by-one and adjust that game so it's hitting around zero dBVU. While we're doing this, we want to be looping the loudest part of the track to focus on. You can see here with the bass, we're going way over. We want to take this game down. Now, obviously, every instrument is going to be a little bit different. Now with instruments with lots of dynamics, particular drums where there's sudden punchy sounds, we need to gain stage in a slightly different way. For example, this right isn't quite hitting that zero dBVU. We'd think about taking it up, but if we look at our level meter, we're picking the signal, which is going to mean we're going to get distortion and it's just not going to sound very good. It's going to sound very unbalanced with everything else as well. We can't have it peaking, which means we need to bring it down and that's fine. Not every instrument is going to be able to hit that digital sweet spot on this VU meter. In a case like this, I will again look at the level meter and I'll try and get it sitting around minus 18, peaking at 10 instead. But again, if we can get it as close as we can to zero dBVU, that's also great. [NOISE] That's good, it's sitting around 18 there and they're peaking up at around minus 10. I'm cool. Unfortunately can't get acquaintance that sweet spot, but that's absolutely fine. Kicks it in pretty good there. Organ sitting around there too, which is good. For each different instrument, like this guitar is just a little bit tricky to nail down exactly where it is. I'm just constantly looking between my level meter and my dBVU meter, I'm trying to just dial it in as close as I can. But a lot of this is quite like a soft science. It doesn't have to be exact. We're just looking for a good ballpark level. So most of the tracks have been gained stage there. Now, we've just got to do these vocal harmonies, but what we can do, is something quite cool to save a bit of time for instruments that aren't too in your face things like background sounds or harmonies, especially ones like these that are just like one or two lines gain staging those isn't quite as vital. What we can do is something called audio normalization. That's essentially going to adjust the gain to each region so that it's hitting a certain peaking point. If we select everything we want to adjust, then go to functions and apply normalize region gain here. Then we can choose if we want it to be individual tracks or individual regions, we're going to go for regions because we've selected love regions and then like we were saying earlier, we're aiming for around minus 10 peakage, [LAUGHTER] if that's a word. So we can type in here minus 10 and hit Apply and then all of these little regions are going to be brought up to about minus 10. You see, they've all been brought up to a pretty good level there. Now what we can do is go back in with a metering and just see how that's doing. So we can say that that's way too loud. So we can just do that exact process again, but bring it down a little bit. Maybe we'll go to minus, say like minus 16 instead. Let's try minus 13 instead. That's hitting a bear balance there. So we can play around with that normalized gain feature on more like background, the instruments, or like a big drumming kit with a ton of different sounds. Sounds a little bit of time. Again, it's fine for getting our audio into that sweet spot. Now the question that often gets asked is, do all instruments need to be gain staged? Well, not really, but it's worth considering. What I mean by that is you definitely want to gain stage tracks out front and very present like guitars, vocals, bases, but instruments like a little shaker or a tambourine or some background ambient noise, stuff like that. Don't worry too much about, but getting up to about the right level is just going to mean you're going to be hard to mix nice and easily. As long as you're in the right ballpark is totally fine. Should you gain stage midi? In a way, yes. Like for example we have the strings the amidi. Now because amidi is just like audio information isn't like a recording, it doesn't exactly have like gain, but we can often do is go into the plug-ins like we have here and they'll often be like a volume dial or some way of adjusting the output. We can get that into the sweet spot just so it's sitting nicely with the other instruments or failing that if you're plugging doesn't have a volume slider, you can add a gain plug-in a little bit that we saw earlier, so just adding utility gain, adding that onto the effects and you can adjust the gain from there. Now you might be able to hear things are sitting at a slightly nicer balance now, just by adjusting those gains, everything's just sitting at a nice level and you can hear most things. By creating this foundation for ourselves, it's so easy to just make small little tweaks and balance in the mix you want. It just creates a perfect foundation to work from and means we're getting the most out of all of our recordings and all of our instruments. Next, we're going to be working on the balance and the volumes. As well, I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Volume Balancing : Next we're going to work on volume balancing. That's exactly what it sounds like. We're just going to be playing around with the volumes and making sure that everything is sitting a really nice level. We can hear everything clearly and we're happy with the balance of the track. This is where our reference track is going to come in really handy too, as we can just compare the volumes and where everything sitting with a reference. Let's again break this down into steps, so it's really easy to understand. The first step is going to be to loop the loudest part of the track. Then we're going to select every one of our instruments. All of these, and we're going to turn all of the volume sliders right down to zero, so you should be able to hear anything. Now we're going to pick our most important instrument. This is usually the vocals, but obviously depending on what style you're working in, it might be different. You may be working in lo-fi, which has no vocals, in which case you might have a really strong melody. We going to pick out the main sound in our song, which is going to be vocals for this track. We're going to bring it so it's sitting at about minus -5 db. See the loudest past climates was -6 or -5 roundabouts, there's fine. Then we're going to pick for second most important instrument and bring it so that it's sitting nicely with those vocals. I think for me, it's probably the lead guitar. There's going to come in second most important. That's here. Then we're going to just carry on in that fashion, choosing the next most important instrument and the next most important instrument and just mixing that in to the instruments that are already present. After that lead guitar for me probably comes the rhythm guitar. Next is the base. We're just going through each of those tracks and just mixing them in one by one. It goes without saying that you can obviously come back to each instrument. You'll be tweaking this for the whole track, I'm sure. But we want to just get it as close as we can, suspend like a really good amount of time here. Just keep listening to that same section and getting those volumes close as you can. It's worth saying that if you play the song from beginning to end, there's some parts in the beginning or the ending that might not quite sound right, but we're going to fix that a little bit later. But for now, we just want to get the loudest part of the song sounding good and balanced and we'll come to the rest of the summer a little bit later. Make sure you have a break as well. Give you a raise and rest. Go on have a cup of tea or just go do something else and then come back to it like half an hour later with some slightly fresher is. Also keep bouncing back between your reference track as well like. I can solve here that I think I need a little bit more of the main guitar. A bit more kick as well. I think I'm quite happy with the balance there. It's a little bit intimidating trying to film while doing this, but I think that sounds okay. I'm happy with that for now. I'll probably think differently [LAUGHTER] about half an hour's time but that's cool for now. If we play this song from start to finish, you'll probably think that things sound a little bit unbalanced in certain sections. That's totally fine. That's normal. We're going to fix that with something called automation a little bit later. Some people may like to do a light bit of automation at this stage, which is totally cool. But for me, I'm going to do it a little bit later just because I know through EQing and compressing things can sound a little bit different. But next, we're going to talk about buses. I will tell you more about that in the next lesson. Thanks, guys. 8. Busses: Hi guys, welcome back. In this next lesson, we're going to talk about busses. I was confused by busses for the longest time, but it's actually super straightforward. The old saying goes a little bit like this. Imagine you want to get a group of children to school. The easiest way to get all these kids to the same place is to send them on a bus to the place and that's exactly what bussing in audio is like. Say we've got like a drum kit with loads of different mics and drums, and we all want to get reverb on them, we want to send them to a reverb. Rather than sending each one individually, we can send them all at the same time. Why do we do that? First of all, it saves a ton of time. Rather than applying reverb onto every single track, we can just create a reverb we like and then send a ton of different instruments to that same reverb. It makes things so much quicker and easier in like every single way and it also greatly reduces the amount of power your computer needs to make it all work. Also because we can use this to apply like this same effect on a group of instruments, it helps to glue it together, like reverb for example. Rather than every reverb being a little bit different, if we can send a lot of our tracks to the same reverb bus it will sound like they're being played in the same space and it nicely glues them together. Also, if you want to adjust the reverb later down the line, again, rather than having to go into each individual track and adjusting it, we can just adjust the reverb bus we've set out for ourselves and we can do this with any effects we want, like reverb, delay, compression, EQ. Sometimes it's nice to EQ whole drum kit together rather than individually. Again, helps to glue it together. We don't necessarily need to set up all of our busses now, but just as we go into the section where we talk about things like effects and compression reverb, keep in mind you can slot these effects onto a bus to make life a bit easier for yourself. For now, let's just learn how we can set up a bus ourselves. Let's take this lead vocal for example. Let's say we want to send this to a reverb bus rather than putting a reverb on this track. We can come to this little section here and we can select what bus we want to send it to. All these are just going to be vacant, empty channels. We can go to Bus 5 and you can see over here on Aux 4, this has created a new bus for us, so this is Bus 5 here. We can rename this at the bottom, reverb and that is our reverb bus now. On the reverb bus I'm going to put in a reverb plug-in. At this point we can set up the reverb however we like. We're going to get into this a bit more later, but we can dial in how much of this effect we want added onto our track. With the lead vocal in mind, we can use this dial to change how much of the signal is being sent to that bus, which means we can still like dial in how much reverb or how much effect we want on each different channel. We've got this reverb going through Bus 5, and I can turn this bus way up if you want lots of reverb and turn it down and we're getting a nice level of reverb sound there. Now, let's say we wanted to add vocal harmonies to that same reverb. We just need to select that track and again, bus it out to Bus 5 reverb, and we can play these together and we can do the exact same so we can just adjust how much reverb we want on the backend. They're both going to the same reverb, we don't have to set out that reverb channel twice and muck around with all the settings, we can just get a reverb sound we like, and then adjust how much of the signal goes into that effect. We can also adjust the intensity of the bus using the slider as well. That's all bussing is, it's just sending different instruments through one effect makes things much easier for ourselves and creates a nice cohesion between tracks and have a play around with this and I will see you in the next lesson. Thanks guys. 9. Compression: Hey friends. Welcome back. In this next lesson, we're going to talk about compression. Compression is one of the most key components of mixing, so it's really important to understand and learn. But before we start talking about compression, we need to understand something called dynamic range. What is dynamic range? Essentially, it's just the difference between the loudest and the quietest part of a recording, so let's use the example of recording a vocalist. Now, naturally, when you're recording something like vocals, they're going to be parts that are louder than others. The performer might move closer to the microphone, they might just shout align [NOISE], or whisper align [NOISE], and that's going to create certain loud parts and certain quiet parts in the recording, which is great for performance, it gives it life and makes it feel human. But this causes a bit of an issue within mixing, because if we try and balance the volume to the louder parts, the quieter parts are going to sing quite weak and a bit too distant, but equally, if we have volume balanced the quieter parts, the loud parts are going to be far too loud. This is where compression comes in. What compression does is essentially squeezes down the louder parts of a recording, so the whole recording is more consistent. We can control how this compressor works, so we can essentially control the dynamic range of a recording, and that creates a more consistent volume level, and a lot of people say it adds presence and punch to a track. But we have to be careful as if we compress a signal too much, it can often just dead in a performance and make it sound quite flat, inorganic and quite processed. That's what compression does, is just making a more consistent volume level for any recording. Have a listen to these vocals before and after they're compressed, and notice how the non-compressed vocals sound unsure of themselves and quite under confident. Hopefully, you can hear that the compressed vocal sound much more confident and consistent and stronger overall. But how do we use compression? Every compressor is made up of several different elements of dials. The first is the threshold. We set the threshold where we want the compression to start taking place. If we use this as an example, here we have our audio signal and we want to compress the loudest parts of this, so you want to just focus on this loudest bit of audio. We set the threshold where we want that compression to start taking place, so if we set the threshold here, everything above it, all of this is going to be what's affected. The lower we set that threshold, the more of the signal it's going to be compressed. We could set the threshold down here, but that would make a very intense compression, so we want to get it at a level that sounds nice and organic, ideally, unless you want to go for crazy compressed drums or something. Next we have the ratio. The ratio determines how much compression takes place above the threshold. If we compressed everything above that threshold, it sounds a bit flat and an organic, so we adjust the ratio to determine how much compression is taking place above that threshold. I think of it a little bit like a filter sitting on top of the threshold, and we can either open that filter up and let a bit of that signal through, it sounds a bit more natural and organic that way, or we can really close that filter down, turn that ratio right up to make a much more intense style of compression. The higher the ratio, the more compression, the lower the ratio, the less compression. Here are some really simple ratio milestones to give you a clearer idea. Next we have attack. Attack is the amount of time it takes for the compressor to start working. A faster attack time gives a thick and tight sound, whereas a slower attack sound sounds more like punchy and organic. Usually, slower attack times are more pleasing to hear. As you can see from this display, with a fast attack time, as soon as that signal goes over the threshold, the compressor is coming right in, is digging the compressor in the signal straight away. Whereas with a slow attack time, as soon as that signal hits the threshold, the compressor starts to work, but it's a much slower decline, as you can see here, and with a slower attack time, it means some of that initial signal is going to just punch out that bit more, so certain lines are going to have a good bit of impact, hence making them a bit more punchy because they only just catching the beginning of the compression. On the other end of this is the release. If the attack engages the compressor, the release releases the compressor, so it's the amount of time the compressor takes to let go of the compression. Fast release times tend to sound more natural and people tend to lean a little bit more towards that fast release times, so you can see here that once that signal comes back under the threshold, that's the compressor sign to stop working. The reliefs determines how quickly the compressor goes from working to not working. You can see here with a slow-release, that compressor slowly comes back out, but with a fast release, as soon as that signal comes under the threshold, the audio goes straight back up to its regular level. Next we have the knee. The knee is the transition between the compressors full reduction to no reduction of the signal, but in Layman's terms, I think of it essentially as just how aggressive the compressor's working. A higher knee will result in a more subtle compression, whereas a lower knee will be slightly more in your face and aggressive. But it is quite subtle, so don't worry about this one too much. But again, just to give you a rough idea, you can see a soft knee here, just like Ben's the compression and makes it just more subtle and softer, whereas a hard knee is just going to be much more direct and sharp. Lastly, we have makeup gain. When we're using compression, we're making the signal quieter because we're bringing down those louder parts. We use the makeup gain to just re-adjust for the signal loss, so we're just bringing it back up to a level we're happy with. Also, in most compressors, you will have a mixed style, and this essentially is just the difference between like the dried non-compressed signal and the wet compressed signal. You can just dial it in if you want to take the edge off of a compressor, also is worth mentioning about gain reduction. Compression is measured in gain reduction because it's squishing down that signal and making it quieter, reducing the gain, and if you ever look at a compressor, you will see a dial or a graph, and that is what that's reading is how much gain reduction is taking place. We get a really clear idea from these readings how much the signal is being compressed. That's quite a lot of stake on, isn't it? Feel free to bounce back through this lesson as many times as you need, but next we're going to get into how we actually use compression in the audio itself. I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Using Compression: Hey guys, welcome back. In this next lesson, we're going to take what we learned in the last lesson about compression and apply it to the recordings we've got in our song. In this example, I'm going to be using vocals. Now, if we listened to this vocal track, you'll see that there are certain words in certain parts that feel a little bit weak and under confident. That's not the fault of Harriet, the singer at all. She's an amazing singer, and it's totally natural that any singer is going to sing certain words louder, certain bits quieter. That's what we want. We want a genuine vocal performance. But we just want to be able to control that dynamic range so that it's not sounding too quiet or under confident. If we have a listen. Hopefully, you can hear there, the beginning of that, is quite strong. But then these later parts here, that missing the feeling, sounds quite under confident. Now, if we were to solo that it would sound fine. But when we've got so many other instruments and other sounds, it can easily just bury those louder parts, which is exactly why we use compression. I'm going to head over to the vocal, and I'm going to put a compressor on it. Here you can see all the dials that we were talking about in the last lesson. Now we haven't adjusted this at all. This is just the factory default setting. But you can see that the line there. It's digging into the signal and just pushing down those louder parts, that line that's being drawn is just digging into the signal. Now, even if you know what all these dials do, it can feel really overwhelming to look at this compressor and know what you're doing. Again, I just like to break it down into several steps to follow every time, and it always seems to work really well for me. First, we want to just ensure that we're not soloed. We're trying to mix the compressions so that it works with the track, not that it works on its own. Ideally, we want to be mixing with the track playing, but we can bounce back between the soloed just so we can hear exactly what's going on. Also, it makes it easier for me to explain. To start, I like to set the threshold at about three to one, so we know that there's a good amount of compression taking place. Next, I'm going to adjust the threshold until I notice some compression taking place. I'm going to bring the threshold right down to zero. I'm going to put it over to the meter, and I'm going to bring that threshold down until it starts compressing the signal. A more smooth and subtle compression normally sits between two and four decibels of reduction, whereas more heavy compression sits more towards minus six and minus 10. But I wouldn't worry about that too much. Every instrument is so different, and I just like to adjust the threshold until I see some compression taking place, and it sounds right to me. You can see that we're sort of floating around minus five, which I think it sounds quite nice. It doesn't sound too aggressive, it just sounds nice and subtle. You may not notice like a massive difference there. But if you listen really carefully, you can just feel that everything's a little bit more leveled out, rather than that dynamic range making certain bits quieter. We can make this really aggressive if you want to. If I turn the ratio right up, bring the threshold down a little. That's with heavy compression, and you can hopefully here there it kind of sounds processed and a bit flat and kind of boring. We want to be adjusting to avoid that. But some genres like heavy metal or compressing drums, sometimes people really like a harshly compressed signal. But with this vocal, I want to keep that natural element to it, so I'm going to bring it back down. Step three would be to bring that makeup gain back up to the level we had it beforehand. We just want to be adjusting that makeup gain, turn the compressor on and off, and bringing it back up to the level that we had it at before. To make this even easier, we can just look at the amount of gain reduction that is taking place on our graph, and we can adjust the makeup gain depending on that. If the meter is reading minus five gain reduction, we can bring the makeup gain to plus five gain, so that we're bringing it back up to the level it was at previously. Next, we can set the ratio so that things are sounding nice and consistent. If there's lots of dynamic range, you might want to go a bit higher with the ratio. If certain lines are really popping out at you, that's a sign that you need to up that ratio a bit, so you can bring it down. But I quite like to just close my eyes and just turn this dial up and down until I hit a sweet spot with it. Just for now, I'm going to take away those harmonies. Okay, so I'm quite happy with that ratio there. I've just dialed it down a little bit to make it a little bit more subtle. That's sounding pretty good to me. Next, we're going to set the attack. This is another one where I just like to close my eyes and feel this out. Again, like I said last lesson, the attack is how quickly the compressor is going to snap in. The slower we set this, the more that initial signal is going to come through. Yeah, slower attack times tend to be more pleasing. We're just going to see how slow it can go without it sounding too weird. Hopefully, you can hear that the faster attack time kind of sounds more snappy. The slower. I want it, everything you had now. See how the slower one just feels like a bit more natural. Again, it's really subtle. You have to really listen out for it. I want it, everything you had now I'm bored and I'm missing the feeling. Harriet didn't really have any big standout lines where she suddenly shouted. We don't have to set the attack speed too quick. If you're seeing a suddenly shouted a word, and if that attack turns too slow it won't be added to compress it properly but because Harriet vocals were quite smooth here we can set it quite slow and it's not causing too much of an issue. Saying the attack time too fast can very often suck the life out of a performance or it can make an instrument feel like it's further away, but with a slower attack time it's just going to be a bit more punchy, natural, and organic. But slow attack times aren't the best for really controlling very dynamic instruments like a drum kit or a really loud shouting vocalists that suddenly shouts out of nowhere. I want it, everything you had now I'm bored and I'm missing the feeling. [inaudible]. Next we're going to adjust the release. We learned this is at the letting go of the compressor. If the release is too fast, it's going to sound a bit choppy like it's going up and down really quickly, but if it's too slow it will just sound a bit too quiet and dull and I start to close my eyes and fill this out and you'll hear where things start to get a little bit weird. This is a very slow release time. I want it, everything you had now I'm bored and I'm missing the feeling. You can see from the graph there that is really slowly letting go of the compressor but if we make that release time much faster. I want it, everything you had now I'm bored and I'm missing the feeling. You can see how it sounds more choppy, doesn't it? We can just set this in a place that feels natural. I want it everything that you had now I'm bored and I'm missing the feeling. Shining green Forester Park Beetle from August to September. It's feeling right at about 30 to me. Now, I forgot to say that when adjusting the release, we are essentially looking for the compressor to let go between words or sounds. In this case the vocals, if you hit Harriet singing. I want it in everything in that little gap, we ideally want the compressor to stop working and start activating again when she starts singing them again. If you listen. I want it, everything you had. Hopefully you can see there, just about as soon as she stop singing, the compression let's go and the graph is reduced back to zero dB and that creates a nice natural sounds, the compression that is almost like breathing with the music. We want to be adjusting the release so that it's letting go of that compressor between lines or sounds, but at the end of the day, do whatever sounds right. It doesn't matter who cares. Lastly, the name. Now again, this is going to be very subtle. All we really need to know is that the lower this is, the more aggressive the compression is and vice versa. The higher the less aggressive. Again, let's just fill this out with our ears. I want it, everything you had now I'm bored and I'm missing. Let's again, do a before and afterwards so fast. Low knee. I want it, everything you had. I preferred a higher knee there. I want it, everything you had. Bring it back in with the rest of the track. I want it, everything you had now I'm bored and I'm missing the feeling. That is our vocals compressed. I'm going to do a couple of before and afterwards now and hopefully you better hear the difference. I want it, everything you had now I'm bored and I'm missing the feeling. It's just making those vocals more present and stand out that bit more. Some of those quieter lines that felt like they faded away and now much more present and you can hear them much more clearly. I know that's a lot to take on and so I really recommend just heading in yourself now and just really playing with all these dials and just listening out and feeling out what each one does. Now you don't need to add compression to every instrument. Again ask yourself, what needs to change about a sound? Have a listen to a guitar or a drum kit and think, are there notes that are fading away a little bit or they're certain bits that are standing out too much. If you want to control that dynamic range, that's when you use a compressor, but it's very often the case that instruments like guitars, bass, vocals, drums are all very dynamic, so being able to control those front facing instruments is often a very powerful good thing to do. Next up, we're going to talk about EQ. I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. EQ: Next we're going to talk about EQ. EQ stands for equalizer, and is essentially a way of adjusting the frequencies of any sound. If you've ever used a basic mixer or a guitar before you may have seen bass, middle, and treble before. We can use these dials to adjust the frequencies of a sound. Can bring up the high-end with the treble or bring down the base with the base and shape or sound. All an equalizer is, is essentially a far more accurate way of using those three dials. We can use loads of different tools to better shape the frequency that a sound is making. It can be used to enhance certain frequencies. Say if you want a bit more top-end sparkly sounds, we can up the top end equally if there's like a weird room noise or resonance, don't like, you can cut that out using EQ as well. We can also use this to make room for other instruments. Let's say like rhythm guitar has a bit too much bass in it, we can duck out some of the bass and make room for the kick and the bass guitar and shape out our instruments like that so they can be heard a bit clearer. They're not like fighting in the same frequency band as each other. I think of it like sculpting out a sound. Leonardo Da Vinci shaping out the statue of David. But in this scenario, it's a crappy snare sound instead of a piece of herp. There's several different frequency ranges that often talked about in EQ. We have the bass, the low mids, high mids, and treble. Each instrument in a mix is going to have its own frequency range. The better we can understand these, the better we can make informed decisions about what to do with an EQ. A really common technique in a busy mix is to focus the EQ around the instruments natural EQ pattern. That way those other frequencies aren't interfering with other instruments in the mix. For today's example, I'm going to be using an EQ on our rhythm guitar. This is what most EQ plugins will look like as we play on track. You see where the frequencies are forming. We've got a lot in the low mid area there. Now you can obviously use any EQ plugin that comes with your door. But if you're a beginner and you're trying to sort of work out what each frequency band sounds like and get a really clear idea on what we're doing here. I do really recommend getting something a little bit like this, which is the neuron for equalizer, just pay a little bit of money for it. But essentially what it allows you to do is what lots of different things. But I think the most handy thing is that it can show you a soloed frequency band. If we hit solo, you can see all of this white area here is the area that is soloed. You can really clearly hear what each frequency sounds like. You can hear once we get past that 60 hertz, 60 down there, it can only have very low rumble. We know that there's not much information back there that we really need. The more basic frequencies, I mean here that the main body is still sitting between 3,000 and 1,500. We picked out really where that sound is saying. Because some nice little overtone, the things here. But a lot of this is very just scratchy and we probably don't need much past this top end here. But essentially, that's what each frequency is sounding like. Whenever I'm making, are really just like to jump into this and just really fill out an instrument and how is that each frequency coming through. There's several different ways of like molding and shaping an EQ and we do that with several different filters. The first is a high-pass filter. A high-pass filter will look like this. High-pass is going to do exactly what it says. It's going to let all the higher frequencies through and it's going to cut away the lower ones. As you can see here, all these lower frequencies and it's going to be cutting away. This is really good for taking away unwanted room noise or Bulinus and we can also adjust the slope. That's like how dramatic the falloff is to the past, so it can make it really dramatic there and cause everything past 299 hertz. If we get quite dramatic with it, or we can level the slope down a little bit and make it sound a bit more natural. Again, we can solo it to really hear what area we're affecting. On the opposite end of the spectrum, literally, we have a low-pass filter, and this is going to be just at the high pass but in reverse. We can shelf off alone without the high harsh silly noises. We can always create a quite low-fi effects with these two. This is really good for just taking away really weird high-pitched noise or symbol bleed and room. Next we have bells. These look like this. They used to boost or reduce a very specific area. If we want to just really target down one frequency specifically, we can use a bell for that. What we can also do is adjust a queue. And that makes the node wider or narrower depending on how much of the frequency we want to effect. If we can narrow it down, if we just want to get a weird bass or just a really annoying frequency from the room or something, we can really finely targeted with a high Q. Or we can make it much wider. We want to just add a bit more top end to this guitar. We can make quite a wide Q and we could bring up this nice frequency on the guitar. Say I quite like that scratchy been guitar and wants and more than that in that. We can use a bell to focus around that frequency range. Lastly, we can use a shelf. A shelf is going to target a wider area than the bellies and it's going to flat-line a certain frequency range. It's easier to show you with the thing itself. If we go for a high or low shelf, just like the high and low pass filters and when we bring a shelf down, you can see it carves out a line of frequencies. Let's say we wanted to just take the base end of this down, but we don't want to get rid of it completely with a high-pass. We can use a shelf to just time that low end. The minute that there's corn on low-end, there has is it that intense. But we can just really time it by bringing that shelf down. Again, we can adjust the queue and change the shape and how it's affecting their frequency. So that's a brief introduction into EQ. In the next lesson, we're going to learn how we can use EQ to better shape our instruments and go through the process of what we should do when trying to EQ an instrument or a sound. I'll see you there. 12. Using EQ: Hey, guys, welcome back. In this next lesson, we're going to learn about how we can utilize what we've learned about EQ into our track and learn really what we should be doing and what we should be looking for, and when the EQ instrument. Yet to some more steps on how to make things sound good. Like we said earlier, all we're really doing with the EQ is boosting the frequencies we do like, cutting the ones that we don't like, and making room for other instruments in the mix. Before we actually start making moves with EQ, again, I will need to have a listen to the sound and think about what needs changing and start to make some mental notes about what you want to do to change it. If we're working on this guitar, let's just have a listen to it and work out what it is we want to change before we change anything. Just for context for working with this guitar, so a couple of things are jumping out to me there. The first, is that there's quite a lot bassy frequencies in that guitar, and the bass is doing a lot of the work in that very low-end area, so I can only tell that we don't really need a lot of that low end, and we can actually make the guitar stand out a bit more by cutting some of that away. I can also hear a tiny bit of hiss in the top end. None of that matters too much because you can barely really hear it, but it might just help to obtain that and take away some of the tiny little bit. It's almost like an electric noise, but it's so subtle. Also, I want to keep some of that low-end in, but it doesn't need to be nearly that loud. We can just time that low-end and bring it down. Also, there's a certain frequency, like a mid, higher. I want to get that ringing frequencies boosted a little bit because I think it sounds quite nice. That frequency. First, I'm going to use a high-pass filter just to get rid of a lot of those unneeded super low bassy noise. Again, we can hear there's quite a lot going on here. I don't want to cut that away too much. I'm going to maybe just move into this zone, slip it down a little bit more. All that really bassy stuff has been filled by the bass. We want to make a bit more room for the bass, so cutting that away makes sense. Unlike everything else, it's really important to always be turning an effect on and off, soloing it and unsoloing it so you're saying exactly what effect it's having within the context of a song. Essentially, you don't really want to be making moves if they're not making any difference, so you always want to be really aware of what you're doing, and you want to really touch EQ as little as you can really. Next, I want to just take down that low end a bit. I'm going to use a shelf to just reduce all of that low end. Also, what's good about this EQ here is the fact that you can just turn it on and off to easily hear what you're doing. Now again, if I was mixing this guitar on its own, a lot of those frequencies sound quite nice. We maybe wouldn't want to cut them all away. But because I know I've got a bass there and I've got several other instruments filling this low-end, I'm comfortable with taking that away. Next we said about removing that super high-end. Some of that just unneeded frequency doesn't really add anything to it, so we can use another pass, low pass and just slope that super high-end out. Now what a lot of people like to do in EQ is removing any unwanted buzzes or just nasty frequencies. A lot of people go by this rule of making a really narrow Q and going through a sound until you hear a nasty frequency. Then once you've found that nasty frequency, bring that now right down and cut out that nasty frequency. Now, that works fine if there's a certain noise you can hear that you want to get rid of when listening to it just plainly. But the problem with this is if you go through and listen out for a frequency you don't like, when you're boosting the frequencies that much, every frequencies can sound nasty. Then if you cut that away, you're doing more damage in the process rather than actually making any improvements. You really want to be listening and figuring out what you want to change before you start moving these Q's around. But let's say we had some weird crackle or something like that. We can use this to pin down where that weird sound may be, and then we can pin that down and remove that frequency from the sound. But it's worth saying if you are going to be using this cutting technique, it's always wise to use quite a narrow Q because we don't want to be cutting away too many of the nice frequencies that make up this sound, so we really want to be just narrowing down the exact frequency we want with a very narrow Q. However, on the flip side of this, if we want to give any areas a boost, say, for example, I wanted to try down that nice frequency in the guitar, that almost clunky, scratchy sound. But when using this, we want to make the Q quiet low. We don't want it to be too radical because it will sound a bit unnatural, so you want the Q to be quiet wide. The old saying is cut narrow and boost wide. That's exactly what we're going to do here. It' s just making that rapidly scratching stand out a bit more. A lot of people like to go by the rule to cut over boosting whenever you can, which I do agree with to a degree. I think you want to be mainly focusing around cutting away nasty frequencies and shaping the sound to work with the other instruments. However, if you want to add a bit of top end or you want to just emphasize a certain frequency, rather than having to record a guitar again and adjust the AMP, just making those little differences to the EQ can just boost it up in a nice place. Listening to the reference track. It's actually a bit more present in the mid than mine. Again, let's go back and maybe adjust that a little bit. This is the thing, it's fine to experiment and adjust as you go. You can adjust these things as much as you want. Listen to it now, maybe I want a bit more frequency there. It's also worth saying that people don't tend to go too crazy with boosts as well. Once we get up to plus 10 gain and up to that level, things are going to start sound a bit weird. Often people like to boost quite conservatively and just make small adjustments to the sound. So to give you a before and after. Now, I know that might seem subtle, especially when we listened to everything else. But like I was saying earlier, is all about one percent at a time. Once we adjust everything else, there'll be a much more noticeable difference. Again, it's like carving away at the song, and the more instruments we can carve away with a bit of EQ, the clearer each one will become. For example, we want to make a bit of room for this guitar because it's quite hard to hear, so we can cut some frequencies away from that organ sound and the bass sound. Then suddenly this guitar is going to be a good bit clearer. Continue to make small little adjustments in the EQ to every instrument. You might have to come back to certain instruments off to the EQ to some others as the frequencies are always changing as you're EQing. I will see you in the next lesson. Thanks, guys. 13. Panning: Hey guys, welcome back. In this next lesson, we're going to talk about panning. Panning is super straightforward. All it is, is moving our instruments either left or right to create a wider sound stage for our mix. If you go and see a band play live, the members of the band will be spread out across the stage left to right. They wouldn't all be standing in front of each other because that'd be really weird, wouldn't it? It also would sound quite weird, wouldn't it? All those sounds just coming at you from one narrow direction, it doesn't sound nice. It's like trying to listen to a mix through a tube. What we can do with panning is scatter our instruments all around the audio field to create a much more like spread out and balanced sound to our mix and gives a lot of depth and 3D effect to our mix. It also makes things easier to hear because rather than things are overlapping in the same space, we can move some bits over here, some bits over there, and place each instrument around the listener rather than all in the front. Now we can use panning however we like. It can be quite a creative process going through and finding what space works nicely with each instrument. But there's a couple of sensible ground rules to follow. The first is to keep any real core instruments or heavy bass instruments in the middle. Like drums and bass, if they're off to one side, because they're such a dominant sound, it can feel like you're lopsided in some ways. This goes the same for vocals as well at the lead vocal line. You don't really want it panned off to the left. You want that to be out front and center. Those are the instruments you want to really keep in the middle. But a lot of the others we can really play with the panning of them. Another good rule of thumb is to always keep this balance in mind when it comes to panning. If you imagine like a scale, we don't want to overweight one side because again, it's going to sound a little bit lopsided, so just try and make sure that there's an even balance of instruments on either the left or the right. On Logic, it's really easy to find the panning, it's just this dial here so we can go to the right or the left and as you see, we've got 64 different places we can take it. A ton of space to work with. For this lead guitar, I'm going to take that off to the right. Already you can hear that a good bit clearer now, it was struggling in the mix before, but it's a lot clearer. I'm with these vocal stacks. I'm just going to get really experimental and pan them like all over the place. It's going to sound like this cool quiet surrounding us. I just panned most of the instruments in this section all around the place. I think that sounds pretty good as it is. Sounding cool. Now, some of you may have noticed that down here, I have three lead vocals. That sounds a little bit weird, doesn't it? Why have I done them? Something else we can do with panning that's really cool, is called double tracking. This is essentially the act of recording two of the same recordings and panning one hard left and one hard right. This is often done with acoustic guitar, rhythm guitar as well. It gives it a much wider sound stage and it really fills the stereo field rather than just one track coming at you in the center. By having two things coming through, each speaker just sounds huge and wide. Now that's great with guitar and to be honest, any instrument you want to really widen up, works great with as well. Now with vocals, it's a more common technique to pan one hard left and one hard right and keep one centered as well. Essentially three tracks all have been recorded slightly differently. Ideally, the strongest one wants to be in the center and then we're going to pan them over to left and right. You can go crazy with this as well. Lots of people like Billie Eilish layer up tons and tons of different double tracks and pan them all over the place, and it makes this huge fat vocal sound. For me, I'm going to keep one vocal centered, one hard left and one hard right. Now it sounds like this. Compared to this. Now if we listen to that in the context of a mix. Now let's hear it without the double-tracked. You see how it sounds much more lonely with just the one. Now, again, you very much use this as you want. In the first verse, I wanted it to sound a bit more lonely, so I just had the one vocal for that section low. But then within the double-tracked version, with all the instruments, just made the vocal stand out and give them a bit more confidence, so that is panning. Just the way of like shifting run those instruments in different spaces in our headphones or our speakers and making a nice wide sound stage. Thanks guys. I'll see you in the next lesson. 14. Reverb: Hey guys, welcome back. So in this next lesson, we're going to be talking about reverb. So if you've been a musician for any length of time, you probably know exactly what reverb is already, is one of the most used effects ever. But if you don't know what reverb is, it is essentially like the sound of a room. For example, if you play in a big Cathedral, the sound of your voice, your guitar will echo and bounce around the room in a very different way as to if you were playing your guitar in a small room. So what we do is use digital reverb effect to try and recreate that feeling of an instrument being in a room and it gives a performance, a ton of life, and makes it feel like real and it's being played in a natural space. But it can also create the illusion that the instrument is further away from the listener. So this means we can actually push things back in the mix by using reverb rather than adjusting the volume. It makes more of an atmospheric impact. So if you remember from our past lesson, rather than putting a reverb on every single track, I'm going to create a new bus. I'm going to make it our lead reverb tone. Why do I call it lead reverb? So like I was saying a second ago, we can either use reverb to add character or to push instruments back in the mix. So what I like to do personally is create one bus for like a lead reverb. So we're going to pull up our lead instruments through that nice reverb. But then any ones that we want to use for like ambient effects and push back in the mix. I'm actually going to make a slightly different reverb for that one. I'm going to create a new bus for that to go on. So every reverb plugin is going to look a little bit different. I'm just using the stock reverb plugin from Logic. It looks a bit scary with all these different dials, but it's actually much more straightforward than how it seems. But let's go through each of these dials so we know exactly what we're working with. So first of all, we can often change the room sounds. Like I was saying about a minute ago, we can choose from any of these different spaces to create a cool sound. So let's have a little play around. I call out the sound of this chamber reverb. I'm going to stick with that for now. Now, if we come down here, you'll see that there's a dry and wet slider. So all this is, is it lets you adjust the amount of dry and wet signal that is coming out of this reverb. The dry is just the recording without any effects on it, and wet is the effected signal. So the one we've reverb on it. You see as we take the way up, it just becomes more effected. We can balance in how much of the reverb is affecting the signal with this. Now because we're using this as my lead vocal. I want to have a lot of dry signal going in, and I wanted to have reverb. But again, I don't want to be too wet because that's going to push it too far back in the mix. But in my ambient reverb, I'm going to make this a much wetter channel. Next is the decay time. So this is essentially just how long the reverb lasts for and it's measured in seconds. So it's really easy to understand. If we turn the decay up. You see how long that reverb trail is. Whereas with we tighten that down it fades out way quicker. So again, for a lead instrument, I'd have this shorter, and for the more ambiance that I fired up a good bit, and aside from that, it's really just a taste thing. Again always be soloing and telling these things on and off seeing what difference you making. That's sounding pretty good. We can also click on this button and we can add how many bars we want the vocal to last for. So we can get a bit more mathematical with it if we want to. I think the next most important thing is the pre-delay. So the pre-delay is essentially how long it takes for the reverb to kick in. In this example, when Harriet starts singing, the reverb doesn't kick in straight away as a couple of milliseconds before the reverb starts, and that's where the pre-delay is. So the more we up this the longer the pre-delay is, it's really going to exaggerate the reverb and make it more noticeable. Again, we can up it for the more ambient reverb, but if you want to keep it a bit more like tighter to the regular vocal, I'd recommend going under 15 milliseconds. Most reverbs will also come with EQ parameter. This thing here, and this essentially just allows you to shape the EQ of the reverb. We can do this for both the ingoing signal and the outgoing signal. On main, we adjust the EQ signal coming in. On details, we adjust the EQ signal coming out. Don't worry about this too much if you're a beginner. All it allows us to do is take what we learned about the EQ stuff in our last lesson and apply it to the reverb and how the reverb is working. We can use a high-pass filter to reduce any of those muddy sounds or we can use a low-pass filter and make them more dark reverb or we can do both and get a really concentrated mid-sounding reverb. Then we can also go into the details and do the same thing with the reverb that's coming out. But I'm not going to muck around with that too much today. I feel like this is so much to take on board as it is. So we're just going to focus on these dials for the rest of the lesson. These are the dials you see here and here. Your reverb may not have these, but in case they do, I'll go through them very quickly. The first is the attack. Now the faster the attack is, the quicker the reverb reflections are going to build up. But if we have it slower, they're going to fade more in overtime. So pretty subtle there. It's going to be more apparent on the ambient solo reverbs. The size is pretty self-explanatory, just really affecting how big the room sounds. It's pretty subtle, particularly in this chamber one because it's quite a small room we're replicating. The density controls the amount of reflections, this bouncing around. So if you imagine a sound being made and it bouncing around the walls is essentially like, how many times it's reflecting. Again, all these things are very subtle and the distance is the perceived distance between you and the instrument that's being played. So again, for that ambient one, if you want to push something back in the mix, we can make that distance further away, but with a lead instrument like this, we want to echo a bit closer. As always begin to listen to this alongside the regular track and mix it in to which sounds best. Cool. What's great? If I want to adjust how intense that reverb is in the vocals, I can just use this little bus style here. What if I want to make it more? Now what I can do is use all of that knowledge to create another reverb bus, which I can make the ambient reverb. I can create a channel where the reverbs really exaggerated and it's going to push things back in the mix slightly. But it's still going to add a lot of character to them. Which sounds really nice with backing vocals or any ambient-style instruments. Now because I've got them on my buses, I can just go through each of these instruments and choose which bus to send them to. So like for example let's go for this kick. Let's add the bus and we want to make this more of a lead reverb tone because it's going to be very present. I just adjust the style. So that is our lesson on reverb. I'll see you in the next lesson. 15. Delay: Hey friends, welcome back. In this next lesson, we're going to talk about delay. Delay often gets confused with reverb and it's for good reason because they're both quite similar, but they're actually a bit different. Reverb emulates sound waves reflecting off of services to create a three-dimensional space, whereas delay creates a copy of the sound as being made and plays it back, but at certain intervals to create an echo effect, like you're speaking down a big cave or something, and then you're getting those reflections come back at you. That's what delay does. I think of it just like an extension to reverb really, we're just adding more space and dimension to a sound. What's really nice about delay is it's really straightforward. Again, to make this really easy for ourselves, I'm going to bust a delay out. Yeah, just lives much easier for me. There's delay. Now on logic, there's a couple of different delays. Now, I'm not going to go too in depth with delay. I'm only going to be using a bit of it on this track. There's this basic echo plugin, which is super easy to use, but still gives us a good bit of control over the kind of delay that's going on. I'm going to put this on the vocals and I'm going to turn the reverb on the vocals off so you can just really you can really clearly hear what the delays doing here. As you can hear, it's just like bouncing those sound waves back at us in academic fishing fashion. With these dials, we can just control how that works. The dry and the wet mix, as we've already explained, is just the effected levels. The note dial here is just determining the amount of repeats that are echoing and on what intervals they are happening at. We can get quite like crazy with this. We can make the echoes triplets or dotted. Just having a one-fourth timing there, or we can go right the other end and go like one-sixteenth. It's a much more rapid. Or we can go for like a triplet. We're just choosing what sounds interesting really. It's quite nice too often line up with the timing of your song. You don't really know much about rhythms to know how this works, just turn your match on. That one eighth is in time with our song there, but if we changed it to a triplet, you'll see that it's because we're not writing in triplets is a bit more out of line with it. That's in time, but it's creating a different kind of effect there. It's much more exaggerated like that. I quite liked the sound of the one eighth. Sounded pretty good to me. I'm just going to turn the wet signal down a little bit. This is just the length of the delay. There's loads and loads and loads of echoes coming back to us there. But if we turn this right down, it's much shorter. We're just controlling the amount of delay, and lastly, the color is going to affect like what frequency range the delays are taking up. Usually with delays, you'll get a high and low cut to determine where those delays are sitting, but this color dial just makes it even easier for us. We can just choose what area on the frequency spectrum we want to focus. Lower or higher. Let's exaggerate it and go for the top end first. Those delays are happening more in the top end, but equally, if we can bring that down. Those delays are now sitting out in a more lower frequency. Again, let's just play a song and balance this in until it sounds good. Adding just a subtle delay there, I don't want it to be too apparent, it just fills a nice bit of space between the lines and just adds that room effects that we're creating with the reverb. It's as simple as that, and that's pretty much it. We can work this on any instrument that we just want a bit of extra life out of, have an experiment and see what you like the sound of, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 16. Automation: Next, we're going to talk about automation. Automation in music is the process of altering certain effects or volumes at certain times in a track. What do I mean by that? Let's say that you volume-balanced your track and everything sounding nice and balanced in the chorus, but you guys play the verse and suddenly that guitar is way too loud. What we do is automate the volume, so it's a little bit quieter in the verse and then picks back up towards the chorus so we can much better balance the volumes over the entire track, but we can use automation for any effects. Let's say that in the bridge we want to just drench the vocals in reverb. We can automate it so the reverb comes way up and give us a ton of nice reverb in a bridge, or let's say you want to really pick up the distortion in a guitar solo. Again, we can just automate the distortion to pick up during that section. Now, it's worth saying that this part of the mix is very crucial. You'll want to spend a lot of time automating the volumes so everything's really nicely balanced. It's worth saying before you go into automation, really spend a lot of time on the volume balancing and make sure that you're really happy with it because it's much easier to change the volumes and bits now. Give yourself a break for 24 hour, come back with fresh ears, have another volume balance, give yourself another break, and then come back and start to automate those volumes in, but don't worry too much. We can always adjust the volume after an automation, it just becomes a little bit more finicky. It's access automation on logic, we can just select the track that we want to add automation to and hit A. Now we can zoom in and you might see this faint gray line there. That is our automation line. Now, if we look back towards the track, we'll see that the different bars appeared. This is an automation parameter. We can click on it and change what effect is being used on the automation. We can adjust the compression or the EQ, but we're going to stick with volume for the minute. If I play the track from the first section, the bit that we haven't been mixing the song to so far, those vocals are just a little bit loud with that guitar. I also want to make the whole section a bit quieter before all of the instruments come in because if we have a volume boost, when all those stuff comes in, it's going to create a good bit of excitement. I want the first verse section to be a good bit quieter. All I have to do is click on the bar, click again and it's going to create this node. We can move this node up and down. That's what's going to change the volume. I've just taken it down by minus 2.5 dB in the verse and then I'm just going to click another node and another one here, and I'm just going to bring it back up to where it was at plus 1.7. We can go over to this dial and bring up and down front to get really accurate. Bring it back up to 1.7 and it's quite visually clear there. We're just bringing it down for this section and then the volume is just creeping up there. When the vocal is coming back for that chorusy section, they have been boosted. I'm also going to do this with the Manne guitar as well. I want it to be brought down and then I want to slowly pan it up into the chorus. Now, it's worth saying for something like this, where there's a constant sound, we haven't got a break where the volume swell is going to be very noticeable, we want to make the curve quite subtle because you don't want to suddenly shoot up because it's going to sound a bit weird like that. If I find where the chorus comes in, so that's where we want our next node to be. We want it to reach that volume as we go into the chorus. I want to make a really gentle slope there and I'm going to just bring this guitar down a bit. You can see it's just really nicely gently risen up there and it's almost create a little bit of bars as well you can just about notice that the volume is increasing and something's about to happen. Like I said, it's really vital that if you're mixing an entire song, go through and automate as much as you can and make it sound balanced over every single section. Spend a ton of time here and get really particular with how those volumes are all balanced, but what we can also do is get a bit more creative with automation as well. For example, this scratchy guitar I've got in here sounds fine, but I think it'd be really cool if that sound is being panned around as it's played. I think it just adds that 3D space and I think I just sound cool. If we go to volume, we can select panning instead. Let's just go absolute. Then I'm going to start it all the way left and I'm going to automate it round to the right. Just like before, we're going to choose a node. I'm going to pan it this way, and then by the end, I want it to end up on the other side. It's actually starting on the right and go into the left side. More starts over here, so I'm just going to bring it around a bit. Hopefully, you'll hear there that guitar has been moved around our head. What does that sound like altogether now? Really cool. Spend a lot of time here, get creative with it, and see what cool effects you can make with this and your mix will be absolutely ace. I guarantee it. Our mix is very nearly there. We're going to talk about some cool effects in the next lesson, so I'll see you there. 17. Distortion, Exciter and Chorus: Hey, friends. Welcome back. In this next lesson, we're going to talk about some really cool effects that we can add to our track to just add a bit of interest. It's worth saying that you can stop here if you'd like to, we've gone through the bulk of the mix. But, there's just three effects in particular that adds a real nice bit of life to our mix and they're super easy to use, so I'm just going to go through them quickly now. The first is distortion. A super popular effect, you've probably heard about it already. It adds character, warmth and grit to a track. It's used a lot in guitars, spaces, drum kits, ads, a bit more aggression and a bit more punch to a track. But distortion can muddy up a mix if we use it excessively, so we need to be careful with the amount of distortion we put on something. For me, I want to add a bit of distortion to this lead guitar. I've added a distortion plugin, really simple to use, we're just adjusting the pre-game, the drive and a tone. There is no right or wrong way to use this, just play around with these dials until you get a tone you like. Again, we want to be like soloing it, turning on and off, listen to with the track and without. Every social is going to be a little bit different, but it adds a bit of that grit to it. This is before and after. I drive it a little bit more. I turn the volume down a bit, so very subtle there, but just added a bit of interest. Next is an exciter. An exciter is essentially going to add some more harmonic sounds to attract. It will make things sound brighter, and more lively and sparkly. It's essentially boosting a lot of the high frequencies, it can add a lot of clarity to attract. To save something that's being buried in the mix, adding an exciter can make it stand out a bit more. It's very often used on things like vocals, that can also add a lot of energy to drums as well, particularly with the symbols and stuff like that. That's exactly what I'm going to do. I'm going to add an exciter on to our rise. Again, this is another one that's really simple. With this, we're just adjusting what frequency range we want the exciter to work within, and we're adjusting this harmonics so you'll hear how that sounds. The harmonics is the intensity of the exciter, and this slider here is going to allow us to focus on what frequency we want to exaggerate. Before, after, that's a heavy exciter, I'm going to play with the track and mix it in. It's making that ride sparkle and it helps it stand out in the mix, and adds a lovely bit of top end to the general sound of the mix. An exciter can add a bit of harshness and too much brightness to mix. Again, just keep that in mind, you don't want to overuse it, you want to balance it in so it's sounding nice. We don't use it on too many things because then there'll be loads of harshness to the mix. Last is chorus. Again, you may have heard of chorus, it's essentially a cool audio effect that adds a good bit of thickness and depth to a sound, but it is very characteristic and it's going to add a very different dynamic to an instrument, and it sounds a little bit like this. Before, very famous effect used on a lot of Nevada tracks if you noticed. Again, there's not really any right or wrong with this. We can just adjust these three daus until it sounds about right. The right is going to be how quickly those frequencies without wobbling. The intensity, self-explanatory, and the mix also self-explanatory. Using the chorus, we're widening the stereo image so that guitar is taking up a bit more room in the mix. It's also adding a spiral effects, which is making cool, interesting layer to the sound. It's very often used with vocals as well as a good bit of thickness and can enhance vocals. But for today, I'm just going to leave it on that elite guitar, I think that sounds cool. But again, it's important not to overdo it as too much chorus on too many things can create a lot of mud in the mix. This is your chance to really have a lot of the fun of these effects onto different instruments, and seeing what creative sounds you can come up with. We are so nearly finished now. There's a couple of things I want to go through in our final checks listen to make sure that this mix can be as good as it can be, so I'll see you in the next lesson. 18. Final Checks: Our mix should be sounding pretty good now. We spent a long time going through and adjusting all those different elements to make everything sound as good as it can be, and we've put our own artistic flare onto the mix as well. Now is the time to really narrow down. If there's anything we're not happy with or anything we want changed, now's the time we can go back in and just make those little tweaks to really polish it off. When I'm at this stage, I give myself at least 12 hours, if not 24, to just have a break, let your ears just readjust to the normal world rather than just hearing the same song over and over again. When you come back to the mix a day or two later, you'll just pick out things that maybe don't quite sit right or maybe you didn't notice before when you come back to mixing the track. I would listen to the song from start to finish and make notes on everything that comes up. Rather than trying to adjust it as you hear it, just make lots of notes, and then after you've listened to the song once or twice, that's the time to go back in and work through that list you've made. Don't forget your reference track, always be comparing it to those couple of reference tracks you've laid out. They're really going to be your North star because they've been mixed and engineered by most likely very professional people. So always bouncing back and forth between that reference track and your own is going to make it much clearer, maybe what needs to change or where you want each instrument or sound to be sitting. You'll also want to keep in mind that if you've been tweaking an exciter or some distortion or any other effects, that very well might change how you EQ a certain instrument. For example, if you've added a bit of distortion to something, and now it maybe sounds a little bit too harsh, you can just go straight back into that EQ and maybe take a bit of that top end out. Or if you've added compression to something, that might make it sound a bit quieter. So you might need to go back and tweak the volume. It's also really important to listen to your mix in as many different environments as you can through different speakers in different rooms, different headphones. Listen to the mix in your car, find the cheapest, worst speaker you can find. As you may be mixing really well to your specific headphones or speakers, but you have to keep in mind that everyone's sound system is going to be different. So you really want to be making a mix that works best over lots of different rooms and speakers and stuff like that. It's very often the case that mix engineers will have a crappy speaker on their desk, which they'll run the track through and they'll make mix decisions on this really bad speaker because that's often what people listen to music through. It's also a great idea to ask other people's opinion. If you've got any friends or family that know a bit about music, see what they think about it, what sticks out to them as maybe not quite sounding right. Someone else aside from you that is going to have a completely fresh ear to a track is going to hear things really clearly. If you don't have any musical friends that can give you that critical analysis, please feel free to send it into that class project. Like I said earlier, I listen and respond to every single one. If you want any help or advice or you just want me to go check out your band or whatever, please feel free to post it in that description, I genuinely love hearing what people come up with. If you've got your mix sounding really good and you're really happy with it, the next point on from here is often mastering. Mastering is the art of mixing the track as a whole. Rather than volume balancing each individual instruments or adding compression to each individual instrument, mastering is affecting the track as a whole. We often export the mix as is, and then bring it into a separate project so we're not tinkering with any of the levels. Now, I think mastering really deserves its own class. So we're not going to be talking about it today, but if you're at a stage where you want to get that music released, you can download programs like Ozone 9. This is a program I use all the time and essentially uses AI to mask your track. It's super easy. Alternatively, you can send your track out to highly professional companies like LANDR, and they will master your track with some of the best engineers and the best equipment in the world often for a quite low price. That will really add the cherry on top to your song, sounding complete and ready for streaming. We're pretty much done. I'm going to say a final couple of words in the next lesson, so I'll see you there. 19. Final Lesson : Hey friends, welcome back so you made it. You're here at the end of the class and thank you so much for sticking with me throughout this whole entire course and I really hope that it was useful for you and you took a lot of good information away from this. Hopefully you feel a bit more confident now about going into a mix and essentially shaping the song, how you like it. Now it goes without that saying, but there is so much more to learn about mixing. It's a little bit like a dark art. There are so many different techniques, ways of doing things, different plugins and effects to muck around with and play with. It's one of those subjects that you'll just forever be learning about and everyone does things so differently as well but it's basically impossible to really get into that realm without first really knowing the basics prophylactically and down like your knowledge about EQ and compression and all the things we've talked about in this class. I really hope this class has lays a really strong foundation for you. But it's worth saying the topics we've covered in this class alone are enough to get truly professional sounds out of a mix. There's just so many different things to learn and know about mixing. If you implement anything you've learned in this class into your own tracks, please consider sending it into that class project. I would honestly love to hear what you get up to. Honestly, one of my favorite things about making classes is the interaction with people sending in their staff legitimately always makes my day when I see one pop up. If you want to share what you're working on or you want a bit of feedback and critique about a project, please feel free to send it in stack class project I will generally love to hear what you've been up to. Also if you've got any questions, please feel free to reach out. I respond to every single question sent in as best as I can. You can either send them into the discussions as part of the course page or feel free to email me or send me a DM on Instagram. I know they can feel like a bit of a disconnect with like online teachers and courses and things like that but genuinely, I'm here checking my discussions and my emails like every single day. Please feel free to get in touch and reach out if you'd like to. I'd just love to help if I can. Lastly, if you enjoyed this class at all or you got some good information out of it a positive review is honestly so massively appreciated. They have such a massive impact for people like me making these classes. It really helps out more than you know. If you get the time, I would honestly appreciate it so much. I know you're really busy, got lots to do but if you get two minutes to just take a positive box and just say, thanks Mike, You have no idea how much that helps me out and thank you in advance if you get the chance to do that. That about wraps things up. Thank you so much for sticking around. If you want to keep in touch, feel free to add me on Instagram or you can check out my YouTube channel if you'd like and I'll catch you really soon. Thanks again. Have a great day. Bye.