Music Production: Best Practices

1. Introduction: Hey, and welcome to my first course on music production. We're going to be going into music production Best Practices to get you started to make sure that you have a solid foundation as a music producer. My big hope within this course is to give you a solid foundation as a music producer and to understand principles that aren't going anywhere. In other words, as DAs change, as technology evolves, there are certain fundamental principles that are not going to change, and I want to make sure that you have those as a solid foundation, and you don't have to explore and learn each of these through trial and error like I did. There are certain processes within my workflow as a producer that took me years to implement. Let's flash forward so that you can take those same concepts and apply them on day one. Now, music production is not a perfect beast. There's always going to be room to make some mistakes, but I don't want you making the mistakes that could have been circumvented right from the start. That's why these concepts within this course are simple but incredibly effective. We're going to talk about speaker and room treatment. We're going to be talking about how much headroom you should leave in a mix. We're going to break down the EQ bands based on numbers like ones, 100 Hertz 1,000 hertz, 10,000 hertz or threes, 30 hertz, 300 hertz, 3,000 hertz. Let's start to break things down in a way that you can compartmentalize each concept, so it's not foreign to you and it makes a whole lot of sense. I'm going to help you find some ways to make your mixes punchier and louder so that they're a little bit more competitive without diving too deep down this wormhole of the loudness wars, which quite honestly has come to an end. So my hope is that this course remains quite timeless. It becomes a great resource that you can continually fall back upon, and it reminds you of what the most core fundamental concepts of music production are in terms of avoiding big pitfall mistakes that many of us make as beginner producers. So I hope that this course resonates well with you, and I'm sure that there's plenty of material within here that will help you improve as a modern producer. I'll catch you in the first class. 2. Class Project: This class project is going to be a little bit different. I'm really going to hold you accountable to this idea of creating a production notebook. Once you've bought the notebook and put in your favorite tips and tricks from this course within the notebook, as well as any extra notes and details you want to add yourself, I want you to open up the notebook to that page or page is, take a picture and submit that picture as your class project submission. You can either make that picture, the class project image or share a link with me through something like Google Drive so that I can access the picture and really take a look at what you've appreciated the most in this course and what you feel is most valuable to you. But like I said, this is about accountability. You taking a picture of the notebook means you've bought it. You taking a picture of the pages where you've put down your favorite tips and tricks, means that you've actually applied what I've recommended within this course. It might seem a little simple. It might seem a little hokey, but ultimately, it works. The idea here is that in music production, there are a ton of tips and tricks all over the Internet through different sources, but some of it's good, some of it's bad. Some of it is going to apply to your style, and some of it is going to contradict the aesthetics of that style. If you watch a video on how to mix bass, and it was a Dub step producer teaching you how to do this, are you going to want to apply that within hip hop or pop or rock? From stylistic preference to the preference of each engineer and how they teach things. It's really important that you can sift through things properly and document the details that you find are most effective. And that's where this notebook comes in handy. It's really a filter through all the stuff that you're going to find on the Internet and being able to sum it down to the most key points. Now, if you want to take a digital approach and create a Google Doc and share that link with me, that's fine, as well, too. There's something about the pen and paper that for me has a bit more impact. But ultimately, if you're more comfortable doing the digital version of this, that's fine, as well, too. This project is really just about getting these notes rolling for you so that you have some sort of foundation for how you continue your own education in music production. I hope you have fun with this project. I'll catch you in the next class. 3. Room Treatment and Speakers: Alright, let's get talking about room treatment and speakers. We're going to start with speakers because I actually went big or went home, so to speak. When I first started looking for speakers, I bought the Yamaha HS 80s. They're now called Yamaha HS eights. And, quite frankly, they were too big for my initial room that I was mixing in. They're probably verging too big for the room that I'm in right now. That being said, I've learned the speakers over time. You kind of develop a connection with your speakers, where you kind of understand how they sound within the room that you're in. But you want to make sure that you're leveling the playing field as much as possible by purchasing the correct speakers for your room right off the bat and treating your room to the best of your ability. So let's dive in. For most home studios, I would probably recommend having four to five inch cones for your speakers. You know how often when you see studio speakers, there's one lower sort of bigger circle and an upper smaller circle. That's your cone and your tweeter. The tweeter is going to supply the high frequencies, and then the cone is going to supply the mid down to low and base frequencies. In most living rooms and bedrooms, you don't need a really large cone. What I like about my current setup is over time, I've bought a second pair of speakers that are very different. I have a set of Genelec speakers which have three inch cones and a set of Yamaha speakers which have eight inch cones. And those Yamaha speakers are connected into a subwoofer so that I can hear sub frequencies and very low base frequencies. The end of the day, I want to make sure that I'm creating a course that is budget conscious. So cut the difference. You don't need a small speaker and a big speaker like I have. Feel free to go with something that's more medium size. Again, I'd probably recommend that you start with four to five inch cones, but try to start with a relatively reputable brand of speakers, something like Genelec, focal, Yamaha, or Atom speakers. Now, even there, there's quite a range. Yamaha speakers are not going to be as expensive as focal speakers. But over time, you can always upgrade. And the cool thing about speakers is if you buy them used, when you eventually sell you'll be selling them for about the same price because you're selling them used anyways. So buying used speakers, make sure you test them out properly, but if you do this, when you go to resell and upgrade down the line, it's almost like you're just borrowing the speakers for free. Now, you do want to be situated at the tip of an equilateral triangle between your speakers. Preferably, with the center of the Tweeter and the cone pointed directly at your eardrum. So what I'm saying is the distance between your two speakers, you should be placed equidistant to each of those speakers respectfully. So if there's five feet between your speakers, you should be placed five feet away from each speaker individually, five feet from this one and five feet from this one. The speakers should be placed at 45 degree angles. And again, the Tweeter and the cones right in between that spot, that should be facing your ears so that you're getting the convergence of those two speakers properly. So again, make sure that you buy the right size speaker for your room. Speakers, as far as they are separated from each other, you should be separated equally from each individual speaker, creating an equilateral triangle. The speakers should be angled 45 degrees inward. That is standard for an equilateral triangle. And the space between the Tweeter and the cones, you want to make sure that that is pointing directly at your ears. Also, generally for larger speakers, you want to make sure that there's a good amount of space between the speaker and a back wall. Now, I didn't want to lead with that because I'm well aware that most people aren't going to be able to pull their significantly far into their bedroom or living room or wherever they might be producing as a home producer. But if you're working with a proper studio room and you have the space, try to pull out away from the wall a bit, preferably about four or five feet, especially for larger speakers so that those speakers have some room to breathe. Now, even once you've done that, you need to make sure that you're treating the room properly. And I want to lead with saying I'm not an acoustician. I'm not someone that gets paid $1,000 to go into a room and properly calibrate all the exact ways that sound treatment needs to be done to perfectly optimize that room. From the best of my understanding, to really do this well, you need to create a room within a room. And from there, you need to set all these sort of sound absorbers and base traps within the room to optimize the sound. From my understanding, the main reason you're creating a room inside of a room is to make sure that that sound isn't getting lost outside of the studio. Think of it this way. Let's say you live in an apartment and the walls are very thin. The sound that someone else is hearing, whether it be upstairs or a side neighbor or wherever it might be, that energy is translating to a different environment. So by creating a room inside of a room, you're capturing all the sound properly, and then from there, you treat that room to make sure that the reflections aren't playing tricks on you. So what am I talking about about these reflections? Well, when sound travels around the room, it bounces, and the more it bounces, the more it's going to collide with itself. Sometimes when it collides with itself, it's like in the ocean when two waves are peaking at the same time, you create this sort of super peak. But at the same time, if the phase is opposite, one is going up at the same time another is going down, they can cancel each other out. And we call this phase cancellation. But in general, whether you're peaking or whether you're canceling out, you want to make sure that you're not running into phase issues. Now, for most of us regular humans that don't have an acoustician come in and properly lay out how your room should be treated and then spend thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars to properly treat that room, there are some quick hacks. I do want to mention that you can buy the best speakers in the world, and if you're in a bad room, it will not make a difference. Your room will doom your speakers. So try to do your best to make sure that your room is in good shape and try to make sure that you're following some of these tips ahead. Now, something I should mention is that square rooms are fairly good as mixing rooms. Ideally, you want a bit of a long throw rectangle so that you're seated here within the rectangle. The speakers are here, and everything in the studio is laid out this way. Do not want a rectangle where you're kind of stuck on the short side. Almost like if you were to take a front porch and turn that into a small studio, and you're sitting staring out towards the front of the house, right? So you would have very little room this way, lots of room on the side. That would be a less than ideal setup. Also, rooms that are circular don't even get me started. The math gets really tough. There's more reflections. So, ideally, you want to be in a rectangular room where you are seated towards the length of that room, and then second to that, a square room will also do quite well. So not only does the shape of your room matter, but also the surfaces matter. What if I have a brick wall on one side and dry wall on the other? Well, sound is going to reflect off of those surfaces differently. So that's where things get really tough. But what I would say is make sure that ideally the room that you're producing in has four walls that are equally the same material. Now, there's going to be two main reflection points from your speakers. And what's going to happen is while we have a direct sound from our speakers coming to our ears, there's going to be other sound that bounces off side walls and then comes to our ears slightly later. This can create something called comb filtering, which basically muddies up the sound a little bit and makes it sound less clear and distinct. So to deal with those, there's a simple trick. So what you can do is have a friend take a mirror and start off by holding that mirror speaker height, which ideally is about the same height as your ears and drag it along that wall until you're able to see the speaker that is closest to that wall. So if they're dragging along the right side, when can I see my right speaker in the middle of the mirror? That will be your first reflection point. Now, as they move the mirror back further, you're eventually going to be able to see the speaker on the opposite side. Ideally, you'll have some sort of sound treatment to absorb those reflections. Now, we also want to make sure that ideally in a square or rectangular room, we're using something called base traps. Base frequencies do some really weird things in the corners of rooms. So let's say this is your corner and you have base frequencies hitting this wall, but also this other wall over here. And then they're coming in together, and they're mashing up against each other, and it's very much destroying the purity of your signal. So corners and base, they do not like each other. So base traps are quite often imagine like wedging a triangle into the corner of the room. So you're not making the room a circle, but you're sort of softening those edges a little bit for where the corners of the room. Once you get into base traps, you're starting to really take sound treatment seriously. There's a couple other things you can do, which is to make sure that you have some sort of sound absorption behind you. Ideally, some sort of diffusers. So for me, I have a bookshelf on one side and a bookshelf Record Shelf on the other side. And for me, those work quite well as diffusers, as the sound is sort of going into the area with these books, but the books are all at different depths so what happens is when the sound hits those books, it chaotically clashes together and sort of cancels out in a way where it's not reflecting back to you as some sort of destroyed version of that original sound. So diffusers and possibly more bass traps behind you are a good idea. If you're used to putting the foam up on your wall, and we see this all the time in YouTube videos, that's not going to do a lot for low base frequencies. It's going to help a little bit with room reverberation, but that's about it. Now, also, some of the sound that hits that back wall is going to come and hit your front wall and then come back to you. So you ideally also want to have some sound treatment in front of you as well, too. This area can be one of the last areas that you start to fill. Then the very last one that I'd recommend, and I do not have one of these is a cloud, and a cloud is directly above you, and it's to make sure that as the speakers shoot sound up because they're shooting out of these cones, they're shooting sound in every direction. As they're shooting the sound up, it doesn't come back and reflect off of that top ceiling. All this is to say, we want to make sure that we're trying to avoid lots of reverberation and reflection. We want to make sure that the sound is absorbed in all the main areas of the room. Side, behind, in front and above, but calculated properly. That leaves most of the sound that we're hearing as a direct sound straight from the speakers. Now, there's lots of resources for how to do this to the nth degree. It's one of those things where things can get very mathematical and things are very specific for each room. But I wanted to make sure that I first gave you some basics of what types of speakers to buy, how to place them, and also how to do some basic room treatment. What I would say for now is you don't need the best speakers and you don't need the best room treatment, but you should start off by having some set of half decent monitors, AKA speakers. And some sort of room treatment. This is going to keep you thinking about both. When can I improve my speakers? When can I improve my room treatment? As long as you have something in place, then you're starting to slowly build towards that more professional studio. Now, lastly, what I'll say is, even if you have some decent room treatment and some decent speakers, there's a chance that you're not hearing the speakers exactly as they were intended within the factory, based on small factors of, again, room size, the way you've treated the room, and the exact placement of those speakers. That's where something like sound ID reference by Sonar works can really come in handy. Basically, you're given this very specific pencil microphone that you will place in your seated position, your listening position. And the software that you're given is going to create these sort of bleeps and swoops of sound. And the visual on your monitor, like your computer monitor is going to show you exactly when you've placed it in the right spot. They guide you through the whole process. You let them know what speakers you've bought, they guide you through this process, and they'll calibrate a filter that goes between your DAW and the speakers. So before the sound even hits the speakers, it's been adjusted so that what you hear should be the proper sound coming out of the speakers. Now, even then this is not the most expensive version of this type of technology. If you want to take it to the furthest extent, I would recommend looking to something called Trinov where it has its own hardware device running this audio correction all the time. It's done quite a bit more precisely, but to get started, if you have this, if you have decent speakers and decent room treatment, you'll be off to a great start. Again, if things aren't perfect, don't worry about it, but what I would recommend is that you have multiple ways of listening to your audio. Have a decent set of headphones, have one or even more ideally two sets of computer monitors that you're listening out of. So just to be clear, we call speakers monitors, but we also call screens monitors. I'll do my best to make sure that I'm really differentiating as we go. And even with a couple sets of speakers and some headphones, you might want a second set of headphones. You might want a small speaker that you can listen to. So if someone's camping and puts out a small Bluetooth speaker, how will my mix sound on that speaker? And of course, there's the infamous car test. If you've been producing for a bit, you already great to be able to take your mix out to the car and see how it translates there. There's tons of sound treatment just based on the fact that there's so much seating and ways to absorb the sound. But also, if you've been driving on road trips or on your daily commute to work, you're listening to music, you're very fine tuned with how that listening environment sounds. So it's a great second reference. I usually will put my mixes on a little USB stick or just email them to myself and then put them through the car through Bluetooth. Now, regarding speaker familiarity, when you get a new set of speakers, the last thing I want you to do is to start mixing on. Because you don't know how they sound, you don't know how they're colored. You don't know how they sound within your room. Instead, have a couple of reference mixes that you always go to. Are you a hip hop producer? Are you an EDM producer? Do you produce rock and pop? If you are a hip hop producer, play three of your favorite hip hop tracks through those speakers on loop. I mean, don't drive yourself crazy with it, but the idea is to really hear those songs over and over on the new set of speakers so that you can kind of understand how those speakers sound. How much weight is there to the bottom end? How much clarity and air is there on the top end? If you keep listening to these over and over especially for a few days, then you're going to start to calibrate how your speakers sound in your room, and then I would recommend to start mixing on them. Now, I already know that if you got a new set of speakers, it would be very tough for me to stop you from producing on them. It's going to be one of the first things you do. But again, this is not an easy thing, but you want to make sure you're really listening to those speakers a lot. At the very least, fine, produce a little bit. But in between when you're producing, make sure that you're listening to lots of mixes that you're familiar in that setup. Now, you can also use reference tracks within the session that you're working on. Let's say I'm creating an EDM track and I want to use something like dead Mouse as a reference. As I'm mixing, I can go back and forth between my Mix and then listening to that dead mouse track or whoever it might be just to A, B, and hear. Does he have more clarity? Does he have more weight? Does he have more punch? Is there more compression? These are things that you'll be able to hear more and more over time. So between getting the right speakers and setting them up properly, setting up your room properly with sound treat making sure that you're using audio references and multiple sets of monitors to really hone in your productions, that's the best advice I can give you to get started with all of this. But again, we're really diving into the physics when it comes to room treatment and speaker placement. So make sure that you're checking out your room and how to properly treat it from there. Now, some companies that sell sound treatment will also give you some advice in terms of how to place that treatment. You send them pictures and dimensions of your room, and they're able to help you calibrate what you should purchase from properly treat your room. I think this is a great service because at the end of the day, it goes from you potentially buying one or two small products to them saying, Here's the breadth of what you would need to properly treat your room. We put a little bit of time up front to help you understand how to treat that room, but in the end, they'll end up getting a bigger purchase from that producer. So that's it for this class on room treatment and speakers. Make sure you're sitting in the right environment so that you can get the best results. I'll see you in the next class where we start to discuss headroom. I'll see you there. 4. Headroom: Alright, this class is going to be a little bit shorter, and we're going to talk about headroom. So what is headroom? Headroom is basically the idea that you can only jam so much of a signal within a digital environment before you start to get some sort of distortion. And the number that we use is zero. So once your signal starts to peak above zero, then you start to get digital distortion. So it's important for us to make sure that our maximum volume sits well below this zero point. So if there's the odd little peak, it still doesn't go over this zero. That's the basics of what headroom is. Let's dive into Ableton, and I'll show you what I'm talking about. I'm going to be working with a drum loop that's a basic sort of EDM house style sort of beat. It sounds something like this. Mm. Mm, mm, mm. Now, when you pull in these loops, they're going to be very loud or very hot. This means that they've been clipped, limiting, maximized. There's a few different words that we use and different types of devices to be able to maximize the amount of loudness that we have. But just take a look here. See this zero that we have right here? We want to make sure that our sound is not peaking above this zero. And you'll see it actually does as soon as I pull in this loop. So there's little tiny overs, and you can see our mastering meter is not happy with that. It's turned red. So keep in mind that a lot of the times when you're pulling in loops or samples from websites like splice or different sort of sample packs, they're going to be maximizing things in a way that you'll have to pull them down. I guess the idea is, what if I only had a drum beat, and that was the only thing I wanted to use? They want to make sure that it's already maximum volume, but as you start to add other layers, you'll need to pull down that volume. Now, in terms of headroom, we want to make sure that if I turn down this loop, I'm going to turn it down by 6 decibels, and you'll notice that our increments are by 6 decibels. Zero, negative six, negative 12, negative 18. Even if I go above zero, there it is six. And six is one of these magic numbers where basically the way the human ear perceives sound, when you decrease something by 6 decibels, you're essentially cutting it in half in terms of its perceived volume. This isn't absolutely accurate, but it's a really good starting point, especially for beginners to understand how much am I lowering that volume in terms of a percentage? So, down 6 decibels is about down 50%. Up 6 decibels doubles the volume approximately. Let's test it out. Here's our loop back up where it was. Down 6 decibels. It sounds about half as loud. Now, you'll notice that even when I have the fader turned down 6 decibels, and by the way, on your keyboard, if you just hit up and down arrows, it moves by 1 decibel increments. But you can also just click it and then hit something like negative six and then enter, and that will also turn you down to that point. So we're down at this negative 6 decibels. And when I hit Play, you'll notice that the loop is a bit over negative six. Check it out. Now, we can really see that over here on the master because right now this fader is covering up this tiny little reference here. So we're gonna watch over here and make sure that we're lined up perfectly with this tiny little line. So let's go for it. Come on. There we go. Yeah. Okay. So now it's sitting at about negative six. I had to turn it down about 9 decibels, but the peak of my drums is sitting at negative six. Now, why am I giving you a drum reference here and not something like bass or something like vocals? Well, your drums are generally going to be the loudest thing in your mix in terms of peaks, momentary volume spikes. So I want to make sure that when you're thinking about headroom, you're very much considering drums as being the peak of that headroom. So now that my master volume is at this negative six here, I have room to add other instruments without going over that zero. Now, in these lessons, I'm going to make sure that we stay at around that negative six. What this does is gives us more headroom for when we're mastering down the line. We want to make sure that we give a mastering engineer our mix, not at its loudest volume. We want to give them about negative six or negative 12 decibels of headroom. Back in the day, it would have been negative 18 decibels. But as we're more and more in these digital environments, you don't need to give a ton of headroom. But for now, to keep it simple, since we're seeing our mixers in these six decibel increments, go at negative six or negative 12. Going to be giving you lots of little math references throughout these classes. So I'd recommend try to stick with me here with negative six. But if you prefer negative 12, just keep in mind that's going to change the math, so watch out for that. So in terms of best practices, when it comes to headroom, make sure that your drums are not peaking above negative six or, again, if you choose negative 12. Different engineers are going to use different numbers. They're going to validate those numbers based on their results. If someone mixes with negative 18 decibels as their headroom, and they get a great mix, does that mean that negative 18 is the number that everybody should use? No, I mean, there's lots of different ways to be able to get a great mix. And at the end of the day, something like headroom just affects some numbers down the line. It affects a little bit of math, but you just adjust the math accordingly. In the most simple version of this, imagine we're playing a game called ten. And the idea is to add up to get the number ten. I'm starting with the number four. You're starting with the number two. You might say, after my two, I like a good old four plus four, and that gets me ten. I'm starting with four, and I might say, Ooh, I like three plus three, and that gives me ten. If we both get to ten, are you the winner? Am I the winner? It doesn't matter. The result sounds good. We just got there using different math. So the negative six is going to reflect the math that I use to get that ten result. So that's it. It's a brief concept. It's headroom. I hope you enjoyed that class, and I'll catch you in the next one. 5. Mixing in Mono: Next up, we're going to talk about mixing in mono. Imagine that you're at a campfire and someone brings a little Bluetooth speaker, or maybe you're out at a pub enjoying some chicken wings, and there's a tiny little speaker up on that patio, and you're not getting the full stereo environment, but rather just a single speaker. How does your mix translate to that single speaker? Maybe you've tried to make it so your guitar is in the right speaker a bit more, but your high hat is in the left speaker a bit more. And then when you go out to this patio, the speaker that they're providing might be just the right speaker or it might be just the left speaker. Or maybe it's a sum of the information from both speakers that is now put into one speaker. That would be an example of a mix in mono, and we have to make sure that we're considering how our mixes translate to mono. Now, to be clear, a patio should not be putting out a speaker that is just right signal or just left signal. So I'm not saying that that is necessarily mono, although technically, any single speaker source is mono, but your mix or the music can be summed to a mono signal and then put through a single speaker. A great example of this would be, let's say I have a right speaker playing only guitar and a left speaker playing only high. In this example of the patio, if there was a speaker outside and it was only the right information, you'd only be hearing the guitar. If it was only the left information, you'd be hearing only high hat. But again, you can sum the signal of both speakers so that what you're hearing out of that speaker on the patio is high hat and guitar. Now, the problem with mono is that sometimes we get something called phase cancellation. So let's say that I have a wide signal of some high hats in the right speaker and left speaker but at times, the signals aren't flowing perfectly the same as one another. In fact, if they were flowing perfectly the same, we would hear it in something called phantom Center. And this is where your mono signal is going to be heard between the two speakers. But the little differences that come out of these two speakers can sometimes disrupt one another. Let's say, for example, I want to thicken up a vocal part, and so I record multiple layers of this voice part, and I start to spread out some of the voices more and more. My timing is nearly exact. The tone is nearly exact. It's the same singer. But based on small differences, if at times singing a word produces a wave going down, and the other one is producing a wave going up, again, they cause phase cancellation. It's like two waves in the ocean hitting as one is moving higher and the other is moving lower, they flatten out and cancel out. Now, some of these little phase cancellations are fine. They're expected. If you did fully avoid phase cancellation, your mix would be fully in mono, and you wouldn't be able to get that nice big wide sound in a stereo environment. So to be clear, again, some phase cancellation is fine, but I want to make sure that when I sum my sound to mono, that some things aren't nearly disappearing altogether. Allow me to give you an example using the loop that we used within the last class. I'm going to play you this loop first in stereo, then in mono, and then using only side content, which I'll explain in a moment. Let's go for it. Here it is in stereo. Here it is in Mono. And here is side content only. Now, I want to be clear I'm using something called the BX solo by this company Brain Works. I would highly recommend downloading it because it's free, and it's a really great unit. But if you're using Ableton like me, go over to the left side Audio Effects, scroll all the way down to utility, and you'll use something like your utility to be able to create a mono environment. You can also listen to only left or only right speakers or even swap the signals. So in our example of guitar in the right, high hat in the left, now it would be high hat in the right, guitar in the left. But for now, we're going to use the brainworks BX solo. It's a really simple device. Again, same thing. This button here allows you to swap left and right speakers. This would be left only. This would be right speaker only. We have mono and side information. So I mentioned that when the two speakers are summed into one signal and we're hearing it in phantom center, that there's going to be some sounds that get lost based on little tiny phase cancellations. If we took all of the lost information and listen to it by itself, that would be the side information. So the stuff that we're not able to hear out wide because we've gone mono, we can also now just listen to that sound. Now, what's interesting is we're actually not hearing that side information out on the sides, unless you're listening in a stereo environment where you have the middle as a reference, and then you can hear things widening out from when you're listening to the side information only, it's going to re sum it in a mono environment, which doesn't matter too much. Basically, the idea is when I'm listening to mono, I'm listening to these summed speakers together. When I'm listening to side information, I'm listening to everything that got taken out of that mono signal. Whether I'm listening to it here or out on the sides, it's going to give you a good idea as to how to balance out the sides in terms of your mix. I digress. We're back to it. So I want you to listen to this loop. I'm going to play it for a moment. In stereo, and then I'm going to switch it to mono. And I want you to be really honest with yourself. What differences are you hearing? I'd recommend using headphones or a good set of stereo speakers to really hear what's happening here. Don't listen to this on your phone. In fact, for all of this course, get off your phone and sit in a proper listening environment. It'll make all the difference for you to hear the stuff that I'm trying to show you. So again, the mix in stereo, followed by the mix in mono, watch my Little mouse here for this blue button turning on when it's Mono and off when it's stereo. Check it out. And again, you're listening for what gets emphasized or taken away based on this process. Let's try it out. Tot, and tweet and tet and tweet tweet and tet and tweet and meet and tet tet and te. Okay, so what I'm noticing is that when it's mono, I'm hearing it right in the middle of my skull, or if I was listening on speakers, it would be right in between those two speakers. When I'm listening to the full stereo image, now I'm hearing it out on the sides of the headphones, and I'm also hearing it out on the edges of the speakers, the outside edges. But that's the obvious stuff. Stereo is going to feel more stereo. Mono is going to feel more mono. But you'll notice there's also volume differences. The kick drum almost doesn't budge in terms of its volume. It stays the same whether I'm mono or whether I'm out on the side, which tells me that the kick drum is probably not mixed to be wide. It's probably mixed to be in the middle. As it likely should be. That little snare drum slash clap layer that we're hearing does come down in volume a little bit, so there might be quite a bit of that signal spread out wide, so it's a bit more of a stereo image. But what we're hearing lost the most are the high hats. So top loop, the highest parts of the drum kit. You'll notice that when it's in stereo, we'll hear those high hats nice and wide and quite loud. And then when it's mono, they're collapsed into the middle, but they also lose some volume. Having said all that, listen again and check for yourself. Here it is in stereo first. Here those highs get quieter? Now, if I'm being honest, actually, the high hats are getting a bit quieter, but the ride symbol, the one that's really splashed out and filling out all that high end, it's ultimately getting more quiet than the high hats. Listen one more time. So you're listening to the high hats. Versus the ride. You're gonna hear that ride gets significantly quieter. The high hats get a little bit quieter. Check it out. Do you hear it? So what that tells me is that if the ride is getting significantly quieter, it was most likely the widest in our mix. The high hats are getting a little bit quieter. They're probably panned in a little bit more, not quite as wide feeling. The snare CAP is going to be a little bit more inward, and then the kick drum is ultimately placed right dead in the middle so that when I'm turning on this mono button, the kick drum is not changing much at all. The snare is getting a bit quieter, the high hat a little bit more quieter still, and the ride is getting the most quiet. Now let's listen to the side signal by itself. What we should hear is that the ride is the loudest. The high hat is second loudest. The clap and snare is going to be quieter, and then the kick will be non existent. Let's check it out. Okay, pretty close. I think the high hat actually is quite loud, but you're hearing no kick drum. You're hearing a whole lot of these top high end parts of the kit and a bit of the clap. So everything that was eliminated when we went to this mono signal is what we're hearing in this side signal. Now, I'd recommend mapping this. If you have something like a mini keyboard and you hit Control M in Ableton, you can click this little mono button and click one of the buttons on your MIDI keyboard. And then click this little side button and hit a different button on your MIDI keyboard. Now, when you come out of Control M and you hit one of those two buttons, you're going to end up hearing the mono or the side signal at the touch of a finger. But ultimately, that has to do more with workflow. I'm just letting you know that this mono and side button at the touch of a finger, can be very, very handy as you're mixing through your process. So some things to watch out for. If your side signal has a bunch of kick drum, especially low frequencies in general, that's not going to be a great thing. We want to make sure that most of our low frequencies are more centered. Part of this has to do with vinyl. And when we had, for example, base mixed too far left or too far right, the needle within the groove of the vinyl would get kicked out. We want to keep that base signal more towards the middle so that your needle stays better in the groove. But also, just in general, a subwoofer is only one speaker, usually. There is no stereo environment for very low frequencies when it comes to using a sub. Also, the energy output of low frequencies can be very off putting when there's a lot of low frequencies on one side, but not so much on the other, it's sort of bothersome. There's this tension that we can end up feeling as a listener. So in general, you want to make sure that low frequencies, bass, and kick drum are more towards the middle. Spatial things like pads and extra little percussion elements, you can put out quite wide, as well as upper parts of the drum kit. But other important elements like your vocals or your guitar solo, you might want to keep more towards the middle. In other words, melodic material. Quite often, you'll keep more centered. Now, there's tons of different genres. There's tons of different ways of using instrumentation within those genres. So when it comes to mono inside content, one of the best pieces of advice that I can give you is listen to a reference song, like, whether it be ACDC or Dead Mouse or whoever. Listen to it within your DAW, pull in preferably a wave file, and turn on Mono. Turn on side, listen in stereo, and really hear, What are they eliminating when I turn on side? That's the stuff that's more mono. Or when I listen to it in Mono, which elements are loudest? Those are going to be the elements that are mixed most in the middle. What I've noticed when I listen to my references in mono, is that the kick drum, sometimes the snare, and the vocals, especially, feel like all of a sudden they're a lot louder than everything else in the mix. So when you're mixing in mono, are you trying to balance everything out? Not really. I think a lot of people do. They turn mono on right off the bat and they try to mix everything perfectly. But you actually want generally the vocals and the kick drum, especially, to be a little bit louder. This is sort of a reverse engineer way of thinking. But if I'm listening to a great mix and I sum a tamano those elements are a bit louder. So when I'm mixing in mono, I want to make sure that those elements are mixed slightly louder intentionally. This is to make sure that when you add all those stereo elements again back to the outsides of those speakers, you don't lose the intensity of those important middle elements. But to really get the feel for this, pull in a few songs, listen in mono, side, and stereo and do a bit of sort of sound research yourself within the mixes that you've come to use as your reference. Going to be many moments of me listening in mono, listening inside as we move forward through these production courses. So I wanted to make sure that I outlined what device I'm using the brain works BX solo, how it works, but also more importantly, what is Mono, what is stereo, what is side content, and what information can we extract out of those three different listening environments. Think it's important if you want to be able to create a great mix with proper depth, proper EQ range, proper dynamics, proper panning and stereo imaging that you're able to look at that mix through different lenses. So we'll be using lots of different ways to sort of dissect a mix so you can listen to certain elements to make sure that you're getting those elements right. And then when you listen back to your full mix, it'll sound that much more professional. So in short, mixing a mono is a good thing. Sometimes we can get obsessed with but then there's a sacrifice when someone's listening in a mono environment. So feel free to mix in mono, and then in the later stages, pull it back out into stereo. But again, in a mono mix, certain elements, the main elements like vocals, kick drum, snare, and melodic elements, do want to be a little bit louder because ultimately, they only sit in the middle or mostly. So the other stuff that later gets splashed out onto the sides can distract from those elements. So let's pull them up a little bit more so that when we're in a stereo environ we're hearing them well, and when we're in a mono environment, we're also hearing them exceptionally well. So that's it for this class on mixing in mono, I'll catch you in the next class where we're going to talk about pink noise. I'll see you there. 6. Pink Noise: Alright. Let's get talking about mixing with pink noise. This is very interesting territory because some mixing engineers absolutely despise mixing with pink noise. I use it as a bit of a backup from time to time. I think it's a great teaching tool to get started to help you tune your ears to mixing volumes properly, especially within a mono environment. So what is pink noise? If you think of white noise as the sound that we hear on old television sets where we hear this sort of sound. Pink noise is that, but it's a bit more even where we also have low frequencies. In fact, it's so even that even on my visual monitor, as you can see, things are working really horizontally on a flat plane minus a little bit of fluctuation that's happening at the same time. But in short, it's noise with a flat frequency response, and it's quite often used to tune speakers. We talked about these tweeters and cones on speakers. But how do I make sure that as sound is moving higher up in frequency the two little speakers are balanced with each other. Is the Tweeter too loud? Is the cone too quiet? Well, pink noise helps sound and audio technicians balance out speakers so that they have a relatively balanced response. A pink noise is not going to help you understand how transients or these sort of spikes of drums work within speakers. But in terms of EQ, lows, mids, and high frequencies, it's used to balance out speakers. So if we use it to help balance out our mix, that not help it translate better to these speakers that were tuned to pink noise. Now, I'm also not saying that every single speaker is tuned to pink noise. There might be some other proprietary technology that certain speaker companies use, but classically, pink noise was used quite often to tune speakers. Now, keep in mind, pink noise is not stereo. It's not meant to sound very wide. It's just noise, and it's going to sit in a mono environment. So when you are using pink noise as a reference to help you balance out your mix, you want to make sure that you're mixing in mono. Now, pink noise can help tell us if our mix is lacking in lows a little bit or has highs that are maybe too hyped and too loud. But for today, what I want to show you is how you can use pink noise to mix volumes, which ultimately is the most important thing. Before you start diving into EQ and compression and all this stuff, you want to make sure that all your instruments are balanced properly, just in terms of volume. After volume, you might want to look into stereo width or panning left and right, and then you can start to EQ and compress as needed. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to play our drum loop, and then I'm going to introduce a bass sound, a harmony sound, and a sort of melodic plucked sound one by one. And we're going to make sure that our pink noise is set to negative 6 decibels, the same amount of headroom that we've given ourselves. So that way, our mix and our pink noise are competing for each other at about the same volume. So once the drums are peaking at negative six, we can also have our pink noise peaking at negative six. And now we're in an environment where we can use pink noise to help calibrate the volumes of our track. Now, as mentioned, in a mono environment, your drums, especially kick and snare, are going to be quite loud, as well as melodic sounds like voice, a guitar solo, or a synth melody. So I'm going to start with making sure that my drums and my melody are a little bit louder than the pink noise. They're kind of poking out a bit over the pink noise. Bass should be level with the pink noise. In other words, I'm hearing them about equally, and the harmony, I want to hear about equally or even just under the pink noise slightly, as harmony is quite often going to be one of the elements that's quite a bit wider. That puts us in a mono environment where we have the most mono elements, the kick drum, snare, and in this case, a melodic synth part as being slightly louder. When I then take mono off and go back out to a full stereo image, you should hear a mix that sounds pretty balanced in terms of volumes. Let's check it out, starting with drums. Now, just to brace you before I jump in, here's how pink noise sounds. So you might want to turn your speakers down slightly, but not so quiet that all you're hearing is high end information. I'm just saying don't blast your speakers this pink noise is going to be quite loud. So let's go for it. So we're going to start off with the drums, making sure they're slightly louder than the pink noise. We're in mono, double checking here. So let's go for it. I'm really hearing that kick drum above the pink noise in a way that works. It sounds not super super loud, but it's also very clear. So I think our loop is in good shape. Next up, the melody, also a little above the pink noise. Let's check it out. That already sounds fine. Let's in if I goosed up 6 decibels or something crazy. It's way too loud, compared to the pink noise, right? So we're pulling it down. I have no problem hearing that over the pink noise. Maybe it slightly bit quieter. Next up is bass. This bass sound has a lot of high energy, and it kind of acts as a little bit of a sort of counter melody to the main melody. So, if it's a really smooth bass and you're mixing something like this, you want it to be really level with the pink noise, but if it's functioning a little bit more melodically, like in this case, it's okay to have it poking up above the pink noise a little bit. You always want to be thinking about context. Bass shouldn't always be mixed with pink noise the exact same way. It's going to be genre specific. It's going to have to do with the bass line itself. And if the bass has a whole lot of high end content, like mids and highs in terms of frequencies, then it's going to poke out a little bit more, and that's okay. But generally, here, I want it to be quieter than the melody. That's still the main melodic element, but also louder than the pink noise overall. It's okay if we get close to the volume of the pink noise, but let's try balancing it from here. Sounds like this. Okay, and then we'll add in our harmony, which will be, in this case, probably one of the more quiet elements. Usually, harmony is going to be quite wide. It is the string section in the orchestra. It is that beefy guitar that's been processed to be wide or maybe multiple tracked guitars panned out. So we want to make sure that it's about the same volume as our pink noise or maybe slightly quieter. Let's try it out. That sounds fine to me. I think the melody was still a bit loud, so I brought it down slightly. Again, I wanted to be a little bit louder than expected because that's how things translate in mono. Those main elements, kick, snare, voice, melodic elements, guitar solos, they're going to feel a little bit loud in the mix when you're listening in mono. So it's okay if they're slightly loud. I just think it was too loud overall, so I brought it down a little bit. Now, before we listen to everything, I want to say this new harmonic part. Has a lot of low end. I would maybe consider treating that low end so it's not competing with the base so much outside of the context of this class. But again, you're going to start to feel these little things. We was like, Well, this doesn't quite work because of the compression or the EQ or whatever it might be. But at this stage of things, we're in mono, for all the reasons I explained in the mono class, we're using pink noise just to get the volumes pretty close to right. Now is the moment. Let's mute our pink noise and listen to our mix in mono and then after in stereo. It sounds like this. It's sounding pretty good. I think the melody still might be slightly too loud, and the drums could maybe come up just slightly. But again, that's now hearing it in a musical context. Without the pink noise. You can make these small adjustments to get your mix volumes just right. Let's listen to it. Without the mono button on, it sounds like this. So I think we're getting pretty close. The bass and harmony together. Again, there's a lot of low end buildup. I'm actually just going to solo in a stereo environment, the drums and the melody together, which I think sound fine. Ooh. Again, maybe the melody is still a little bit on the high end. This is a very piercing sound, so we'll take it down a little bit. But the harmony is actually mixed a little bit too loud. In this case, I think this would not be mixed with the pink noise, which is how I did it, but rather a little bit lower. So again, with harmonic and wide elements, you can have the pink noise almost burying them just by a bit. Have it so the volumes are equal, and then pull it down one to 2 decibels. So if we pull it down just a couple, maybe even 3 decibels. And then the bass I'm in pretty close territory. Now, the most important thing here is you can hear all the four elements without any issues. So in terms of balance, you're going to want to go between listening with the pink noise and mixing in mono and then using the same pink noise in stereo and then no pink noise in stereo. Go between those three environments, and you'll notice that there's going to be little changes that need to happen over and over. These little tiny micro changes tell you get better at really knowing how pink noise sounds on your headphones or your system and how the genre that you're mixing should balance out with that pink noise. Now, just like previously when I mentioned that you want to mix with a reference and listen to your reference in mono, stereo, and just as side content, you also want to listen to how your mix that you're up against, your reference mix sounds when pink noise is layered. Make sure that your mastered audio that you're working with that really hot, loud pop track or whatever it might be that you're bringing it down appropriately so that it's leveled with the pink noise. From there, listen to it in mono with the pink noise and try to match your mix so that it sounds the same way pink noise versus the mix, and then that will get you pretty close to dialed in for the volumes of your mix. So one last time, the little minimx that we've created, and I just created these parts really quickly. This is like, very bare bones in terms of production. We're going to listen to the full stereo version. Then we're going to listen to it in Mono, and then we'll add back the pink noise so you can hear all three different environments. Starting in stereo, here we go. Mono. The big noise. So there it is. There's our overall mix from there, super small tweaks to get it to be balanced, and then you can start to gel and glue things together from that point. Now, even if pink noise and mixing with pink noise isn't your thing, I think there's something to be said about not getting obsessed with getting granular and into these little micro details too early on. Don't be working on queuing out resonances and coloring things until the volumes are set. Once your volumes are set, then you can do something called top down mixing, which we will talk about in the future. But just understand that volumes, that's your step one right now. And if you feel like you need a bit of assistance, pink noise is here to help you. Just remember to make sure that you're mixing with it in a mono environment. So that's it for this class on pink noise. Our next class is titled The Music is in the MDs. And Is it ever. We're gonna talk about mid frequencies, not the highs, not the lows, and how important they are for you to achieve a great mix. That's it for this class, and I'll catch you in the next one. 7. The Music is in The Mids: Alright. Next up, let's talk about how the music is in the MDs. Now, there's something that I've set up on my master channel strip that I think you're going to find very handy. So let's take a look so that you can better analyze what's happening in the MDs of your music. So what I've done here is created two sort of versions of a double autoflter setup. You can use EQs to achieve this. You can use Ableton something like an autoflter it doesn't matter. The premise is quite simple, and you can apply it however you so choose. Now, I'm using Ableton 12, but before that, the auto filter looked a bit different. As you can see, now the newer one over here to the left is quite wide. It's a little bit more detailed in terms of parameters. Originally, I was using this trick with the older auto filter. So I first want to show how it looks on those, and then I'll show you the new ones. Ableton very well might change the look of these filters again in the future, but these are not units that are frequently changed, so it should be pretty ironclad moving forward. I have one auto filter set with a high cut or a low pass. We're letting the low frequencies. These ones pass through while cutting the higher frequencies up here. I have it set to 5 kilohertz, which is 5,000 hertz. Resonance is put at 14%. This was actually the stock percentage that this old filter was set at. That's not true for the new filters, so you'll want to keep that 14% in mind. I just gives a nice sort of solid roll off where things aren't rolling off too shallow or too steep. To complement that, we have another filter that is a high pass low cut. It's letting the high frequencies pass through. It is cutting out these low frequencies here. So if you don't know how to set this up, there's all these little sort of icons at the bottom. You just want to set it until you get the one that looks like this, setting it at 200 hertz, and again, 14%. I have both of these filters turned on and group. So if you click one, shift click the other, and then hit Control G, it'll go into a group that you can then turn on and off so that both devices are turned on and off at the same time. So to demonstrate, if I click the top of this unit, shift click the top of this one, Control G, it's now grouped, and I can turn these off collectively. I've done the same thing. I'm going to delete these. I've done the same thing over here for the newer auto filters, 200 Hertz, and the resonance down here is set at 14%, 5 kilohertz, the resonance down here is set at 14%. And now instead of seeing all those icons, which I kind of miss, they're all sort of contained here. Now there's more options, which is pretty cool. There's other things like drive and different sort of parameters that you can access that you weren't able to before. So everything above 5,000 hertz, Ih is cut off, and everything below 200 hertz ish is cut off. I say everything. It's not absolutely everything because there's a roll off, but these are the numbers that we have in mind. Now, again, I've grouped these two units so that I can turn them on and off at the same time. Turn them on and off individually is fine as well, too, but for the most part, you're going to be turning on and off this group. So again, that's another thing where Control M select this little on off button here and then map it to something on your keyboard so that you can just hit a button and turn on and off these units. Very handy when you want to listen, like I mentioned before, in mono, side, the MDs, you can slowly add these different filters to be able to listen to your mix from different angles. So let's listen to our mix as it was. It sounded something like this. Now, the first thing I might want to do after having completed a bit of a relative balance of volumes that I didn't do in the last class, but we can do it now is to shift click the different instruments that we have and drag down any one of these faders, I'll drag down all four until our headroom is back to where it should be. Now, we haven't got into clipping, compression and limiting yet, which later will be the way that we achieve that. So for right now, the quick and dirty trick to make sure that negative six is the top number is just to drag everything down together until we hit that negative six on our master. Sounds like this. Okay, we're really close to that negative six dB headroom. That's what we want, so we can move forward. Okay, so we're going to play it again, and as it's playing, I'm going to turn on this auto filter group right here. And you'll hear that the extreme highs and the base and low and sub frequencies all get cut. Check it out. It sounds like this. Here's our mix. With the filters. Okay, so now we're not concerned with how the base base frequencies sound and the sub frequencies. We're not concerned how the high, high frequencies sound, everything above 5 kilohertz. And what we're hearing is mostly things cut off above seven just based on that roll off. So we have high frequencies that we're not concerned with and super low frequencies that we're not concerned with. It allows us to sort of dial in to those mid frequencies and make sure that we're hearing the music. After all, the music is in the mids. So can I hear the harmonic elements? Can I hear the melodic elements? I'm not saying you should not hear drums in the mids. You definitely should. In fact, you should even probably some of your high hats and some of your ride. Those more extremely high sounding instruments, those cymbals, they do bleed down lower into the mids. So you should hear some of those high frequencies. You should hear the slap of the kick drum, as well as some grit from the bass, but none of that sort of smooth, low and from the kick and from the bass. So I'm not saying we don't hear low sounding instruments or high sounding instruments. They'll just be a little bit quieter relatively, but they'll bleed into this middle part of the mix. That being said, let's listen again and just listen to the harmony and melody and make sure that is coming through clearly. So, to me, I think the base is occupying a little bit too much of those mid frequencies. I'm going to put an EQ on. We're gonna dive more into EQ later, but just to show you, basically, if I sort of sweep around, You can hear that we're adding more low, mid or high sounds to this instrument. I'm just going to take a moment to look and listen to see how the bass might be built up in terms of its volume. 'Cause right now, if I turn down the bass volume, then that will achieve the bass sounding less loud in the mids. But isn't that going to influence the bass frequencies that we're not hearing? So I don't want to just start playing with volume too much now. We did that before. We used pink noise, and then we fine tuned from there. Now we're getting a little bit more surgical with different frequency areas. In this case, the MDs. So let's go through. Give me a moment, and I'll show you how I might EQ something like this. So I'm not doing anything too extreme. I'm not really taking out more than 6 decibels on any of these bands. You have to watch this 300 Hertz area. It is where mud can build up. Now, bass guitar sounds relatively okay in this area. It's the other instruments that we have to watch out in terms of building up this muddiness. That being said, even if I turn this off for a moment, we're four and what was it three. They're turned off, it's nice and flat again. Just watch the buildup in this area. We have this huge peak up around here, and then it rolls down and it also rolls down before it pulls back up. Part of this low low end pulling up like this has to do with the Fletcher Munson curve, which is getting really technical. We're not going to dive into it yet. But this area is supposed to look like this, this really low area, but not so much the 300 Hertz area. Some lift in this spot is fine. This just looks very unbalanced. Let's listen again. That's feeling much more balanced. Now, at the same time, I think the harmony is getting a little bit lost in the mids. We talked about how the volume for harmony, we might not want to push too too much, just based on the fact that it's often quite wide. And when we were doing our mono mix, this is where it sat well. But I might want to give a little bit of a boost probably somewhere from this area to this area, maybe not quite so wide, but I want to kind of go a little bit wide with this. I'm just doing a big brushstroke of trying to bring some clarity out in this harmony sound. Let's check it out. I say, right around one K, 1,000 hertz, that little bit of a lift that kind of bleeds out into the highs and then the mid lows. I think that this is going to sound fine once we kind of pull the full mix back into picture. Now, before we do that, I want to show you that we can take either of these two filter types and flip them, which used to be easier with the older auto filter, but it still works fine. And you're going to be able to hear just the lows or just the highs. You can also compartmentalize those mixes, as well. Now, just to be clear, the 5 kilohertz up top and the 200 Hertz down low, those roll off points, that's what I prefer. Ultimately, you can find your own preference, and the way I'd recommend doing it is to set something like a high pass filter, listen to your mix, and slowly pull it down. Like let's say we're starting way way up here. Slowly pull it down. And once it starts to feel a little thick, that's kind of where I want to stop. Like, right around here. We're starting to pull some thickness in, and I don't really want to be dealing with that when I'm just wanting to hear the high end. So for me, 5,000 hertz or 5 kilohertz, that was kind of my sweet spot. But down low, if we were to do the inverse, we would get something like this where we can pull down the frequency quite low and then pull it up until we start to hear the low sort of smoothness of the base, start to get a little bit of that mid punch or grit. Let's listen to it. Right around there, we're hearing quite a bit of the mid start to poke through. That's a 360. If I dial it back. Now we have that smooth low end again. Sometimes I've gone down to about 170. That's another fun number to work with for isolating bass frequencies, and I use that quite often when I'm doing parallel compression on bass, like bass guitar or bass synth. But right now, I'm just going to use a nice clean number 200. It works fine for the purposes that I use it for. So that's kind of the next trick exposed a little bit is that once you've kind of balanced out those mids, you can flip this, listen to the lows. Make sure you flip it back, and you can flip this and listen to the highs. And then you can mix those as little submixes and then listen to the full thing, as well. Now, you don't want to go too drastic with this. You've already balanced volumes, right? We use pink noise, whether you use it or not, we started with volumes. So if you feel like the high end, you want to just boost everything quite a bit. That's going to now not sound relative to the mids and lows. So you want to make sure that you're kind of doing more surgical moves at this point, but still listening to these little submixes of the low, mid and high frequencies separately. Try to lets listen to the highs for a second. I'm hearing a lot of nice clean high hat, and I'm hearing that melody poke through. The bass guitar has a little bit too much of that high end. We're actually going to clear that up not in this class, but one of the next ones where we're going to talk about a fun roll off we can do on certain instruments on the high end. But let's keep that in mind moving forward. Now let's listen to the low end of the mix. The kick is sounding quite nice, and the base is not as powerful as the kick, but it still sounds great. And there's something that I'm watching for, which is when you take a look at the master or any of these channel strips, that is, there's, like, a forest green and a more lime green that you're going to see in these signals. The forest green or the peaks, so we can see a lot of movement up here, even up to this, yellow, I guess they kind of change the colors a bit. But there's more lime green down here, is going to represent the RMS value, the average value of the sound. Now, there was an old base view meter trick that they used to do. I'd recommend check it out base view meter trick. You'll be able to find it pretty easily. But it translates into an RMS trick, as well, too, on these sort of channels, which is that basically, I want to make sure that the fluctuation of this pump is about three ish decibels. If we take a look, when it settles, it's just below the 18, and at its peak, it's kind of around this middle part or just below. From this middle part down to 18, that is 3 decibels. So we're working with a pretty good fluctuation of the kick is poking through and settling back down onto the bass sub frequencies. Now, it's important to mention that these lime green signals that you're seeing has more to do with low end. The average sound that you're hearing, when you consider high end, there's lots of ticky tacky sounds. In the middle, there's chords pumping in and out, vocals coming in and out. But what is holding steady most of the time your bass guitar, and there's usually some sort of repeated kick pattern that's going to take that lime green signal of your bass guitar and sort of fluctuate it up every time that kick happens. This is style dependent. In something like drum and bass, you might have a very loud sub and your kick is a bit quieter. So, in fact, every time the kick hits, the sub pulls down a little bit, based on something called side chain compression, out of the context of this class, but just letting you know, you'll always see some sort of little fluctuation. If your kick is hitting and your bass is hitting and you're just seeing a flat line of that lime green information, I would say that your low end isn't very dynamic, and you might want to consider giving it a little bit of breathing room. So having said all that, I think the base and the kick are actually pretty well balanced already. So first, we'll listen with the filter on, and then I'll turn it off, and you'll get to hear that mix expand out or more out this way. The highs come back, the lows come back, and it should sound pretty full. Let's give it a listen. So I'm still sitting up around this negative six as my peak. You'll notice that the lime green information below, based on how much base frequencies you add, that lime green information will change. We're going to focus on settling the base so it's level with the mix later. But for right now, we're still peaking at around that negative six. Volumes sound relatively balanced, and we've done some subtle adjustments to the mid of the mix to make sure that it's feeling good. As for the highs, I talked about us rolling off some of those highs. That's coming up in two classes from now. But for now, we're not too worried about perfecting every bit of the mix. We're just inching forward with small changes to improve it bit by bit. So as explained, the music is in the mids. Set up a couple of auto filters on your master channel. Roll off one above 5,000 hertz or 5 kilohertz at a resonance peak of 14%. Your lower filter is going to roll off everything below 200 Hertz, again, resonant peak at 14%. You can also do this with a single EQ. I prefer to use the auto filters. That's just me, but with an EQ, it would look very similar. 200 hertz rolled off on the low end and 5 kilohertz, Rolled off on the high end, you can see the slopes look slightly different, but this is essentially what you're looking at. You're looking at the mids. You can automate this button to one of your keyboard buttons, and then when you hit that button on your keyboard, it can turn on and off just the same. Now, flipping those bands is about equally as challenging where I can just take one of these and flip it so I can hear the lows by itself, or I can take the other one and flip it so that I could just hear the highs. Admittedly, the reason I'm using the auto filters is because flipping things used to be a bit easier with those different types of filter patterns available, but now it's about equally the same. So, I mean, there's a little bit more control over setting something like drive or working with the percentages of resonance as opposed to just using a cue. It's all kind of the same thing at the end of the day. So if you want to use an EQ, use an EQ. If you want to use two auto filters, use two auto filters, it's really up to you. And lastly, I'll mention, although we're talking about the MDs in this class, I've shown you how you can flip these auto filters or the EQ, so you're listening separately to the highs and to the lows. One more thing I'll mention is that when we're just listening to the mids, we're really zoning into a part of the mix, just the middle frequencies. When we're using something like that mono button, now we're not too concerned with stereo width, and we're just zoned into how do things sound in mono. So you should feel free to combine these two tricks together. Here's our original mix. Here's with the filters. And here it is with Motto as well as the filters. So sometimes what I'll do is I'll really mix the middle of the mix with all of this stuff turned on, and I'll spend like five or 10 minutes in this environment really getting granular with the middle part of this mix. From there, what I'll do is I'll now take off the auto filters and listen to the full frequency spectrum, and then again, try to improve the mix from there with little tiny tweaks. And then in the end, I'll turn off mono so that you're hearing the full mix, and it's amazing how much the fidelity improves, how much more professional your mix sounds after sort of making it more difficult in terms of the environment you're mixing in, more sort of narrow focus, and then pulling those off one layer at a time. Let's listen just for a moment with everything turned on. I'll slowly turn things off, and then you'll hear how rewarding it is when we get that full mix again. Alright, so let's check out the mix first with everything turned on, then just in mono without the filters, and then the whole mix. It sounds like this. It's so fun hearing the mix in this sort of narrow range and then hearing the lows and highs come out, and then hearing the width come out. It's like you're really working with the Y and X dimensions to all of a sudden bloom out that mix. So we're starting in an environment that's more difficult, and then from there, we're sort of opening things up so we can see the full picture. Now, there's these old little square speakers called Oraton speakers, and there's a lot of modern companies that are sort of remaking these. They are essentially mono speakers, and they have essentially a narrow frequency range. They don't have extreme lows, and they're not great on the extreme high range, either. They're basically just like the cone of a speaker minus the Twitter. Isn't that kind of doing the same thing? In a lot of studios, you're going to see these little speakers that they use intentionally to nerf their mix. I'm using NRF as the same term from, like, video games where a hero used to be more powerful and now they've made them less powerful. They've nerfed the hero. Well, we're nerfing the mix. We're trying to make it almost a more difficult mix environment, but we don't want to make it intentionally tough. We want to make sure that we understand why it's tough and what ranges we should be working within. If I'm just listening to mid frequencies, should I be tweaking the high hat and the subbase? Probably not. If you know how you've narrowed that range and you know that you're mixing in Mono, you can mix accordingly. So between mixing in mono and mixing the MDs, we're essentially recreating this ortone speaker experience and saving you the money from buying one of those speakers separately. That being said, if you have lots of cash flow, I'd recommend getting one of those speakers because they're iconic. They're used in a lot of studios, and this is essentially what they're doing. So that's it for this class on the music is in the MDs. I hope you understand how you can use this to your advantage as a producer. I'll catch you in the next class where we're going to talk a little bit about sub frequencies. I'll see you there. 8. 8k Roll Off: Next up, let's talk about an eight K roll off. How can I take some of my instruments, roll off some of the extreme highs to create a little bit more space and clarity in the top range of my mix? Let's go into those filters that we put on our master channel and just listen to everything five K and up. It doesn't have to be eight K and up. We're still going to hear everything eight K and up. We're just hearing a little bit below that point as well. So I'm going to take this filter here. I'm going to flip it and turn on both filters. So I'm hearing everything about this. This filter is not affecting this filter, by the way. This filter is saying everything above 200. This filter is saying everything above five K and up. So they're essentially saying the same thing. This filter here is making sure I'm not hearing any of this middle stuff here. Even though this filter is allowing it, the one that is moved to highest in this case is sort of the one dictating what we're hearing. So let's just listen to the top part of this mix for a moment and see if we have any clues as to what we might want to fix. So, to me, there's a lot of bass in this area, which some genres, that's okay, like Dub step and drum and bass. I think I might want to roll off some of that top end on the bass. I'm also going to try it on the other elements as well. And let's see if doing this to any one element opens things up considerably. Now, on my base, I already have an EQ from earlier when we were adjusting the mids and rolling off some of those super low frequencies. What I'm going to do is take this top filter and set it to 8 kilohertz. So this is a low pass or a high cut filter. Again, just look at the shape. That's all you really need to know. Let's listen to the high end of this mix with the filter off and then on and see if it does anything for benefiting this part of the mix. Here we go. There's a bit of sizzle that we're getting rid of out of the base. I don't know that I prefer one over the other. So I'd say at this point, it makes sense to keep it on because if putting it on is leaving a bit more space for the other elements, and I like it equally both ways, why don't we create the safer environment for those other instruments? Now, if you're really not sure at home, just leave it off. Like, it's one of those things where you have to fine tune your ears over time, gain a preference, and understand what would usually happen in the style that you're mixing. But I know that I don't need a ton of bass up in this area. I can do without it, so I'm going to keep the filter on and get rid of those extreme high frequencies. I'm also curious how it would sound on the melody. There's a lot of melody coming through in this area. Let's set this to 8,000 hertz, and let's see if we can achieve something again that improves the mix. Now, I do want to mention just like 60 Hertz, the idea that we might be 50 hertz or 70 hertz where we have these highest peaks. The 8 kilohertz, the 8,000 hertz is not an exact number. But if I give you a couple numbers to start to think about now, they can be your go to starting points, and you can fluctuate things from that point. Let's give a listen to see how the melody sounds with the filter on and off. Here we go. Again, I prefer it on. There's just a little bit more room for those high hats to breathe. I'm not really going to touch this on the drums. I do want the drums to have a very wide fidelity down to the 60 hertz or maybe below and all the way up to above 10 kilohertz for those high hats. So I don't want to roll off the high hats. If I was doing something like lo fi hip hop or really dry drum sound, something like a fky drum kit, then maybe I might want to roll off the high end, but I'm not really concerned with that for this style. Lastly, let's see if it also works on the harmonic element. As you can see, we already had an EQ from earlier. Let's set this to 8,000 hertz and give a listen on and off. Here we go. That was a significant change. Listen again. Oh, that's gonna be a tough one. There's a lot of air that we lost, but it's opening up so much room for those high hats. One more time. Here's where I want to keep a bit of that air. I might scooch this up to 9,500 Hertz, a little bit higher. I really like that. We get to keep a little bit of that air. But again, the high hats have so much more room to breathe. Let's turn off the drums for a moment and just listen to the three elements separately, and we'll turn on and off these filters on the high end so you can hear what they're doing without the drums distracting us. Check it out, starting with the bass. Over to the harmony. That's the biggest change. And then to the melody. Everything just feels warmer. I mean, the melody gets lost a bit I might pull up that cue a little bit to compensate for some of the lost energy without opening up some of these extreme airy frequencies back with the drums, and we're even gonna pull the full mix back into picture. Let's check it out. I pulled a little bit more of that bass back in, but otherwise, I think it sounds fine. It was very electric sounding before, and it almost sounds slightly duller now, but I think with a fresh listen, we're going to hear that this mix is going to allow us to crank up the volume a little bit more without giving the listeners fatigue. Consider this. You're in a club, and every speaker there has a lot of ability to output a lot of power. But those high frequencies, unless they're well managed, just end up attacking our ears. So we want to make sure that our instruments are relatively well balanced up there. Now, if I'm being honest, it's pretty unusual that I would put this eight K roll off filter on all of my instruments like this. Usually I'm working with a lot more instruments. But I think for this example, it worked out pretty well. So keep in mind this is not an ironclad rule that you have to follow every time, nor is this 8,000 hertz. Again, that number can be moved around accordingly. Also, again, the is something to consider, something that you can add to compensate a little of these frequencies that roll off. So let's say I want everything rolled off at 8 kilohertz like we've been talking about. Well, that might actually mean that a little bit of 7 kilohertz and a little bit of six start to decline in volume before that roll off. So by pulling up the cue, you can compensate. So six and seven aren't really touched too much, and then after eight is when you get that roll off. So up to this point, we've done some mixing in Mono. We've mixed with filters. We've talked about the mids. We've talked about the lows, specifically around 60 hertz, and we've talked about the highs, specifically in this case, around 8 kilohertz. And after adjusting all of these things, so far, our mix sounds like this. Without doing too much fanciness, like, we're not pulling in the most expensive VSTs that we have. We're not diving into compression and limiting and all this stuff. It sounds pretty decent straight at the gate. But like I hear time and time again, the last 10% is 90% of the work. So a lot of the courses to come after this course are really going to be about digging into that last 10%. So how can I put that little polish on the mix to make it sound really professional and stand out amongst other mixes? Now, one thing I want to mention is that it's quite often that I'll leave one instrument in this upper range here. I think for now, the harmonic element, like I mentioned, had a lot of energy up there. But because it's this consistent sound that's happening and the drums have a consistent thing that's happening, I would want to make sure that this is the one that I definitely roll off. Now, bass is generally considered with being a lower instrument. Of course. Sometimes its frequencies can find its way up into this extreme area. But I'd say to start, if I was going to keep one element up in this area, it would be the melody. Let's listen to it again, the full mix up in that area with just the melody poking through in those frequencies, as well as the drums. Let's check it out. Sounds like this. So in this case, I'm not hearing too much of a difference. So I'm going to keep those frequencies open on the melodic element. Kind of different than what I was saying before, but now I'm asking myself, is there maybe one element that I want to be able to be up in that area? If I can't hear the difference too well with it turned on and off, let's leave that area open for the melody to consume. So that way, if someone is on a really tiny little speaker or something like that, the melody, which is a super important element has its chance to be able to shine up in those upper frequencies. Again, you'll find based on the sound that you select, this will either have more of an effect or less of an effect. It really depends on what preset you're using or how you've sound designed that sound yourself. So that's it for this class on eight K roll off, in the next couple of classes, we're going to start to take a specific number like one or three and work through various frequency bands to talk about EQ in great detail. For example, 100 Hertz, 1,000 hertz, 10,000 hertz. How do these areas sound? And what are some fun ways to think about them so that you can improve your mix? That's it for this class, and I'll catch you in the next one. 9. Sub Frequencies: Next up, let's talk about the magical frequency, 60 Hertz. 60 Hertz is in terms of a sub frequency things we're hearing through a subwoofer or very large speaker's low end. 60 Hertz is going to be that frequency where you're going to want to see most likely the most energy in your mix. This is especially true if you're mixing electronic music. Or hip hop or anything that's very bass heavy. This is not true if you're trying to go for more of a retrosund, something where the high end and the low end are sort of tapered down just based on the limiting technology at the time. It's not going to be true also for more softer genres like orchestral music, jazz, and folk music, but for anyone doing something a little bit more modern and really trying get as much as they can into this digital atmosphere or even an analog console, 60 Hertz is a really good place to start looking. Now, the way we hear as humans is we can't really hear things below 20 hertz. And if we have our full hearing, it's really difficult to hear anything above 20,000 hertz. So 20 hertz on the low end, 20,000 hertz on the high. That is our hearing range. Sub frequencies are going to exist at about that 20 hertz, I would say more likely 30 hertz, upwards of about 80 hertz. So let's say 20 hertz to 80 hertz. That's kind of our sub frequency territory. Around 80 hertz, it starts to blend into base territory, where even on a Bluetooth speaker, you can hear some of that low end. But 30 hertz 40 Hertz, you're likely not going to be able to hear that unless you have a large speaker or a dedicated subwoofer. Now, if you don't have a large speaker or a dedicated subwoofer, you can use visual aids, like I used the TC electronics clarity, but you can also use things like Isotope, insight, and so many other digital sort of visualizers to see what's happening in that low. Now, Ableton has a free spectrum analyzer under the audio effect section. You can pull the spectrum analyzer just onto your master channel. I'd recommend putting it on at the very end so that if you're listening to mid frequencies or high or low separately, the visualizer will show you that because your filters are coming before the spectrum analyzer. When I hit Play, you'll see, we'll see things visually around here. And we're going to take note of, like, if this is 100 Hertz and this is 1,000, 60 is in around this area, and I want you to watch the energy in that area. So we can see right around that 60 Hertz is where we're getting the highest signal. And this is great. I don't really need to touch it very much. But if you're treating kick drums from scratch or synthesizing bass from scratch, you need to kind of keep in mind that this area is pretty important. Now, admittedly, I've listened to a lot of dead mouse, kill the noise, daft punk, savant, zomboe, all these at this point, older electronic artists, whether they're old or new, it doesn't matter, listen to their music in this environment and just watch the visualizer. See how their mixes look visually on these spectrum analyzers. Now, something you'll notice is that generally, we're working down on this diagonal. The high is poking out a little bit up here, above this sort of washed out diagonal. We'll see some of the melody poking out around here, and we'll see that kick drum and bass sort of creating motion down low. So we have this wash of sound with certain elements poking out. Isn't that kind of like pink noise being the wash of sound and our main elements poking above that pink noise? This is kind of that, but visually confirmed. Let's check it out one more time. High had up top. Melodies up around here. It's a bit more difficult to see. And then we have a chorus, the kicks in the bass here. The kick is the more sort of gluey sort of version of this peak, and we'll see little tiny strands, these little frequencies poking up. That's your base. And now, the kick is hitting quite well up around this 200 Hertz and then down around 60, and it sort of pulls this U shape here for the bass to sit in. These are not things you all have to memorize, but I'm just showing you that, even when two instruments occupy the same space like a kick drum and bass guitar, the kick drum is sort of perfectly sort of curved out in terms of the frequencies so that the bass can poke out in that section. So you want to consider if you start with a kick and you really like the sound of it or you start with a bass sound that you really like the sound of, take a look at what it's doing visually and fit the other element around it. Now let's take a look at how the pink noise would sound on the spectrum analyzer. Let's take a look. We're still getting that slope coming down, but of course, music is more dynamic than pink noise. So we're going to see elements poking out of this general slope. So if your mix on the spectrum analyzer looks like it's sloping a little bit, that's okay. It's supposed to. And that all has something to do with the Fletcher Munson curve. The Fletcher Munson curve is a great way to explain how we perceive sound. And, of course, this curve was named after the people doing the experiment with the last names Fletcher and Munson. Now let's take a look at the curve. The experiment went something like this. Imagine you're sitting in a room and at a very low volume, you hear a low sound, like a low frequency sound. And then they turn it up to a mid frequency sound and a bit higher and then a bit higher and then a bit higher. And you are to document how you perceive the sound. Which one sounded loudest? Well, quite often those low, low, low frequencies, the bass frequencies don't feel like they have as much energy as the higher frequencies. Our ears are tuned to perceive around 3 kilohertz as being louder. Babies cry around this range. If you're wondering why our ears have fine tuned to that area. That's what I believe. But also, you'll notice that fire trucks and any emergency vehicle, those sirens oscillate around 3 kilohertz. Our ears are very sensitive to that, so we'll hear it over other sound that might be happening in our area. So if there's some areas that our hearing is more sensitive, there must be other areas where our hearing is less sensitive. So what they're showing you here is that, let's say we just take this very bottom line here. And this is, let's say, all very low volume sounds. For me to hear 1,000 hertz at the same volume as let's say ten hertz or 20 hertz, I would have to increase 70 ish decibels for this area to sound as loud as this area. You'll notice that this 3 kilohertz area, we actually had to turn down because our hearing is so sensitive. We actually had to turn down the 3 kilohertz or the 3,000 hertz for it to sound the same volume as the 1,000 hertz. So again, back to the experiment, I play a low sound, slightly higher, slightly higher, slightly higher, and you're documenting, okay? The first one felt really weak, and then it got a little bit louder and then a little bit louder. Well, let's say I make all the adjustments that you give me. So you might say that the very lowest frequencies need to come up significantly in volume for me to hear it with the same amount of perceived volume as some of these higher frequencies. And once I've made all of these adjustments, so I play the lowest tones, the middle, low, the middle high, the highs and the extreme highs, you say, Yeah, they all feel like they have about the same amount of energy. Well, then we could plot things you would see this sort of graph. And what you'll notice is that as we go higher and higher in volume, things flatten out a little bit. So what that tells us is that at really low volumes? Like, try this at home. Set your speakers really, really low. And what are you mostly hearing? Higher frequencies. If you start to crank your speakers up, now, everything seems to sort of squash together. So as a whole, it's important for us to remember that low frequencies, we need to boost a bit more for them to be perceived as having quite a bit of energy. The kilohertz is an area we really have to watch out. Even at the highest volume, there's always some sort of a dip around this area. You'll notice that this one kilohert area also needs a little bit of assistance, a little bit of a boost for it to sound equal to some of the other areas. And then the high, high, high frequencies, you need to really boost in order to hear them with the same amount of clarity and energy as some of those middle frequencies. This is especially true. Once you've gone up above about 18 kilohertz, you'll see this, like, a basically vertical incline of really needing to pull up what we would call that air band, AKA, the highest frequencies. So just to be clear, if this makes some sense, awesome. It doesn't all have to be transparent to you at this point. But what I wanted to show you is that when we go back to our spectrum analyzer and listen, just watch here what's happening. You'll see that we do have to boost those low frequencies so that they sound relatively level with the other frequencies. So just make sure you're watching and you'll see that those low, low frequencies are significantly inclined so that they have the same amount of energy ish as the mid and high frequencies. Now, you might be wondering, but Josh, why are these high frequencies not pulling up extremely like we saw on the Fletcher Munson curve? Let's go back to our pink noise just for a moment. I'm going to solo this, and I'm going to put an EQ onto the pink noise. And there's something kind of interesting that happens based on these visualizers. If I was to set, let's say, a base sort of shelf at 100 hertz and another one at, let's say, like around 7 kilohertz. I'm going to flatten those out, so there's no gain. Watch what happens visually when I pull up this, let's say about this high, and when I pull up this about the same distance, you'll notice that the base frequencies pull up significantly, but these high frequencies don't pull up as much. You won't see as much of a visual change. Check this out. Okay, so we just went from the base being up around this area to up at the very, very, very top. Now let's try it with this other shelf here at 7 kilohertz. Right? So we're getting this sort of, like, everything sitting below, and then as we pull it up, it does pull up about 6 decibels still, but we're working at a much lower range visually. Even the bass with the pink noise, when we're working with it visually, it's up around this plus 6 decibels. You'll notice that we actually don't get below this center line until we're up around this area. Most of this is relatively flat. And then we get this sort of slow ramp up to this area here. So just watching things visually, even in terms of pink noise, can give you some clues as to how your mix is balanced when you also check it visually using these spectrum analyzers. Now, we can get some more visual clues if we start to eliminate elements. I'm going to take out the bass for a second and just watch the drums. Okay, so we can see that our harmonic sort of pad is actually very prominent around this 100 200 hertz area. Also an area that we're going to see our base. Here's our bass solo, for example. Lots happening up around that 100 200 hertz range. So I might want to consider taking a little bit of the low end off of that pad or the harmonic element. I don't have to get rid of it entirely, but I might just want to pull it down a bit because there's a lot of thickness in that pad that already exists in the bass. Let's listen again without the base. It's still significantly pulling up. So let's take a more visual clue here. Pull things down. I'm going to get rid of all this low garbage content. There's something called artifacts, which is everything below the fundamental frequency. So the fundamental frequency is when you're playing the lowest note, if you sweep everything out, it sounds almost like a sine wave. Check this out. Just listening to the harmony by itself. Let's get more extreme with it. If you really turn that up, it sounds smooth. It sounds like a sine wave. And everything that we're hearing up above that are upper harmonics. That gives the sound a character, sometimes called tone. In other words, these low frequencies that we're seeing here. Do you see there's a bunch of extra stuff happening down below? All those little rumbles, those are artifacts. They're not really contributing much to the sound. A cautious sound engineer might do something like this where they pull down those frequencies significantly, but keep some of them intact just to help sort of with the glue and all the extra little bits that fill out a mix. In a digital mixing environment, it's really not uncommon to just sweep them out entirely. So I've brought down these frequencies here. I've taken everything out on the low low end as take a listen. Versus a very stuffy version of that sound, a very muddy version. So now that we've got rid of that, let's take a look again on the spectrum analyzer. We're still seeing these poco, but they're much lower. They're closer to this sort of curve of the kick drum. And when I bring the bass back in, everything should sit pretty well in the mix. Now, if we solo the bass by itself, I want you to watch for any other visual clues around that 60 Hertz area that might be off putting. Let's check it out. So it's reaching down to about 40 hertz, but take a look at this extreme low here. You're going to see this weird spike at, like, the lowest point and even quite a bit around this sort of ten, 20, 30 hertz area. That's all below our fundamental frequency. So, again, I'd recommend probably sweeping that out. Now, we can see that visual again on the EQ. It looks something like this. And the lowest base note that happens, let's say visually it's right here. I'm trying to make sure that my filter is sweeping off just below that point. Sometimes it's not a bad idea to raise up the cue, which is this sort of movement just a little bit so that you're not really rolling off into that area. I mentioned that it was around here visually that we're trying to roll things off, but you can see we're already kind of getting that slope happening in that area. So to pull up the cue a little bit is going to help ease that just a bit. So now, again, everything together looks something like this. And what's really cool is our kick drum is peaking at around that 60 Hertz, and as it's coming down, we're seeing some of that base float up into that same sort of area. Watch the base? Is that about this negative 24 number, maybe just above. Now let's watch the kick. It's at about that negative 24 or just above. So without going into too much granular detail, again, the point of this class is to show you that around that 60 hertz is where you should be getting the highest peak in your frequencies. Now, it might be 50 hertz. It might be 70 hertz. It depends on how your kick drum is tuned and what key your song is in, so what is the lowest note of the bass, et cetera. But that's stuff we can cover in much more detail outside of the context of this course. Right now, we're just focused on 60 hertz. Ish is where we're seeing the most energy. If your kick drum is at that 60 hertz as it should be and your bass is very prominent in that area, and they're spiking each other, that's where you can use something called side chain compression. Side chain compression essentially is when one instrument tells another instrument to get quieter. We're going to be talking more about that as we get into the courses more specific on drums and bass. But I'm just letting you know that if you start to see too much activity of those instruments interacting together and creating these big peaks, there are ways to manage that. Trust me, I've got you covered down the line, but I want to stay focused on the simple facts. And right now, that simple fact is that 60 hertz is where you should be seeing the most energy. Again, give or take in terms of the frequency. I'd recomm take a whole day, watch as many videos as you can on the Fletcher Munson curve to really get an idea of exactly how that curve works based on how we perceive sound and then make sure that you're doing a lot of, again, visual listening where you're watching your spectrum analyzer or if you have a fancy piece of software, you're watching that, whatever it might be, but you're connecting your ears to what you're seeing visually. It's just one other way to help. Now, do you need to use your eye? No. But if you're worried that your room isn't treated well or your speakers aren't the best, maybe your hearing is compromised, whatever it might be, visual aids are something that I personally don't have any shame using because they only help my mix. So that's it for our class on 60 Hertz. Now we're going to go in our next class to the other end of the spectrum, and we're going to talk about rolling off some of the high end to achieve a bit more clarity. Let's talk about an eight K roll off in the next class. I'll see you there. 10. The 3's: Let's get talking about some numbers on your EQ. In terms of the frequency spectrum, we have 20 hertz up to 20,000 hertz. We're going to cover all the threes in this class, 30 hertz, 300 hertz, and 3 kilohertz. We're going to break them down individually in terms of how they contribute to your mix. Let's jump in and talk about it. So these are really important numbers. The reason I'm starting with three is because I think they are three of the most important numbers to get started with. At the end of the day, you could break it down. All the twos are quite important. All the ones are quite important. We're going to cover threes, and in the next class, we're going to cover ones. I think that is a very great place to start in terms of foundation. So let's talk 30 hertz. When you're down in the 30 hertz range, you're definitely in sub territory. You are below base frequencies. They are not so much heard as they are more felt. So if we were to take something like analog, a simple synth within Ableton and play a low C, C sharp and D, what you'll find is that we're down around this 30 hertz area. Now, this line right here, this is 30 Hertz, and you can see that in a little box right here. Like, right here is 30 hertz. And when I'm playing that low D, we get this 30 hertz. When I'm down on the C sharp and the S, we're also down in that territory. Now, I said it's more felt than heard, and right now, you're probably thinking, but I can hear it, no problem. It's because there's all these other overtones happening over top. But if we switch it to a sine wave, you'll see it's much more subtle, something like this. You probably can't hear it at all, right? It's one of those things where you would need either a subwoofer or really good headphones. Even then the headphones are probably doing something a little fishy. You want to be working with a bigger speaker system or with a sub. But as a general rule that I have for myself, this D, for example, really low is at around 36 hertz. I actually don't compose any music where I'm using something below this low sub D. That's because a lot of bigger systems are tuned so that they might be able to hit around 30 even then there's usually some roll off. In other words, if you want to get the most power from those low notes, when you start to go below that D, it starts to on some systems, drop off a little bit. So I'm cautious. I make sure that most of the bass music that I create, D is the lowest note. This is why a lot of Electro and Electro house, for example, in the early 2000s, was written quite often in the key of D so that in clubs, you're accessing some of the most powerful low frequencies. You want to play it more safe, you could go E or F as your main keys. That's going to be a little bit higher up. That's really common in drum and bass. Once you get to G as your low note, now a lot of home systems are able to recreate that low pitch, so that might be the low end that you would want to explore in terms of pop music. So pop music, I tend to be around this G, drum and bass, E and F. But Electro house and house and just a lot of really sub frequency heavy music, I'll be down around that D. And that D is right around 30 Hertz. Again, it's 36 hertz, but I wanted to mention that as you get closer and closer to that actual 30 hertz, I think C Sharp is 34. C is around 32. You really start to get this roll off of energy. So do keep in mind that when you're playing around in those low sub frequencies, the key of your song really does make a difference. Ideally, you wouldn't want to write a song in B minor, hoping to hit a B below this low C. You're going to be down in around that 20 and change Hertz sort of area, and most systems aren't even gonna be able to play that any it's garbage frequencies, it's artifacts. But as a cautionary starting point, I would recommend having D as your lowest note in the sub frequencies, knowing that it's sitting a healthy amount above 30 Hertz at about 36 Hertz, and it's going to be heard quite well on a lot of big club systems. Over to 300 Hertz. Let's take one of the filters that we have on our master, and I'm going to turn one off, and I'm going to turn the other to be a band pass at 300 hertz. Now, we could be at 300 or around 300, but this 300 hertz range tends to be where muddiness happens. There's often a lot of buildup of thick frequencies, the low end of orchestral instruments, the low end of guitar and bass and harmonic elements. They're going to sort of pile up in this 300 hertz area and cause some issues. Now, every style is a bit different with how they treat this area. Some styles are more open to it. We can have a bit of muddy buildup and it adds to this analog warmth sort of sound. Other styles, we need to get as loud as humanly possible, so we have to really cut a lot out of this area that has a lot of energy but not a lot of use. So if you want to crank up the sub and crank up the base, you have to take that energy from somewhere else. And in this case, 300 Hertz is a good place to start looking. Let's listen to our mix at this 300 Hertz. I'm going to take the resonance up to 30%. You can see that kind of puts it level with this line here. So here's our mix with that filter. You can hear a lot of the harmony in here. Listen, if I get rid of the harmony. And that feels like as a little submix quite groovy. We can hear some of the kick, a little bit of the layer of the clap slash Snare. Even a bit of that melody is poking down around here. But the harmony, when I add it, everything gets cloudy and a little bit tough to hear. So I'm going to go into my harmonic part here. Pull up around just above 300 hertz, in this case. It's actually up closer to 400 her. Is this little buildup area here. Take that out. And when we listen back with the full spectrum open, it's not going to sound entirely different, but we got a little bit of that mud taken care of, and that's gonna allow us to push our mix a little bit louder and give us a bit more clarity on smaller speaker systems. Let's give it a listen. Alright, so 300 Hertz, watch out for mud. Again, put a band pass filter on your master. Listen just to 300 Hertz. I do this later in the mixing stage when I'm kind of starting to tweak everything at the very end after I've composed everything. Then I'll kind of really hone in and listen to what's happening there. I'll start with just the drums and the bass and make sure that those are sounding appropriate together as a little submix. Then I'll bring in every other instrument one by one or sometimes eliminate them one by one, but generally bring them in one by one. And what you'll hear is one maybe or two instruments that you add might all of a sudden add way too much energy to that area. We want to be able to hear the bass and the drums in and around that area. We don't want other things clouding that too much. And then we're up to 3 kilohertz or 3,000 Hertz as our next area of focus. You might remember that when I was showing you the Fletcher Munson curve, I was mentioning that around 3 kilohertz is where our ears are most sensitive. So what I want you to take out of that is if I was to solo this harmony I'm going to create a separate EQ just so things are really clear and easy for you to see. So we're gonna pull in another EQ eight. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to create at around, let's say, 100 hertz or so, I'm going to create a large bump up and back down. I'm going to do the same thing at this 3 kilohertz, and you'll see that this is much more sensitive. I don't need to drag it up super high to get a pretty significant change in terms of how we're hearing that change. So let's go for it. Sounds like this. Alright, now up here. Do you hear how much more sensitive our ears are to the adjustments in around this area? When you're doing any EQ adjustments around 3 kilohertz, I would say a little can go a long way. You don't have to do these huge boosts because her ears are sensitive to this area, you don't need to exaggerate things so much. As another example, what if I was to take a shelf down here? Listen to this difference. A significantly huge EQ move, and we're only getting something that sounds modestly louder. If I was to do the same thing way up here in the air frequency. Pull the back even. Now we're starting. You can see right around here that we're even starting to kind of almost dip into that 3 kilohertz area just on the bottom end. But watch this as I move it towards three K. It's overwhelming. So I want you to make sure that around 3 kilohertz, you have a lot of information that is very clear. You want to make sure that main elements like voice, your melodic elements, these are very clear in and around this area. After all, our hearing is sensitive in this area, so it's going to pick up really easily from across a patio or down the hall from someone listening to music. That is where the intelligibility is going to really translate in your mix. But at the same time, you have to approach it with caution. You can't do too much in that area, or it gets very bright and brittle and a little bit too overbearing. Let's try on our overall mix, adding an EQ and playing around a little bit with this area of 3 kilohertz, adding and subtracting. In other words, boosting and attenuating on an EQ. When we subtract, we are attenuating. So we're over here around 3 kilohertz. Let's give it to listen. So this is dull. And this is way too much. It's very harsh. Dull, harsh. I haven't even gone to the extremes. Like, I haven't even pulled it up the full 12 decibels. So if your mix is feeling a little dull, you might want to be adding a little bit of this 3 kilohertz area. I would recommend even go pretty wide with this, not too wide, but wide enough that it's a gentle brush stroke of an EQ move. And if you find that your mix is too bright, you can pull down a little bit around this area. But keep in mind, you don't want to jump to this master EQ first. Let's say your guitar sounds great. Your bass and drums sound great, but your voice is a little too bright. Well, take the 3 kilohertz down from your voice, not from the overall mix because now you're going to sacrifice the tonal qualities of other instruments. However, if, for example, your speakers are quite dull and you've mixed as well as you can on them, and then you listen in the car and everything feels too harsh, maybe your speakers in the room that you're in just aren't giving you the right information. So you've added over time too much of this 3 kilohertz sort of buildup. That would be a good time to apply this EQ move to your overall song. And to be clear, this is sort of dipping our toes into mixed bus processing where we're taking the entire mix and we're making changes. But it's also in and around the area of mastering. We'll be talking about mixed bus processing and mastering in much more granular detail outside of the context of this course. But this is one of the first sort of introductions to mixed bus processing and mastering in terms of when you add an EQ move to everything, you're trying to smooth out and balance out the mix. And that's a big part of what your mixed bus processing is going to be all about, as well as your mastering. So there 30 hertz. We want to keep things no lower than 30 hertz, and some good key centers to play around with in terms of sub information would be D minor. You could even stretch a little bit lower, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. 300 Hertz, watch out for mud, 3 kilohertz, watch out for dullness or harshness. So that's it for this class on the threes, where we have 30 hertz as the low end of our sub frequencies, 300 hertz where you want to watch out for mud and 3,000 hertz or 3 kilohertz, where you're going to watch out for dullness or harshness and adjust accordingly. So this class was on the threes. Our next class, we're going to talk about the ones. I'll see you there. 11. The 1's: Okay. Alright, let's get talking about the ones within your EQ spectrum. One hert we are not concerned with because it's something that we're not even going to be able to hear anyway, and it's below our hearing spectrum. Ten hertz, same idea. Our next numbers that we're going to find with ones that are significant would be 100 Hertz, 1 kilohertz, and 10,000 hertz or 10 kilohertz. Let's talk about those three frequency spectrums, and let's jump in. So using the sine wave that I was using before on this analog simple synthesizer where we just have a sine wave and nothing else happening, I'm going to play some low sub frequencies and move up until we hit about 100 Hertz. Let's check it out. Watching here, you can see this is our 100. Keep listening. Right around here, you might be able to hear it on most systems, but by the time we hit 100 Hertz, which is this G, in this case, we're really close to 100 hertz, this is where we're going to start to hear base frequencies, even on smaller speakers. So I would say around 100 hertz, it's good to think of this as sort of base territory. Now, when I'm applying any sort of EQ moves to base, generally, I would be working with a shelf. I'm working with this sort of EQ as opposed to something that look like this, which would be a parametric band. Thank you, George Massenberg, the producer of Earth Wind and Fire, who gave us this particular type of IQ alteration. So if we're at 100 Hertz, a really common way to think about this is when you're in your car and you have base and treble as two things that you can affect in terms of what you're hearing, when you're affecting the base, it's probably set at around 100 hertz and you're simply adding or subtracting as a shelf. This is going to also influence these sub frequencies down below, but it's going to be a very even blend of base and sub being added together. Let's listen to it. It sounds something like this. Now, you have to be cautious because adding to this area can add a lot of hype, and it can sound really cool. But I don't want big, huge boomy sounds coming out of my headphones so that I feel like I'm in the club. I need to understand these headphones. I need to understand my speakers, my car, wherever else I'm listening and referencing my mix. So a lot of people will get caught in this area of adding way too much down. This is where I like to use visualizers to help me understand what my sub and base information is looking like and how it's going to translate to other systems. Also, I don't keep my subwoofer on all the time. So what I'll do is I'll get my mix as good as I can, and then I'll flip on the sub and listen to it balance together, and then I'll even turn off my speakers and just listen to the sub by itself to make sure that the kick and the sub base are working well together and as a little submix feel appropriate. It might even at that point be worth listening to a reference mix, hear how their mix sounds just in the sub and then reference that back to how my mix sounds. Now, the truth is, for this mix, I think our low end is feeling fine. When you pull this up, Right? We have a lot of hype. And then when you pull it down, it feels thin. But you have to make sure that when you make these moves, you let your ears adjust a little bit. Especially when there's a lot of hype and you take away the hype, it might sound dull or it might sound like there's some energy lost, but take a little break, come back, listen again, and you might find that things are really well balanced. So here we are too much hype. And again, it feels like it loses that energy, but this is relatively well balanced before we go into any mastering. I get clients that sometimes will join me as I'm co producing with them, mixing or mastering, and quite often they'll ask for more base frequencies. But I try to explain to them using these visualizers that the base is actually well in check. I'll turn on the big speakers, I'll turn on the sub, and you hear straightaway that things are really well balanced. There's tons of low end. But when you're mixing on smaller speakers or mixing with your sub turn off, you might get tricked into adding a little bit too much down in this area. This is 100 Hertz. I'm not saying you can't use a parametric band down around this area. I especially use it for scoops at around this spot or this spot, depending on how my kick and base are working together. But it's one of those things where if you start with a shelf, you'll have a pretty solid starting point and really hear what's happening down in this base territory and everything below, which would be your sub territory. So that is 100 hertz. Now we're up to 1,000 hertz, and this is where sort of the music is in the mids. 1,000 hertz tends to be where you're going to find your mid frequencies really poke out. I like to do wide brushstrokes around this area. If you start to do something like this, you're going to get these little resonant peaks. Just listen to the difference. Hear that right? If I do something like this. Now it feels like I'm just shifting those mids a bit higher and lower and playing around with colors. So as a starting point, when you're EQing, I don't want you doing a lot of this stuff, right? Really high, really narrow peaks. You can do some attenuations that are quite narrow, especially for like let's say, working with a violin and there's a harsh ring to it, then you might want to pull out that ring. But for now, especially in these mid frequencies, I want you to make sure that you're doing wider brushstrokes. Let's listen and see if we can benefit from adding a little bit of this within our mix. Let's check it out. Mm hm. I think that definitely does help bring a little bit more clarity to those mids. So we're going to play around with keeping that on for a little bit, but that is 1,000 hertz. It's the mids and do some wide brushstrokes. A little can go a long way because we're also bleeding up into that 3 kilohertz sensitive ear sort of territory. Lastly, we have 10 kilohertz, 10,000 hertz. Again, when you're up in this area, which is this line right up here, what I would recommend is that, again, you play around with a shelf. And this is going to add airiness and a little bit of clarity, sometimes digitalness to the mix. If you pull it down, it might sound a little more analog or subdued or soft. Let's listen. Now, this is another area where when you have it hyped up for a while and you pull down, let's say, it's over hyped and you pull down, it's going to feel dull. So you want to make sure, again, for these extremes, way down low and way up high, I like to use visualizers to help confirm, but also switching between two types of headphones, three different speaker systems. I'm moving all over the place to make sure the things sound good. I know my Geneex are a little bit bright. I know my yamahas are a little bit dull, so I like to cut the difference between these types of juxtaposed speaker systems. Let's say my mix sounds a little bit bright on the Genelx and a little bit dull on the mahas. That's actually the sweet spot for me. But if it sounds very bright on the GeneX, my smaller speakers, and it sounds perfectly bright on the Yamahas, then I'm probably too bright. Vice versa, if it sounds very dull on the Omahas and kind of dull on the Genex, it's probably too dull. Now, I tend to err on the side of caution of being a little too dull in these high frequencies because, again, on some big speaker systems, things can get a little bit overly bright. But I'm not saying intentionally make your mixes dull. This is just more of a stylistic thing for me. What I'll find is that a couple of my instruments will have a pretty significant peak up around this area, and then everything else is going to feel a little bit flat or deadened to make those elements really poke out. Let's say it's the airiness of vocals and the nice top sheen of some high hats. That might be all I really want to be occupying some of this extreme 10 kilohertz and above territory, whereas other elements I might not want to boost. Now, I promise you that almost every instrument that you boost, if you do one of these, it'll sound a little bit better. But you don't want to overdo it. If every instrument is occupying that territory, then essentially, they're all combating for your ears attention up in that spot. So think of this 10 kilohertz as airiness adding a little bit of clarity and adding a bit of a digital sheen. So that's it for the ones. We have 100 hertz, Think base territory, and generally use a shelf. We have 1,000 hertz or 1 kilohertz. Think mids and generally boost a little bit wide. And then up top, we have 10 kilohertz or 10,000 hertz. Again, this is airiness digital sheen. It's going to give you a little bit more clarity, but you don't want to be adding this to every instrument. Although it sounds quite nice, make sure you're selective with which instruments you want to poke out in this top area. Ones are a great way to just think lows, mids and highs. And you can even see on the EQ, they've outlined this hundred hertz. They've outlined this 1 kilohertz, and they've outlined this 10 kilohertz. They are great starting points to get thinking of these low mids and highs. So make sure that you're really watching out for these ones. The reason I showed you threes first is I think they're more cautionary spots, whereas the ones are maybe a little bit more fundamental in terms of memorizing these sweet spots. That's it for this class on the ones. In our next class, we're going to talk about clippers. I'll see you there. 12. Clipping: Let's get talking about clippers. Clippers are a great way to manage volumes, especially with very short, transient information, little tiny spikes that happen from our drums and percussion most often. Now, let's say you're taking a look at either a drum beat or your overall wave form of your full song, and things are moving around and boom, you get this really high spike out of nowhere. A clipper is a great way to clip that spike so that it's level with all the other spikes around it. From there, you can process things into a limiter or do some other things where you're maximizing the volume. But clippers are a great way to manage some of these rogue peaks before you run it into a limiter or a maximizer. Let's jump into Ableton, and I'll show you what I'm talking about. Now, to start, what we're going to do is create an audio track, so control T on PC. We're going to call this wave. And then what we're going to do is set this input to resampling. And that means that anything we hear, so if I'm soloing a track, that's all we're hearing. But if I don't have anything soloed, I'm hearing the whole mix. Anything I hear is going to be able to be recorded into this audio track. So straightaway, if I just hit Stop a couple times, so I'm at the beginning of the session, arm the track so that it's read and ready to record. In four beats, you'll see what I mean, one, two, three, and. Okay. So if we zoom in a little bit here, what we're going to see is that things are really well managed. There's kind of a little bit of a peak here. I mean, we want some peaks. We want some transient information. Drums are, after all, quite quick. This is all a byproduct of the fact that this loop was probably already clipped. It was probably already limiting. You can see it looks like it's always touching the tops and bottoms perfectly. And just as a loop, it sounds quite nice. Oh. So, whoever worked with this loop did a great job. But let's go ahead and intentionally add some little sort of clicky sounds to over spike some of these areas, and then we'll use a clipper to maintain and manage that. So I found a pretty annoying little sound. It's this little sort of click. I mean, it's not so bad, but it's pretty abrasive. If we take a look, it's actually spiking way too loud right now, so I'm gonna pull it down so that it's at about negative six. And as much as this looks like it should be managed because it's at negative six, remember, some other elements like our drum loop are also at negative six. What happens when I have an element that's peaking at negative six and another element that's peaking at negative six, and they share some of the same frequency space. In other words, the higher sounds, they both have some higher sounds. We're going to get this sort of super peak. Again, sort of like waves colliding in that same sort of phased cycle in water and then creating a big peak. Let's take a listen. If I have this by itself, We can even pull that up just a little bit. I'm going to keep it a bit under negative six our mix is pretty balanced right now. But if I add this click, now we're way above. We're like 3 decibels above this negative six, sit again about negative three. So what I would maybe do in this case, because everything else is pretty well managed, I don't need to add a clipper to my entire mix. What I might do is rename this click. We're going to color code it because I love color coding. We're going to select both of these channels, Shift click to highlight both, control G to group, and I'm going to say all drums for this group. Here we're going to pull in our clipper. Now, for today, I'm going to use gold clip. This is one of the most expensive clippers on the market. It is the best, and it's really meant for mastering. It's meant to go over the whole mix. But visually, it's really great, and it's going to give you a good understanding of what clipping is doing. So let's just listen and take a look as we go. You can see those huge spikes there. So we're going to pull the ceiling down until we've clipped off those so they're the same height as the other peaks around like this. That works for me. Now, I pulled it down a little too much accidentally, and I could hear the kick drums starting to distort. And that got me thinking, I should explain how clippers work. How am I able to pull down that transient, that tink without really affecting the sound too much? So, listen, if I turn my clipper off and then put it on it sounds almost exactly the same. If I go over here and watch on the Master Bus over here, check it out. Here it is off too loud. Here it is on. Peeking right at that negative six. So what clippers do really well is I mentioned they work with sort of short transient information, and they're very good at putting a little bit of distortion onto that so that the human ear doesn't really hear the difference. By squashing it and sort of distorting the sound, we're able to get that peak to not be reading so high, but being perceived as sounding the same. Now, exactly how clippers all the algorithms on the back end, if this is something of interest, I would say watch and learn a lot just regarding clippers. But keep in mind they work with short transient information. They can squash those transients by applying a type of distortion that still make it sound the same. They don't change the tonal quality. They don't change the volume. They just change the amount of signal within this digital environment. Now, clippers can work against you. Watch what happens if I pull it down too low. No, no, no, no. We get a whole lot of distortion. So clippers don't like base frequencies. If you're going to clip something like a kick drum, it should only be the slap of that kick. You should not be touching into the sub frequencies. And you'll know right away when you pull it down into the sub frequencies or the base frequencies, you're gonna hear that sort of distortion, that sort of grind on that low end. Again, sounds something like. So just watch out for that. So visually, I really like this particular clipper because you can see when you've pulled things down to the right amount and leveled things off. Another classic clipper is standard clip. And I want to mention that Ryan Schwab, the guy who made Gold clip, also made something called Oge clip. I don't own it yet. I will be getting it at some point. It's better for individual tracks. So think of it as, like, a very great sounding clipper for individual instruments. Gold clip goes on the master. It goes on your entire mix. But right now I'm using standard clip most days if I'm affecting just a single instrument. So let's check it out. It works very similar. It has a very different layout. It works very similar. It has gain a little visualizer, a cyclym. So you can see here those huge spikes. I'm going to pull down the clip until those are managed. So you can see it's eliminating all that red stuff, and so we're pretty much at the same height for all these transients. You can also watch up in this graph. Basically, for every decibel of input, there's a decibel of output until it reaches a certain threshold, and then it does not go above that threshold. Sounds like this. Ooh. You can see it just flattens out. But again, this visualizer, I think is going to help you a little bit more. So most of the time I'm keeping the settings relatively simple. I might roll things off a little bit using this soft clip saturator. And sometimes I might even go into hard clip mode if I'm looking for something very aggressive. But honestly, most of the time, I'm just using soft clip classic, pulling down the clip until it's appropriate and maybe adjusting the gain if I need to to compensate. But most of the time, I don't need to. So again, let's check it out with standard clip off and then on. Going to watch over here on the right side, and you're going to see, again, it's going to peak up around negative three. And then, hopefully, when I turn on the clipper, it'll peak around negative six, and you're going to find maybe even just below that point. So let's listen. Here's the clipper off. And on Sounds the same, and it's much more managed so that later down the line, I'm not going to get digital distortion from these intense peaks. Also, there's something called a limiting, which is going to help you bring out the most volume from your track. But if you have something running into your limiter, where there are these rogue peaks that all of a sudden get really spiky and really loud, you want to manage that first and then run your signal into your limiter. Now, today, some limiting have clippers and Limiters all built into one. There was a really popular VST for a lot of hip hop producers called Master Plan, which is, like, a very simple mastering unit. I used it a little bit. It was pretty fun. It was very behind the scenes, and you lacked some control that I was hoping for. But as a simple starting point in mastering, it was great. And that unit uses clipping going into limiting to get your mix as loud as possible. I prefer to do it all by hand and individually, but that's just me. Now, if you don't have the money right now to buy standard clip to buy orange clip to buy gold clip, don't worry. Ableton does have a built in clipper. It's not quite as effective I find, but it does have a little bit more of a forgiving tendency on these lower frequencies. Remember before I mentioned that if you pull things too low, that you start to get a lot of distortion in your base. Well, we're going to use glue compressor in Ableton, and you're going to find that you don't get quite as much of that distortion. It's a little bit more forgiving. So step one would be turn on this soft clip section. I'd recommend have your attack and release down all the way. Your ratio you can play around with a little bit. I would keep it around ten just to make sure that even though you're soft clipping, your clipping is a little bit more aggressive. Once you have that set, you're going to take your threshold from all the way up and slowly pull it down. As I'm doing this, I want you to watch over on the right to see what's happening to the signal. Let's check it out. Alright, so that puts us at about that negative six area. But now watch over here. You're going to find that the click is going to pull up the needle quite a bit. That is the reduction of the sound. Think of it as, like, the visualizer slicing off those little peaks. Same idea. However, when the clap and kick hit together, you're going to see a little bit of action here as well, too. Let's listen. Cp. Clap. Clap. See that little tiny movement. So we're not controlling just that little spike. We're controlling that spike considerably, but we're also tapping a little bit into some of the other transient information. Also, if you watch the lime green information here, let's see where it's peaking. So here's our negative 18. We're up around here maybe negative 16 ish when I turn on glue compressor. It's a little bit lower. So I've sacrificed a little bit of that low end. So you can start to see that, like, this is doing the job, but with small little sacrifices. But if you want to do the best job possible, play around with these different settings and really get comfortable with how they're affecting the sound. Watch things visually, make sure that you are properly clipping, but that you're not adjusting the sound too much. Now, like I mentioned, if I pull this down further, check it out. It doesn't have that sort of grimy, crunchy sound that we had before. This is soft clipping. Soft clipping is going to be a little bit more of a gentle sort of clip, but it almost feels a bit more like it's compressing. I mean, this is glue compressor, but you can see it's acting almost somewhere between a compressor and a clipper. So if you want more control past what they've given you in Ableton, then you might want to invest a little bit in something like standard clip, orange clip or gold clip where the unit is specifically designed for clipping, not compression, and oh, maybe kind of clipping as well, too. This is enough to get you started. It's going to give you plenty of control. But you can start to see why so many producers eventually invest in better and better software to help them achieve what they're going for in their mix. So there it is clipping. If you have these little peaks that are happening within your wave file, maybe on your entire mix or just on the drum bus, clipping might be the best solution for you. Level out those peaks, and then from there, you can bring up the overall volume so that you don't have these overshoots on your master fader. In other words, the master on the right side isn't turning red occasionally from these large spikes. Whether you want to go big or go home and check out the Ryan Schwab gold clip and orange clip, find something that does the job well but isn't going to wreck your bank account, standard clip or try out the soft clipper that comes with Ableton, you can start with the free stuff and slowly expand into VSTs software that is more specific for clipping. Now, I talked about running clippers into limiters. In our next class, we're going to talk about limiting. I'll see you there. 13. Limiting: Next up, let's talk about limiting. In the early 2000s, there was the loudness war at its peak. Everyone was trying to get their mixes as loud as humanly possible. And as much as we've sort of counteracted these loudness wars, limiting, which is going to help our mixes get louder, is still very important. Now, some heavier genres like trap and dub step, you want to be pushing your mix to the extreme, and that push that feeling of cramming everything in is part of the sound of that style. Everything feels hypercompressed. Clipped, limited, maximized. So we're going to talk about what limiting is, how you can use it to help benefit your productions and get them louder. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go up to Main, this channel over here, and this is going to be our mastering channel. I'm going to pull over the EQ that we applied before because it was benefiting our mix. I'm going to pull it over, and this is going to represent the area where we're going to do our mastering. It's not really mastering. I'm just show you clipping and limiting, but this is the area where you would apply clipping and limiting, which happens to be in and around that mastering stage. So I want all of this stuff here as filters. I want to listen in Mono inside. I want to listen to these auto filters of highs, mids and lows separately, and then run all that into mastering. I'm going to take this Ableton limitter off of this section. Here, after we've done all of this EQ clipping limiting, then you can have visualizers afterwards. You want to make sure that the visualizers are showing you everything after you've clipped after you've limited, et cetera. So just to be clear, for right now, when I say mastering, I'm just talking about the little EQ bump that we did clipping and limiting. Mastering is much more subtle, much more difficult to get totally right. But for now, I'm glossing over that term, and I guess we'll call this master. Oh, let's pull in gold clip and a limiter. And we're going to work with some of these fancier tools. But again, you could work with glue compressor, it's just not going to give us the same accuracy in terms of what it's doing. And again, visually, something like gold clip works really well. And this is what it's designed for. It's designed to work over an entire mix. So let's take a look over here at our master channel on the right, and we're going to see how the signal is interacting with this negative six decibel headroom area. Let's listen. So you can see at times I'm poking over that negative six. I'm going to use my clipper to pull it right down to negative six. Now, I already know that I like to use a lot of these extra little functions on Gold clip, but I will resist for now. We'll talk about those at another time. It's very complex stuff that's super specific for this clipper, but it just always makes things sound better. It's like Ryan Schwab really nailed those features. However, I digress. Let's pull down our ceiling until we're clipping just the tiniest bit maybe about half of a decibel. Let's check it out. So I'm clipping about zer 0.9 of a decibel, maybe a little more than I would usually want to click. Gonna pull that up just a little bit, but watch what's happening over here now. Pulled it down 0.1 decibel bore, but you can see it's basically right at that negative six. Once you have your headroom established, that 6 decibels of headroom, now we're going to go over to limiting. And I think most producers, these days are using the fab filter PL, in this case, PL two, but you can use the stock Ableton limiter. Again, I'll show you the fancy stuff so we can get really granular. But then I'll show you what Ableton is able to provide straight out of the box. So here is the PL two imitter. I'm going to go over most of the basic functions, but some of this stuff is going to be outside of the context of this more beginner based production course. So I'll show you some of the go tos here. For output level, we're going to want to set this to negative one. Is a very safe number. You could do negative 0.5, but what that means is that once I've limited, once I've got my track as loud as possible, we actually don't peak at this zero. We're going to peak just below. And you'll see that in a moment. But for now, set that to negative one as your starting point. Step two, I would not worry so much about true peak limiting oversampling and look ahead at this stage of things. All we're really concerned with is bumping up this gain knob until we have 3 decibels of reduction. And that's maybe the biggest takeaway is that you're going to see some action happening here. There's sort of red spikes, and this represents negative 3 decibels, negative 6 decibels. You don't want your limiter to be limiting much more than negative three. I have a personal hard stop at negative three, but that's what I'd recommend. Now, right now, our mix is how loud. It's at negative six. So if I bring up 6 decibels, I'm going to touch right around that zero, technically, negative one because of the way we've set this output. Now, if I go an additional 3 decibels higher from that point, then I would be clipping about 3 decibels. In other words, I have to add 9 decibels to my gain to see about negative 3 decibels of reduction. Let's check it out and keep in mind this is going to be a bit louder because we have added 9 decibels, so maybe turn your speakers down a little bit. Here it is. Now, I want you to notice this little black space here. Again, it only goes up to this negative one. It doesn't touch the zero. Watch here. So what that means is it's never going to go red, it's never going to distort, and we've left still about a decibel of headroom to make sure that even though we've maximized our sound as much as we can, we're still being cautious. Now, let's say when I upload a track to SoundCloud or to Apple or to Spotify, there's very subtle differences in the absolute volume that translates through those systems. In other words, let's say SoundCloud accidentally adds about 0.2 of a decibel. Well, if I was slammed right up to zero and then SoundCloud through its algorithm or whatever, adds a little bit more, well, now I'm distorted. So, again, this negative 1 decibel is a safe starting point. So this plus nine over here might still be a little bit tough to understand, so allow me to show it a different way. I've turned off our P. I'm going to close it for now. And what we're going to do is, again, if I play my mix, it'll sit at around negative six. Now let's add 9 decibels of volume using a utility. One, two, three, four, five, six, 789. Let's give a listen. So, first of all, are we red? Yes. How much above zero is our signal peaking? You're gonna find it's about 3 decibels above. If this is six and we're halfway up, that's about 3 decibels that we've peaked over zero. Check it out. So, in other words, I want to lower that by 3 decibels, so it's sitting right around that zero. Well, now if we do some math, I get rid of the utility back to again, just the mix. We're at negative six. How much do I have to add to get it up to zero? I have to add 6 decibels. Now we're here. Now if I add an additional three, we're going to get that same volume that we had up here, but we're going to have all of that extra stuff above zero squashed down using our limiter. So if I was to show you us adding the gain on the limiter, take a look at how this works. So this is at about zero, and this is at about negative three. And where are we 8.3? Now, I already know that nine is going to give us some sort of perfect math we were right at that negative six. Adding 6 decibels gets you to zero, adding an additional three will give you this negative three that it's clipping back down. Watch what happens if I sort of squash the mix up more than that point. Again, be cautious, it's about to get loud. Check it out. The mixture starts to sort of smooth out altogether and distort. Now, P E is very good, and it's actually quite good at masking this. But have you ever noticed when you scroll on your phone, let's say you're on social media platform or something, and someone has a really loud video, but it's also kind of distorted. It's because they've overlimited it, and they did it intentionally just to make sure that they have the loudest thing that'll catch your attention the most. Now, what platforms are doing more and more, especially like Spotify, Apple music, and some social media platforms, is they recognize when people are trying to do this, and they'll squash you down a bit. Now you just sound as loud as the next person with the distortion. So you want to make sure that there's a combination of getting as loud as you can without sacrificing quality of sound. Now, as I mentioned, there's also a stock Ableton limiter. And this thing is great. Like the way that the soft clipper sort of underperformed some of the other more dedicated clippers, this limiter actually works quite well. So first things first, over in this area, I want you to set your look ahead to the maximum value, which should be how it's going to be straight out the what this does is it delays the signal going into the limiter by six milliseconds. So imagine Ableton is trying to respond to all of these peaks instantaneously. It's impossible. But if we delay the information, so it has six milliseconds to think about what's coming into the unit and then apply the correct processing, then you've given it a better chance to do its job well. Now, you'll notice that this limiter also has a soft clipper. So this may work really well as an alternative to the glue compressor, but just showing you that Ableton has some options for clipping. We're going to keep it set to standard. So, again, we're going to set the ceiling to negative one, which is a little bit lower than currently is. I think it's at about negative 0.5. But again, that ceiling is to make sure that there's a little bit of headroom on top of everything that we've limited. Negative 0.5 is fine. I've always been very cautious with negative one, because the loudness wars are over 0.5 of a decibel isn't going to make a huge difference. 0.5 would still be fine, but just keep in mind that you want to keep it in around that area in terms of that top ceiling, maybe negative one, maybe around negative 0.5, but I wouldn't go more than negative one, and I wouldn't go less than negative 0.5 as you're getting introduced to these limiters. Now, we're going to add 9 decibels of input gain. We're throwing nine extra decibels of sound into the limiter to do its job. What we should see over here is that we have about negative 3 decibels being sort of squashed off in terms of gain reduction. Let's check it out. So we have our negative 3 decibels of gain reduction. We still have that negative 1 decibel of head room or sealing. And again, if you listen to it, it sounds fine. In fact, why don't we go back and we're going to pull in the PL. And I'm going to do a little back to back comparison. Now, what you'll notice with the Pels, there's all these other ways that you can control the limiter, and that's a big reason of why it's the pro version over the stock Abelton version. But here we go. We have our 9 decibels added, negative 1 decibel sealing. Let's do a little back to back test. We'll start with the Abelton limiter, and then we'll move to the PL. Here's Abelton Here's the PL. One more time. Here's the Ableton limiter. And then we can move over to the FabFilter limiter one more time. They sound pretty comparable. I like the sound of the Pel just a little bit. It feels a little softer. There's something about the Ableton limiter to me that sounds a little bit harder, but it might just be me looking at the visualizers and throwing myself off. It's too hard to tell. All I know is that with the Pel, you have more control. There's great presets to choose from. And I just like working in that environment. Plus, it's also one of those things where every producer talks about this in high regard. And eventually, you just learn to really trust it cause if the pros like it, then ultimately it's trustworthy and you can develop a good relationship with this limit. There are other limiters like the vintage imitter by Isotope. The Maximizer by Isotope works very similar. You can do some research online to ask, Here's the style that I produce, what imitter might be best suited for my genre. But I promise you that for the most part, you can get away with this Ableton stock imitter. It's going to do the job. It's going to get your mix louder, and it's going to sound great. So for this class, I'd recommend that you watch it a few times because there's a bit of math getting involved. We're not called audio engineers because we aren't using math. Engineers use math. We need to be thinking a little bit systematically and mathematically to get the most out of some of these plug ins and to make our mix sound as loud as possible, as bright as possible, et cetera. So that's it. For this class all limiting, you can see how it worked hand in hand with clipping. First, we made sure that we were at that nice even negative six, and then we used our imitter to beef up the sound, make it louder, but again, not distorted. So in terms of attack time, release time, look ahead, oversampling, some of these other features that we saw in our limiter, I'll cover that down the line, but for right now, it's out of context. For this course, that's more for beginners. Oh, if it was already kind of confusing, you can see why I haven't dove deeper. But if you're someone that already kind of understands limiting, I hope that I give you some perspective to kind of help you work out the math to get the most out of your limitter. So that's it for this class on Limiting in our next class, we're going to talk about visualizers. I'll see you there. 14. Visualizers: Next up, let's get talking about visualizers while you're producing. I wanted to finish with this because I think it's difficult when we first start producing to trust our speakers, to trust our ears, to trust our room, and to trust the process that we're applying to our productions. We're very visual learners quite often as humans, so I want to make sure that I give you a bit of a visual reference for how you can check some things in your mix. So the first thing I wanted to get back to is this idea of using the built in spectrum analyzer in Ableton. Now, I'm going to mention quickly I took our limiter off of this session. So if you had to turn things down a little bit in the last one because things got loud, we're back to a more standard volume again. So I wanted to mention that this spectrum analyzer is a great, really effective free tool within Ableton, and we've been using it quite a bit to see how energy resides within sub and based frequencies, mid frequencies, all the way up to the very top of our hearing spectrum. Again, I'm going to play a bit of our mix, and you can briefly see what our spectrum analyzer is showing us. So it's giving us quite a bit of information about the EQ spectrum, the lows, the mids, and the highs. Now, I'm going to recommend that you generally have this set to Auto down in the bottom left corner, and you can also play around with how things look visually. There's this linear mode, which I rarely use, but if you're watching a pro mix in this linear mode and then watching your mix, it could give you some great clues. Most of the time you're going to be in this logarithmic mode. Logarithm basically means, as you approach a threshold, like let's say zero to 100, let's say it takes a bit of effort to go 0-50. It's gonna take a lot more effort to get 50-75. Take a ton of effort to keep moving higher and higher to the point where once you get to that 99%, it's impossible to get to 100. It's essentially, just more and more difficult. Think of it like squashing an accordion. It gets more dense and it's just tougher to sort of approach some sort of threshold. So logarithm looks good. There's also this ST mode, which is going to show you the different frequency bands. So like on a piano, C zero, C one, C two. I'd imagine if you have perfect pitch, this might be quite helpful for relating what you feel and hear and see on the piano. How this EQ spectrum works, as well, too. So you'll notice it looks the same as the logarithmic, but logarithmic is going to have 100 hertz, one kilohert and 10 kilohertz. Again, the ones as sort of outlined areas. The ST area or semitones is going to show you something that's laid out a little bit more like the notes on a piano. So this might give you some great information, again, whether you have perfect pitch, and this is sort of the language that you're used to speaking, or you just want to start to get an idea as to how the layout of the piano can start to translate into visualizing an EQ spectrum. The refresh rate is going to basically change the amount of bounce that this has, how slow it is. So if I was to crank up this all the way, you'll see it's a bit more jittery. And as I pull it down, it'll get a little bit more responsive to what you're hearing. So I would just keep that at the stock 60 milliseconds. It tends to work quite well. You can view only left or right signal information. Again, I would keep that on the L plus R. Now, this block mode is going to give you a different amount of clarity in terms of how many slices there are of detail. So right now, there's 16,384 slices. But if I was to go through to like 2000 slices, check this out. Now, the sub end information is really sort of widespread, and you can see there's just generally less of these little slices. Now, once you get up here, all those slices are so close that it just looks like an image sort of blurred together. But if I were you, I would just keep this at the maximum value. Now, the only other thing that I should mention right now is this bins. I switched to bins kind of recently. I just like to look of it. But if you said it's a line, you'll see it looks a little bit different I was working with that for years. I think I just wanted to mix it up at some point. They both work equally well. Now, in terms of spectrum analyzers, there's another great free one called span, and span, if you set it up the right way, the lows and the highs will almost be level with one another. I'm going to go into the settings really quickly and just show you how I've set things up, and then that way, you can just choose to copy the settings if you choose to. So over here on the gear, I just want you to take a little screenshot or take a look at what I have here. We have 20, 20 negative 78 18 and 4.5. I stole this from someone on the Internet. Essentially, what you're doing is re skewing things. So instead of having that diagonal that we're used to seeing, it pulls things a little bit more level. And for the most part, the lows want to be about as high as the highs in terms of those peaks. But again, watch span as you're listening to some music. Whatever reference you're listening to, you generally want to try to match that shape in your mix. I've noticed that certain producers like overwork, have quite a bit more sub, so it's not quite level, but the sub's a bit higher. Other people like Savant is able to cram a lot of high end into his content. So everyone's a bit different pull in a reference mix, take a listen to it. And the last thing I'll mention before I show this to you is we're able to see the mono and the side information. Check it out. Here's how it looks. Now, this is in pretty good shape. This line that I'm creating is at the top of this high hat part. You'll see some of this mid content poke a little above. That is juicy, beautiful mid content. We want that. And the sub is poking up a little bit above as well, too. This is all relatively fine. But the side content, which is this peach information, I can tell you there's way too much of it down in this low area. Take a look. In fact, at times, there is more in this area on the side than there is in the MDs. So an easy remedy for this is you would go into your mastering chain or sort of mixed bus processing chain, you're going to go over to your audio effects, pull in an Ableton EQ, Again, this is kind of outside of the context of this course, but I just want to quickly show you it's fun. And you're going to switch the mode to mid side. You're going to switch over to side so that whatever you're equing is just side content. You're going to sweep out a considerable amount of that side content. Finally, the sweet spot of where this is supposed to sit is going to take some experimenting. But just to briefly show you when we go back to span, watch the low end. Now you can see that peach information is rolling off. By the time you get to about 100 Hertz, the base information, it's fully gone. So there are ways to see more in depth using different spectrum analyzers. Span is great for seeing mid inside content. And if you're not seeing that side content, keep in mind that that comes from the way that you've set it up here. On routing, you're going to hit this little triangle, and you're going to go to mid side stereo. That's what I'm working with. You're probably going to get default stereo off the back. Default stereo is just going to be one color. Again, you set it to mid side stereo. Now you can see the blue information is the mid and the peach information is the side. Two other fun visualizers I wanted to show you today. These are not free, but they're great are tonal balance and insight. And these are both by native instruments. Now, by the time you see this video, tonal balance is probably going to be the old version of tonal balance, and Insight two might now be Insight three. It doesn't matter they still generally do the same thing. Tonal balance is going to show you once you've selected a basic style, like, let's say, heavy base. And you can even bring in a reference track for this. So instead of their algorithms, you're using a very specific reference track. Let's just sit with their presets for now. So there's two main views. There's broad and there's fine. And you can see visually things are quite different. There's also this little indicator over here that will tell you what the crest factor of your track is. Let's listen to our track, and I'm going to show you all three of these. Let's start with fine. With the base heavy preset, which this is a base heavy song, Ish, we want to make sure that our signal sits within the middle of this tube, for the most part, there's gonna be some fluctuation, but let's give it a listen and take a look. I don't think it needs to be touched. There's a little bit extra energy around 2000 hertz that might want to be managed. That might be the melody, that plinky sound. The low end is a little bit extra high, but I'm also used to seeing that in other producers as well, too. So this sits well with me. Now, Broad is going to show you, low mids, high mids, and highs separately. Again, generally, you want to be around the middle of these areas, but you'll find that that's not always true. Quite often, this high band, I'll see quite a bit of extra hype. Same with this low band. It depends on the style. But let's say we're generally trying to stay, first of all, within each of these rectangles, let alone trying to stay towards the middle. Let's give a listen. I mean, that looks pretty good to me. We can talk about the cress factor over here as well. But before we do that, I want to mention that you can also solo these different areas. I avoid this. I think it kind of over hypes the areas when you're soloing. It's doing something that I don't like. I tend to avoid it, but I'll show you what it is. It sounds like this. The lows doesn't sound bad. Highs are okay. I just feel like it's adding almost like extra volume or hype. There's something about it that I avoid. If I'm going to listen to individual EQ bands, I might use something like the multi band dynamics within Ableton or something else that's specific for that task. But I would just say I'm just throwing out some caution. I wouldn't necessarily use this because I've done stuff like holding down the solo button and mixing that part of the mix, and it doesn't give me the same results as doing something like a band pass filter on our filters that I showed you before when we were analyzing 300 Hertz, for example, I prefer that method, but that's just there's also this cress factor up over here, and this is showing you how dynamic your mix is. So it's saying, like, everything that is sort of holding and sustaining and kind of creating a bit of a gluiness to the track versus everything that's transient or attacking like drums. What is the difference between those? Is it very transient based or is it not transient based enough? A good starting point is to get this little ball to float towards the middle, but a lot of electronic and hip hop is going to be a bit more compressed, so you're going to see it inching towards this line. Anything above this line would be considered over compressed. Anything below this line is going to be too transient, heavy and maybe not compressed enough. Now, it's not all about compression. Compression will adjust this, but if I add more sub base, it's going to seem more compressed. But if I add more percussion, it's going to seem less compressed. So the idea is transient information versus held information. Again, compressors can help achieve that, but it's also the instrumentation within the mix and their volume relationships. So I want this circle to be close to this line but a bit below. Let's take a look. Looks good. To me, that's generally what I'm used to seeing from a lot of my reference files. So we're in pretty good shape for this quick and dirty mix that we're working on. Last thing I'll tell you about is Insight two. This I could do a full class on altogether, but I can't assume first that you can afford this or that you want to have it, so I'll blow over it a little bit. But if you want the, like, best visualizer out there, this is one of the best for sure. So the way Insight two is laid out is there's all these little modules uptp and they show us different sort of ways of visualizing the mix. First is loudness. Let's just take a look. Okay. Now, this is all showing us lufs, and lufs are similar to decibels, but the math is a bit different. Decibels are a little bit more exact to what is coming out of the system. So what is coming out of my DA or how loud is this instrument within Ableton? LufS has to do more with how we perceive sound. So part of the way that we got over this loudness war of the early 2000 and late 90s is by switching over to ufS and Lufs is a huge topic, but all I need you to understand right now is that we're not seeing decibels. We're seeing short term integrated and momentary lufs these are going to have their own sets of numbers that you're going to want to aim for depending on whether you are mixing for film or doing something that's meant to be heard in a club or working on a light jazz track. But again, the best way to get used to this stuff is listen to your references and watch what these meters are doing and try to get generally close providing your song sounds similar to that other song. So this is just showing us different loudnesses If we go over to levels, we're seeing something very similar. They're just showing us the numbers as opposed to before. Now if we move over to levels, we're seeing something similar to what we have on our main channel over here. Take a look. So this is peaking at about negative six. This is peaking at negative six. What's interesting is this is by fives. I still like working with sixes, but you'll see fives quite a bit, too. You're gonna see the peak volume, and you're also going to see the RMS, the average volume. Take a look. There's two different colors. So this is showing you the same thing that you're seeing over here. These two little strips that we have are just sort of magnified into these two big strips. So loudness, the way we perceive sound and levels, the way volume is going to be shown within your DAW. Now, stereo field is going to show you how your mix is translating in terms of mono versus stereo. We don't want tons of information on these side triangles. We want most of our information to be in this middle mono field. Let's listen and take a look. So we can see a lot of our information is in this middle area, and we're seeing this little blue tick here approach this plus one quite often. A plus one is mono. So we want to be pretty mono compatible. Zero is going to be stereo within a normal limit. It's not going to cause tons of phase issues. If you're down at negative one, you're probably in trouble. Your mix is probably too wide, and you're going to have tons of phase cancellation. So you want to be between zero and plus one, with the average being more towards plus one being very mono friendly. Now, if I was to play a sine wave, you can see it is at absolute plus one. It is absolutely in the middle. But again, our mix for interest purposes, we do want to be a little bit stereo, in fact, sometimes quite a bit stereo. So that's why we're seeing some information in these areas. Now, if you take a look at this image that's been left, look how much is in Mono versus look at this little bit and the sides. I say this is pretty well balanced in terms of stereo image, but there's probably some fine tuning that we could do from here still. Let's listen one more time and take a look. So I'm pretty happy with that. We're moving over to history. So this histogram is basically going to show us the loudness that we saw before, but over time in a nice little chart. And you can see that once I listen to the mix for a second, well, listen. There's this white line, there's this gray line and this red line. The red line is your integrated leufs. The gray line is your momentary lufs and the white line is your short term lufs. Now, what we can see is that the momentary lus is the one that's adjusting the most. And this is probably mostly the kick pulling this up and down. But over time, the integrated and the short term leufs sort of balance out together. So if you really want to get granular with seeing over time, how your volumes are sort of working within your mix, this is especially important if you're working on, like, post audio for film, then this history section with this histogram might be for you. That being said, I don't really use it too often. I'm used to seeing the loudness meters. That's what I work with. Next, over to intelligibility. I never use this, but basically, you pull in some sort of a sound source, and you can see how your track works in terms of being intelligible in different listener environments. So you can add different types of noise. How well can someone hear my track in a low noise environment? It says, if an AC is running in the background, a medium noise environment versus a construction worker trying to hear off their Bluetooth speaker, this section is very new for insight, too. I don't use it. But keep in mind, if you want to know how your track is going to sound with different levels of noise in the background, you would want to become a master of this section. For now, this is just an overview, so let's move forward and take a look at here it is again another spectrum this time available within insight. I don't love this spectrum. It's not my favorite, but let's take a look. Now, it doesn't make sense to have tons of different spectrum analyzers because at the end of the day, you want to know one really well and how things look visually when you compare it with your reference mixes. This one, to me is jittery, and while you might be able to fix that, I just don't like the way it fits within this box. Feel free to use it, though. It is still quite valuable. And at the end, we have a spectrogram, which is going to show you something similar to your spectrum, but with a bit more depth. Let's take a look. I want you to watch to see if you can visualize the kick and the clap slash Snare. Take a look. So we can see these little sort of lines down here. These bumps would be the kicks, and then these up here would be the kick kick and clap. Kick, kick and clap. So you can start to see the amplitude. And again, if you're doing a lot of referencing and watching this spectrogram, you'll be able to start to notice that the peak of a clap always looks like this when this artist is viewed through spectrogram. So shouldn't my clap look kind of similar? I don't use the spectrogram very often, to be honest, but I know a lot of artists do. It's a very valuable tool. The last thing I'll leave you with is that you're actually able to start to combine these. So let's say I want to add loudness, sound field, and spectrum, I can now visualize all four of these. I would then pull this to a second monitor, maximize it, and then I always have all the visuals as I need readily available. There it is. So when you're looking at a clip of a studio on social media or you pop into a studio and you see all these visualizers, it looks like they're running a spaceship. I promise you they're not. It's all stuff that just gives them a little bit more perspective as to how their mix is going to translate in different environments, how loud their mix is, how wide their mixes, et cetera. So that's it for this class on visualizers. I covered most of the basic visualizers that you're going to see. And while there might be others out there in the market, I would say start with becoming a master of these ones. There might be some that even now having shown you, you're like, I really like that. Well, start with adding that. I love span and tonal balance. Those are the two that I use the most. Span is free, total Balance is not, but it's very affordable for the most part. So ask yourself, What do I have a hard time hearing sometimes? And how can I use visualizers to help me so that I have better perspective on that area of my mix? So that's it for this class on visualizers, we're getting towards the end of this course. We're going to pop into the Otro, but I just want to say thank you for joining me on this journey. We've talked a lot about music production, created a small little song, looked at it from various angles. So thanks for joining me for that, and I'll catch you in the Otro video. 15. Outro: Congratulations on finishing this course on best practices in music production. My hope is that after taking this course, you're going to feel very confident with the fundamentals that make up certain rules in music production that should nearly always be in place. Now, if we want to produce the best music possible, it's really important that we have the fundamentals of music production in place from room treat to how loud our mixes should be and how to properly get them loud, to balancing the mix in all of its many forms from EQ to spatial balancing and a whole lot more, I'm really hoping that after having taken this course, you're feeling like you have a really strong understanding of the fundamentals of music production. This course is also meant to be sort of a springboard into some of the more niche topics in music production that I'm going to be teaching moving forward. I want to make sure that there was one course that really gave you all the basics, and then we can grow upon those concepts. Now, I want to remind you that there is a class project within this course. So make sure you go back to the class where I outline all the details of the project, make sure you submit the project to me so that I can give you feedback. And at the end of the day, this project is really meant to make it so that you have a trusty notebook of all your best tidbits of music production advice to yourself. So it's something that I believe won't be going anywhere anytime soon for you, and you can continue to grow upon that notebook so that you always have it as a reference moving forward. I hope that you're able to take these best practices in music production and apply them to your own productions in whatever style it is that you might be composing or producing. Continue to apply these concepts so that they become second nature, and you're always putting your best foot forward to make sure that you're not making all the same pitfalls and mistakes that I made. With all the types of mistakes that we can make in music production, I think some of the most basic concepts, we want to make sure that we really have those nailed down, and that's why I created this course for you. So rest assured that as a music producer, you're in good hands, you're going to have some great fundamentals to get you started, and you're going to be able to truly express your creative side through music production. So feel free to sift through the courses that I've created, see if any others resonate with you and then slowly improve those building blocks that'll help you stand out as a musician. So one more time. Thank you for taking this course. Congratulations on finishing it. I had a great time. I'm looking forward to helping you out in the next course, and I'll see you there.