Mixing

Jim or Xaq are the people to answer this. They Will ask you a lot of questions about this, so try and expand as much as possible now. What other instrumentation are you using? Is it EDM using synths, What software are you using, what software do you have access to? These two guys are an absolute wealth of information, so make sure you know a direction you're heading in so they can give you the most solid advice

1st tip? listen very carefully to the music and make it sound good. Pay attention to the details early on so you can have fun and dance around as the mix comes together. Make the music sound as good as you can as a whole piece.

2nd tip? monitor through speakers QUIETLY. If you can't talk voer the track you are wearing your ears out.

3rd tip? take frequent breaks. Walk away, do soemthing else. You don't want to get fagiued and you don't want to get used to the sound of the track and start taking any of it for granted. GO sltien to the wolrd....

4th tip? half breaks. Tun the mix up a little bit and leave the control room and listen from anotehr room. You wills till hear it pretty well but almost every good record has a certain projection into another room and if way that's a good sign for the overall balance. If it soudns weird in another room I'll ebt some of the issues will jump out at you with the air space diffusing the sound out. its weird, this helps and its easy on your ears.

and tip 5? don't work on any mediocre music. A good song with a thought out arrangmeent starts mixing itself assuming it was recorded competently, but badly thought out music is notoriously difficult to balance. There is no 'fix it in the mix.' you're thinking "hey, I was looking for specifics, I coudla thought of thsoe myself!" but you need to remind yourself to make it sound good every 2 minutes, for real.

here's my free mixing as science resource for you:

http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-bpmtempotime.htm

you're thinking, dleay plugins sync? why do i need this? other thigns have time constants, dude....a ttack and decay on compressors? the release on an expander/gate, reverb tails (what about gated or expanded reverb, hmm?) helps topt it all in time with the music as precisely as posible and tweak from there. I could give you other science like tell you about the different types of dB or teach you how to calculate delay between a DI and a mic on the same instrument by getting the speed of sound using a thermometer and ... but for msot people this translation from BPM to MS for quarters, eights, tripelts and sixteenths will be the most sueful reference they have ever seen. For real. boundless apllications if you sit and think about it

Awesome to read your interested in improving the way your music sounds however, the question you asked is about 1000 questions in 1. That's understandable but to really help I'd need a bit more information.

I'm working on a mixing 101 article/video series for Equipboard that should help- covering all of the basics over a series of installments. Everything from mixing a kick with baselines, compression, reverb, delay, et cetera.

but on helping you in a more direct way-

If you link here to the song you're having trouble with I'd be happy to talk about how I think you might get it sounding better just using your stock plug-ins that came with whatever DAW you're using & keeping it dead simple.

If you're uncomfortable sharing something that's a work in progress online we can talk about having you email it to me.

If you also link to another song you feel is similar- like from an artist that inpired the track/style you're working on. That kind of context would really help me understand the sound your after.

There's no shortage of mixing videos out there but you asked how you could improve your mixes so I "unmixed" a song and then started over again & put this together for you-

Mixing with Pink Noise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NICds3eiAT0&feature=youtu.be

This is a way to get started learning balance- Not a way to mix every song going forward of course.

but as I mention in the video-

You got a song you really like?

Dump it into your DAW and and look at it with Ableton's Spectrum or the equivlent in any other DAW.

Try and make your mix conform to the same profile.

Experiment, ask questions, and have a blast makin' music.

Disclaimer:

This was done hastily while I was dealing with tech support so with a grain of salt, ya know?

The upcoming one will be way more fun/way less dry as well. This was just a quick one-off.

This is also a good reference-

Interactive Freq Chart-

http://www.independentrecording.net/irn/resources/freqchart/main_display.htm

You might not be using traditional instrumentation but you at least know what they sound like and you can transfer those concepts to whatever you are playing.

that's a really cool chart, Xaq because it combines the arangers' chart with the frequency spectrum in HZ (although only for the fundamental, it doesn't take intoa ccount the ahrmonics produced by each isntrument that will be higher and give the sound its timbre)

some thoughts on frequencies to listen to while recording and mixing: snares whether live, sampled, drum machine? basically a burst of noise, right? yes and no, 12k sizzle, 6k snap, there's ringing harmonics of some sort somewhere in the upper mids below 6k but generally above 800 cycles in a real drum but just the hissiness of the noise in an analog drum machine snare, you'll hear perceived 'woodiness below that until below 400 cycles when you find the weight of the sound and eprcieved stick thud and then there's rumble too far below 200 cycles, depending on the sound. And wa up top is detail that will give your ears a sense of distance because the highest frequencies get absorbed by air friction msot readily being the shortest wave cycles so clsoe soudns ahve more of them and ebcause we think of snares and drums in general as acoustic isntruments with real physical volume limits the top end tells your ears so much about the location of that sound in relation to your lsitening position and relative to the rest of the mix.

More anon. Getting tired...

THIS! is Equipboard!

This is what makes this site magic!

Gather in guys.. big Equipboard hug!

POW!

I swear the tutorials I'm working on are gonna be way more fun to watch!

This was very much off the cuff & as a result super dry.

I had some more fun I wanted to build in but I just didn't have time this go round.

I forgot to leave a link but a quick google search for "pink noise" should give you a host of options to download a file.

If not I'm happy to provide you a link to the one I used.

For grabbing stuffs online try Offliberty or Audio Hijack. There are more options out there of course but those are what I use on most quick sample grabs...

POW!

I swear the tutorials I'm working on are gonna be way more fun to watch!

after I watched it Iw as pretty impressed but when you said it was dry remember my suggestion? just end it by saying 'and now for soemthing compeltely different" and then paste the credits to Mony Python and the Holy Grail on the end. Whimsey added...

I forgot to leave a link but a quick google search for "pink noise" should give you a host of options to download a file.

my SE1's noise gen does pink as well as the common white... I actually mix a little into a lot of patches come to think of it. So if this guy's got the right analog synth...

s anyway, some more thoughts on frequency ranges in common instruments... with bass sounds I tend to really separate my kick and actual abss and I mainly have the abss with its deth low, low, low around 80hz or so whereas kick will have its bottom around 100hz depending on how tits. I will roll off a bunch of kick around 40 or 50 and notch out soe 80 too, notch out soe 100ish on bass and roll off the lwos at 20ish. But then kick I will do some sub synth or soemthing to get some sub thumping weight back but I'll dial that in against bass so it thumps below 80hz for the most part or below and above and I'll make sure the 2 soudns are not fighting but working together. so that slamming club music thump is like 100 hz and below in abss instruments... I find beater click to be specific to each kick but its broadly throughout the 800 to 5k range, true mids LOL. I find 250 cycles yo about 600 to be the bouncing ball range. That round, bouncy 70s kick sound lives there and cutting there will give you an open, slappier kick with the right boosts above and below. If you are recording live drums you can do a lot of this with mic placement assuming you pay attention to phase... for dum machines and samples its CRITICAL to be able to ehar this stuff and work with it because not every track ahs room for a bouncing ball kick, for isntance. And we all have our kick preferences and that preverence is rarely going to be flat coming off the machine unless its some pretty minimal music! I don't wanna get into abss ebcause bas guitar, double abss and various bass synth patches will be different as night and day and otehr than treating the bottom with similar respect I would say to play it by ear (pun intended). Hihats? Stick whack around 250ish, mush 300 to 500, ringing 600 to 1k, 1k to 5k is hissiness usually or more ringing... stick CLICK is 5k to about 10k andthat's where you hear sizzle... there's a nice sparkle to them in the 12k area and that's also the detail of the sound to me u to about 14k and from there its distance like I discussed in snares. You can do a lot with a 15k shelf at 3 to 6dB with a fairly sharp slope to pull the hihats back but maintain a reasonable amount of modern brightness. Note, working with fully synthesized hihats like from an 808 or dr55 is another story. There's soem overlap but they don't pitch out the same way as real hihats or even the gritty samples from the 909.

https://www.izotope.com/en/community/blog/tips-tutorials/2017/07/8-common-compression-mistakes-music-producers-make.html

also this might be helpful-

http://edmprod.com/beatport-analysis/

this is more on arrangement, key, etc. these are also conciderations when mixing.

much easier to mix a well thought out track.

also this might be helpful-

http://edmprod.com/beatport-analysis/

thats a really interesting article if only for his structural analysis although the way he lumped some of the different sections together was a little confusing for me ebcause it was a lot more, umm, homogenous than how traditional american songwriting looks at structure, but hey, there must be soe sense to it becaause EDM comes from house and techno and house for the smot part comes from disco, techno comes from Kraftwerk but also funk, so there ya go, there are ties to blues-based songs, gospel and the great american songbook

Wha?

Yeah, perspective is really important. You're not alone.

If you wanna shoot me a session file sometime im happy to give ya feedback soon as I've got time.