As a beginner, I’m always looking for good resources like tutorials to learn more about music production, it’s not an easy experience, because there are too many professional producers posting tutorials, and each of them has his own approach to execute each process.
That’s why I’m writing this post about what I’m learning from professional producers I’m following and share my experience with you, also it’s a good idea to keep a reference and update it each time I learn something new, I hope you like this overview about mixing and please don’t hesitate to comment this way I can update it.
First of all, it’s important to introduce the professional producers I’m following, I share these pieces of information to show some respect for what they are doing.
The first professional producer I’m following is :
FireWalk:
FireWalk Youtube channel
FireWalk on SoundCloud
FireWalk Facebook Page
Some of FireWalk’s awesome work :
What is mixing?
I invest many hours watching tutorials and take notes about the mixing process, there are various approaches used by professionals, but all of them agreed on one point, which is “There’s no correct or wrong process”.
Mixing is a combination of science and art, each professional has his specific steps, depending on the music genre and the elements used during the production phase, the main point is to learn and understand how, why, and when they do each step of mixing, once you get it, you can build your own process using a combination of them, and try to get reviews and update it.
How can we define Mixing? According to FireWalk:
The mixing process is DAW independent, it’s always the same in any used DAW, we have just to care about doing the mixing steps correctly, even we have a very good composition if our mixing process is awful we end up with unbalanced sound.
A good mixing ensures that all production elements work well together, this is some steps to reach that:
- Set all volume levels right way
- Set up the routing
- Applay processing to individual tracks
- Applay processing to groups
The main goal of mixing is to be sure that each element of our track have his own space in the global production and avoid frequencies to overlap and clash with each other making it difficult to hear all the individual elements sound, it’s what professional producer call muddy mix.
After hours of video tutorials and reading, I pull out three major steps to get acceptable mixing:
- Gain staging
- Leveling
- Eqing
Gain Staging
Gain staging is one of the most important steps to getting a pro-sounding mix, it maximizes the clarity of a mix by working on the volume levels in different locations, like synth and channel rack. There are many approaches used by professional producers to carry on gain staging, all of them try to save a sound clipping, sound resolution loss, and distortion.
Sound Clipping
According to professional producers, gain staging is very important and it’s not cost too much time, and the benefit is too height, later on, also they suggest keeping the volume levels down from the very first source to the next until it ends up in the master bus.
We will go more in detail with gain staging in the next article.
Leveling
Leveling is setting all the elements volume in good relation to each other, it’s a major step of the mixing process, it’s about to select the start point carefully and build the leveling around it, this process is done in the mixer by adjusting the volume of each channel according to some rules like the amount of decibel in the master channel and the overall sound…
Fruity Loops Mixer
We will go more into detail in the next article.
EQing
EQ means Equalization, its most editing elements frequencies to reduce unneeded ones and makes enough space for each sound of a mix, for example, we have to reduce high-end frequencies of bass to make more available space for Hi-Hat frequencies… We have to learn how to EQ kicks, Sub-bases, Hi-Hats, and other elements of our project. Each of these elements has a specific way to be processed, during this process we use EQing plugin like Fruity parametric EQ2:
Fruity parametric EQ2
We will go more into detail in the next article.
Conclusion
In this post, I just introduce what I globally understand about the mixing process, maybe I’m wrong on some points, or I forgot some aspect, so if you think there any amelioration or missing steps, please add a comment this way I can make updates. In the next post, I’ll explain in detail what I understand about the whole mixing process, especially the one explained by the professional producer FireWalK.
Thank you for reading.
