One of the easiest ways to give your mixes some additional polish is to use reverb. Reverb allows you to add depth to your tracks, make your drums sound bigger, and add fullness and sustain to your vocals. The problem with reverb is that, although it can bring new life to your tracks, it is […]
If you’ve spent any time looking at pictures of pro studios, watching online mix tutorials, going through your plugin list, or following any plugin manufacturers, chances are very high that you’ll be familiar with the famous 1176 compressor (or some variation of it). What’s the deal with these things? Why are there SOOOO many different […]
Audio engineers love finding new toys and plugins to play with. These days there are literally hundreds of plugins available for purchase that claim to be the solution to all of your mixing problems. The sad fact is that so many of them are simply variations of other existing plugins. Do you really need ANOTHER 1176 compressor? It’s very […]
Recording drums in a small room can be a challenge. If you’ve ever tried recording drums before, you’d know that the room you’re tracking in can play a major role in the final sound… Large rooms tend to make the drums sound huge and roomy. Small rooms will make the drums sound tight and dry. […]
When it comes recording, editing and mixing, it’s important to be efficient and work fast so that you can stay in a creative headspace. There’s nothing worse than having to deal with little organizational steps that disrupt the creative flow and force you to work slower. For that reason, I thought it’d be helpful to […]
Have you ever experienced this before? You start working on a mix, throw the faders up, add some eq and compression, you’ve got the track feeling good… …But then you look at your master levels… … You’re clipping the master buss. …So you pull all of the channels down to prevent it from going in […]
Recently, I moved into a new condo. As exciting as the move was, one thing that absolutely terrified me was how my new mix room was going to sound. For years, I had been working out of a small bedroom to do the majority of my mixing and mastering work. Since I listened to/worked on […]
One of the biggest challenges most mixers face is getting the low end to translate properly across various sets of speakers. Often when we play things back on headphones or laptop speakers, the low end totally disappears. It seems that when this happens, a natural instinct for a lot of mixers is to go back […]
Getting a balanced low end while mixing bass guitar is one of the biggest challenges most engineers face. It can be extremely difficult to get your bass tracks to cut through your mix without overpowering everything else and making your mix sound really muddy. EQ and compression can be your best friends for correcting this […]
As trends in music change, so do the tools we use to help create mixes. Often these tools aren’t new or revolutionary, but instead they’ve resurfaced in popularity. Just like modern music relies on the use of drum samples; more and more these days, I hear a lot of people talking about reamping guitars. …Maybe it’s […]
