In my last blog post I demonstrated a good starting point for teaching students how to mix.
After six weeks or so of having my students mixing using only faders, panning and EQ (on a few projects) I then start to discuss the overall picture of the mix process. Advanced students would be required to purchase the excellent Mike Senior book on mixing on Kindle in addition to reading other articles online and visiting blog posts like soundscoop (and a multitude of others).
Many recording equipment manufacturers like Universal Audio, AVID, Presonus and many others also offer excellent mixing tutorials and students are encouraged to complete as many of these as possible. However, while we all have some motivated and diligent students, we’re always going to have several that need a little more ‘spoon-feeding’ (which of course we always try to ‘wean’ them off as good parents/teachers should!). It would be great if all students went to these websites and started teaching themselves (which undoubtedly some students will) but for others I’ve done a few guides that may help.
NZ Music Technology teachers will be familiar with my resources from http://www.learningideas.co.nz and these are excellent guides specifically tailored to the NZQA assessment system. A resource I wrote several years ago (which was hugely influenced by the excellent book The Mixing Engineers Handbook by Bobby Owsinski from Mix Books) which I gave away free to NZ teachers can be downloaded here. It basically goes through the stages of mixing and can be summed up like this (but keep in mind there is no one way to mix as every mix and mixing engineer is different – but this is good for newbies):
Balance the faders
Pan the tracks to create a stereo image (although some engineers, particularly if mixing for a live PA system will choose to mix in mono for various reasons)
Use EQ to give each instrument it’s own space in the overall frequency range of the track. You can think of it like this:
(I got this image off the http://www.harmonycentral.com website many years ago and have not been able to find the pagefor it again so sorry I’m unable to give proper credit to the person that created it).
Use compression on some instruments to reduce the dynamic range to create a more stable volume balance between the instruments (but in many instances it’s more appropriate to use compression before EQ, or before and after, or use multiple compressors… it gets quite complicated really!)
Add ambience with reverb and/or delay. Note, it’s best to try and get this naturally by recording in a very nice room with good acoustics. But if this isn’t possible then record the tracks as ‘dry’ as possible and add ambience in your DAW.
Add interest. All of the above just serves the purpose of making sure you can achieve a stable balance and hear everything. But it may not make the mix very interesting. So here you do whatever you need to make the mix dynamic, exciting, original – this is where you attempt to create a piece of great art! I’ll try to do a blog post dedicated to this point in future weeks.
I’ve done a video for my students and NZ teachers who are teaching the level 2 27703 unit standard, showing how to do a basic mix in a live setting. Here I’m using a Presonus Studio Live mixing desk and have the audio tracks streaming from my laptop to the mixing desk (rather than having a live band in the room). I find this mixing desk a great tool for teaching live mixing to my students but all the concepts I discuss in the video are equally applicable to mixing in a studio/DAW environment.
This video has worked well for my students who may not have followed my in-class demos and may be too nervous to ask questions in front of others as they’re able to replay parts they don’t quite understand. It serves a good way of filling in the gaps for them.
Please note, the tracks from this video were downloaded from the excellent Sound on Sound magazine website.
In another blog post I’ll go into detail about my assessment processes for mixing with my senior students. Students can’t just do a mix – they have to be able to articulate all their mix decisions and why they made them.
Thanks,
Duncan
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