![]() Controlling bass and kicks together is another technique. Typically in a song I may only have one vocal reverb and other instruments may share another reverb. Rather than throwing multiple different reverbs on everything, use reverb sends, and group the instruments to send to those reverbs. If all your instruments are going all the time, and are a constant volume it's going to be hard to mix. Use of good dynamics and not cluttering your songs also helps with the mixing process, it's not all about trying to fix the issues in the final stages, but choosing the right instrument tones, separating instruments into the bands they use, and removing unwanted frequencies that create additive mush to other instruments. What kind of genre are you looking at improving? If doing orchestral works, film scores are also a great resource. ![]() Most of the big budget commercial game tracks should have some credits to mixing and mastering engineers and those are some that you could look at too. Mr Cab Driver from Lenny Kravitz was one of them. While I was at SAE, I took tracks from CDs I owned to reference and analyze. To learn clarity and mixing and mastestering, you can use commercial tracks to deconstruct and analyse. They're usually just a company collating a whole bunch of composers works to license out. problem is with royalty free tracks, you never know if they have been mixed or mastered well to begin with. You want to go with professionally mixed and mastered tracks. But if I could find high quality uncompressed reference tracks it could improve my music. Some tracks will use too much reverb too. Either because of compression or some other factor. I've mostly been trying to use Royalty-Free music for reference tracks but they seem to lack clarity. Often times the lower instruments will be difficult to hear in the mix or it will be hard to tell where stuff is panned. Well the problem I'm having is with a lot of mixes are hard to deconstruct. There's no specific 'reference track' library persay, just songs that you aspire to mix as well as. ![]() A lot of this skill is practice, and learning how to hear things in the music and then understanding how your processing and eqing will affect that mix. Mixing is like playing an instrument, you don't just do it, you need to learn the basics first and then practice listening to other's play to try to emulate, and practice playing to improve. Our lecturer used to test us twice a week by boosting or ducking one of the bands. We also learned how to hear individual frequencies on a 20 band EQ. ![]() These are actual exercises we had to do in an audio engineering course. This is the blue print you can use to apply to your own song. You should be able to construct a fairly good graphic representation of a mix. Identify processing used - chorus, flange, echo, reverb. Within that square, draw what instruments and where they are in the stereo field, how far back they are in the mix - volume, placement with wet reverb. Listen to a song you're using as a reference. Then you can A/B your mix with the reference track and see how they compare.ĭraw a square on a piece of paper. Reference tracks are songs that are mixed well in the genre you are mixing and using them as a tool to help re-create the same EQ, reverb, panning and volume for the parts. Taking a whole mix and deconstructing it so you can analyze how it was constructed in the mix. Active listening involves training your ear to hone in on elements in a song. One of the things you can help is to imrpove your analytical listening.
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