SIR GIANT - How To Mix A Song (basic advices)

SIR GIANT shows some basic tricks for you to start your mix and get the best from it. There is so much more to do with the mix, but this is a very good start!

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Howto & Style

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[PunnonyDeal]

thnx man nice tuto bless P Deal

[sirgiantmusic]

@PunnonyDeal you're welcome! I'm glad it was useful, somehow! Keep in touch! Between, check out my new music website here: w w w . b a n d b e r r y . c o m

[zionirie1]

respect big man luv your style........luv the tutorial...blessssss

[fabioltsilva]

And in reverbs: Don't go into the trouble of applying reverb to low frequency instruments. The reflections have so much energy that they can "muddy" up the whole mix...

[fabioltsilva]

Yeah. Some instruments have similar effects on a human being: A french horn (transmits that "ominous" feeling), a Saxophone (transmits "soul"), a flute (transmits soothing and peace)... But never, nothing so powerful as a human voice or choir.

Also, on stereo fields. Unless you are not going for a real piano, never squash the stereo variance of a grand piano: Low keys on the left and high keys on the right... Just like a drum set.

[fabioltsilva]

10 - Finally: Never, never, never underestimate the "power" of the final step: Downmixing to Stereo or "Mastering". Leave always in each track a "headroom". Never allow a single track rise above -12dB or the mastering engineer will not have "space" to manipulate the final effects and you can even suffer from clipping when summing similar frequencies...

[fabioltsilva]

8 - I am a fan of Sonic Maximizer and similars. What they do is basically optimize the phase spread of the different waveforms. This is really brilliant for making a single instrument "cut through" the mix.

9 - Don't kid yourself: The singer is the pivotal point of a song. This is very hard to admit if the person mixing is an instrument player. It's a thousand times better a mix with a good clean voice and crappy guitar than the other way around.

[fabioltsilva]

6 - Watch out for crappy eq's: A good EQ doesn't introduce phase distortion which, per se, is imperceptible but, in the context of a crowded mix, it can provoke annoying and undesirable side-effects (like frequency dropouts...)

7 - Remember on your final mix to open up the very high frequencies (> 10Khz) on your EQ's to let the mix "breathe".

[fabioltsilva]

4 - Also very careful with the energy difference. A -4db peak level on 60Hz is much more powerful than a -4db peak level on 5kHz. This means that single-band compression can be very tricky

5 - Listen to your pre-master mix in the most possible outputs. A good example is your car radio, which is radically different from your studio monitors or Hi-Fi.

[fabioltsilva]

2 - Be very careful to not cut the frequencies that compose the transient attack of an instrument. The transient attack consists of 90% of the human perception for instruments

3 - Be very careful with human chorus. The psychoacoustics of your brain tends to pay closer attention to human voices than to other noises. This means that the frequency span, albeit small, will psychologically absorb more attention