 This video is sponsored by DistroKid. Follow the VIP link in the description down below to get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music to the world. Hi folks, I'm Mike, and I hope you're well. YouTube is full of an overwhelming number of mixing tutorials. And if you're just starting out, it could be difficult to know exactly what to focus on. That's why I've made this video with five essential beginners mixing tips. But even if you've been mixing for a while, you may find these useful in terms of refocusing on what's really important. Let's get started with what I think is absolutely key. Balance. I'm primarily talking about level or the comparative volume of all of the elements in your mix. Balance doesn't mean that all of the faders will be at the same level, and it doesn't mean that all of the meters will be reading at roughly the same level. It's a little bit more subtle than that. And when you have a good balance, it feels like everything is working in the right way with each element. In other words, the things that are supposed to be kind of in the background will sound in the background, and the things that are supposed to be upfront, often things like vocals, will feel like they're just a bit upfront in terms of everything else. Now, you've been listening to good balanced mixes your whole life when you listen to commercial music. However, when you get into your door and do your own balance, you can quickly find that you lose objectivity. And when that happens, I have a really quick tip for you, something you can do. Let's take a look at this really simple mix. This is a guitar and a vocal. We just wanna balance these two things together. Now, I'm gonna play this for a few moments, and I reckon 99.9% of you will spot what is wrong with it right away. Was it the touch of my hand? Was it the way that I stand? Okay, that guitar is way too quiet, right? So I think we all understand that right away. Let's push the fader for the guitar all the way up to the top, and have another listen. Was it the touch of my hand? Was it the way that I stand? Too close. Now, it wasn't quite so obvious this time, but I think most of you will agree that that guitar was kind of overwhelming the vocal, and the vocal should really be sitting up front with this piece of music. So what I like to do is find those extremes and then work from them to a point where I'm kind of not quite sure anymore. So let's push that fader all the way down to where it was before. I'm gonna play the track, and I'm gradually gonna push the fader up until I get to that point where I just feel, is it right or not? Not sure, let's have a listen. Was it the touch of my hand? Was it the way that I stand? Too close, and that kept you running? This is a point where I'm not quite sure. I'm thinking, you know, that could be okay. Let's try the other extreme and work down from it. So fader all the way up. Was it the touch of my hand? Was it the way that I stand? Too close, and that kept you running? Okay, so I think there is a bit of a gray area. So what I'm gonna do is look at those two extremes. They were here and here, or not extremes, but the edges of the extremes, and then just go halfway in between, right? It happens to be around about zero for this mix. Doesn't mean it will be for yours, but that's where I reckon it's probably gonna be about okay. Let's have a listen. Was it the touch of my hand? Was it the way that I stand? Too close. Now I think that is now about right. So I find it useful to listen to those extremes and work from them. Now as I add more elements to this song, I may find that I'll be fine tuning this for absolute sure, but that's a pretty good starting point. Now there's one other thing which you can use in this situation, which is absolutely golden. Reference tracks. These can really save your life with a mix. A reference track is a commercially produced track which you're gonna use as a reference. Something to listen to and compare to your mix to assess all kinds of elements about your mix. We'll talk about that later, but first of all, I wanna talk about some really important things about reference tracks. First of all, make sure you choose the right track. Preferably something in a similar genre with similar instruments being used and a track that you would like your track to sound similar to in terms of productions. That's super important. The other thing is make sure you're listening to your reference track through the same speakers that you're mixing with. The easiest way to do that is just to drag or import your track into your door. I like to have it on its own track which I can solo and mute, et cetera. That's really handy. And when you do that, make sure it's roughly at the same volume as the rest of your mix. Usually it's gonna be way too loud because it's already been mastered. So often you'll have to turn it down a little so it's at a similar volume because if it's much louder, it tends to just sound better to you for that reason. So that's super important with reference tracks. Now what am I listening for in a reference track? Well, I'll go through a few of the things that I often listen to. First of all, there's balance that we talked about a moment ago. How loud is the vocal compared to the guitar or the piano? How loud is the kick compared to the bass guitar? Those kinds of things are really important. So I'll be listening to the reference, then listening to mine and comparing them. Another thing that I'll be listening for is particular frequency ranges. I'll listen for air or those very high frequency ranges in the reference and see how mine compares. On the other end of the scale, the low end. Now the low end is super, super important, I feel with reference tracks because many of us are mixing in non-ideal environments in terms of low end. So a reference can be super helpful. And I'll also be listening for presence in the mid frequencies, all of that kind of stuff. So definitely do make sure of reference tracks. And if you've been mixing for a while and you're struggling with your mixes, let me know in the comments down below, have you been using reference tracks? Love to hear from you on that. By the way, when I was preparing for this video, I came up with so many other tips apart from the five I've included here. If you'd like to know about those and you'd like to see a part two to this video, do let me know in the comments down below. So a lot of people wonder where they should start their mix and I would most often suggest that you should start in the loudest part of the song. In this song, for example, you can see here where all these sort of pink clips are that we have the most elements present in the song in that part of the song. It's generally going to be the loudest part of the song. So I would start your mix there and try and get everything in balance. But there's a word of caution with this. Just because the balance will be correct for that part of the song, doesn't mean it's going to be correct in other parts of the song. So for example, in this very busy section, I may have a particular balance between the vocal and the piano, but I may find in a much quieter verse that I don't need the same balance. Now we normally change that from one section to another section of a song through automation. So automating values. It could be a fader. It could be levels of different effects or what have you. Now automation is sometimes regarded as a rather more sort of intermediate part of mixing. And I guess you could say that it's something that you wouldn't concern yourself with right now if you're a beginner, but I would aim to learn about it reasonably soon. Otherwise you're just going to find that some parts of your song sound in balance and other parts don't. And you want the whole thing to be in balance. Use buses. I come across people who've been recording at home for decades sometimes and they still don't use buses. And I can't help but feel they're making mixing way more difficult than it needs to be. Let me show you why. I've got a number of different vocal tracks here. 10 of them all in fact. And they make up a kind of a choir or a vocal group. I'm going to select all of them. And without using a bus, I'm going to apply reverb to each of them. So I'll grab my reverb and I'll just go and drop it in the insert section. At least here in studio one, it automatically inserts it to all of the tracks I've got selected. Now the first thing I'll often want to do is create a balance between the dry and the wet signal. So what I'd need to do is go to the first track here, solo it and pull up its plug-in like so, have a listen and adjust that balance. Okay, that's fine. But I'm now going to have to go through that process another nine times for these 10 tracks. And if I don't get it right when I've added other elements to this mix, I'll have to go back and do it all again. I probably won't bother. And it will probably never be quite right. The other thing is I'm using 10 plugins already in my mix. And even though we've got much more powerful computers these days, I still think we need to manage the resources from within our door. Okay, so how would you do this with a bus? Well, first of all, let's get rid of all of those plugins. And here in studio one at least, once I've got all of my tracks selected, I can grab my reverb and drag it over to the sends section. So I'll do that and just drop it there. And if I just move this plugin out of the way slightly, you can see that a bus has been created here. A bus is just an extra channel in our console or a mix through in our door where we can send audio. It's as simple as that really, but it has multiple uses. And the first use here is for our reverb. Let's have a quick listen. Oh, we play. So all of those vocals have now got reverb on them, but the balance is pretty poor. Well, all I have to do is pull up this one plugin here, which is inserted into my bus and adjust that balance. However, I'm not actually gonna use the plugin for this. What I'm gonna do when I'm using a bus is turn this signal all the way up to fully wet in the plugin. There's usually a control for that. And then what I can do is just use the fader on the bus down here to adjust that blend. Let's do that now. Oh, we played it all this game. And if I want to adjust it again later, super, super simple. I don't need to do it 10 times every time I want to make an adjustment. So that's one use of buses and it's one way of routing to a bus using an effects send. Let's just get rid of that for a moment. I'll get rid of the send from all of the tracks like so. Just do that, remove. Sorry, I didn't select all of them. Let's try that again, remove. And this time I'm gonna show you how we can use a bus to route all of the sound from a track or a channel in your mixer through to that bus. So I'm gonna select all of them again and then I'm gonna right click here in Studio One and select Add Bus for Selected Channels. I do that. And you can see that again, a bus has been created. Now, because all of those vocals are going through to that bus, I can now control the whole volume of the whole choir with just one fader like so. Oh, we played it all. It's just one of the many uses of buses. It may seem like a kind of an intermediate kind of a thing to be worrying about as a beginner, but I would say get on to it as quick as you can. It's gonna make your life much, much easier. Now, when you wanna get your music heard and sold on major platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Google Play, et cetera, I highly recommend you make use of our sponsor, DistroKid. You don't have to sign up with accounts for all of those places. DistroKid is a place where you can manage it all from one central place. It's really, really cheap, actually. And if you follow the VIP link in the description down below, it's even cheaper. The car test. Back in the day, you'd finish your mix in the studio, and the first thing you do is jump into a car, take it for a drive, and have it listened to on speakers that were down by your legs in a very closed environment where you're not sitting equally between speakers, et cetera, a very different experience to listening to your song in studio monitors. And the point of the car test, I suppose, was to listen to it in an environment where many listeners will be listening to it. And as I say, in a place where you're gonna get a very different sound to your studio monitors. Now, the car test is probably still important, but I'd say possibly more important would be the ear pod test, or maybe even just the phone speaker test. The important thing is, do listen to your mix on different devices. It's going to reveal problems that you didn't know were there on your studio monitors, especially for home studio producers where our mixing environment is often less than ideal. Now, do be cautious with this. Obviously, these different systems do have characteristics. Don't listen through a phone speaker and expect it to have amazing bass response. It doesn't. It probably can't even produce some of the low frequencies. So I don't want you to listen to that and then suddenly turn up all of the low end in your mix to compensate. So do this with some intelligence. But I would say that, as I say, the ear pod test is really important these days because for many of us, it's where we listen to most of our music. Now, what that means is because you're familiar with your particular listening device, you kind of know how a professional mix should sound on that at least. So it's a really good place to test your mix. Now, as I said earlier, if you'd like a part two to this video, there's so many tips I could have given you today which I didn't have time for. So let me know about that in the comments down below. And if I get enough comments, I'll definitely make that video. Thank you so much for joining me today. Good luck with your mixing and I'll see you in the next video.