10 Years of Mixing Advice in 10 Minutes

okay let's try this again I just filmed this entire video dragged it onto the computer and everything was corrupted so here we go again it's been exactly 10 years since I bought my first midi keyboard I was super inspired by some of my favorite artists so I went to the local music shop got the cheapest one I could get loaded up the free software and started making beats in my bedroom just purely for fun I spent those 10 years producing mixing mastering eventually accidentally sort of turning this from a hobby into a full-time job and

running my own Studio but more importantly it got me thinking about loads of the harder lessons or just straight up mistakes that I've made over the years a few of them are just simple mixing tips others are mindset shifts that really help things click into place I don't want to turn this into a 45 minute long video essay but if any of these Concepts really resonate with you or connect and you want to have a much deeper conversation just leave a comment and I'm happy to have a chat or I can turn any of these

into a much longer and more detailed video this is the best way to mix competing tracks and it's the most common question I he while there are lots of plugins designed to help carve space between different tracks and you can use eqs and dynamic eqs to you know attenuate and boost the same regions on different tracks to try to carve space but the reason it's so difficult to get all of these competing elements to fit together in the mix is because the problem cannot be fixed in the mix this is one thing that really has

to be fixed in the arrangement and production and nobody likes to hear that it was so annoying to hear this when I was starting out or even for many years but listen to any of your favorite records notice how all of the elements Groove around each other fit in the pocket and they're all working with the arrangement once this mindset shift SNS in your tracks are going to sound so much more confident they're going to have a lot more purpose they're going to groove well and they're going to Mi pretty much mix themselves lots of

the presets you use like synthesizer presets they're so full range with Basse mid and treble and they sound amazing you're not going to be able to stack too much on top of it you've got to make some compromises if you want to let the let the song breathe and do what it's supposed to do as a song this is a more practical tip this is how important it is to check the phase of your samples if you're going to be layering them especially in the low end I've got a whole video about this but really

quickly if you literally zoom in on the sample say you're layering two kick drums you can see the waveforms go above and below the central line just make sure that at the same time they're both going up and down because these will reinforce each other if the two waveforms are opposite they're actually going to cancel each other out and no amount of processing EQ compression Distortion anything you lay onto it can help because the two waveforms are canceling each other out before you've even started and the reason I share this is I've just had a

few embarrassing mixes that I've done where I didn't realize until the next day or the next week why I was struggling couldn't make the kick and base work layering samples adding on EQ low-end um exciters and Distortion all sorts of stuff all it needed was the polarity to be reversed so there's always going to be some degree of phase cancellation I just didn't understand anything about that for the first couple of years and I was just you know loading on samples and trying to make things work and it just it was bad so hopefully you've

learned from that mistake I learned this one years too late I call it the five click Rule and I've never shared this online at one point I decided that if anything was going to take more than five clicks in my dawr software I had to find either a better way to do it automate it shortcut it or simply just use a different software my relationship with the software at the start was really bad I felt like I was wrestling this software to make it work for me I always felt like I was having to do

the heavy lifting and the software was just totally getting in the way there had to be a better way to do it and the truth is if you go through the manual if you look for advice online there almost certainly is if you're trying to record stuff add effects uh pull in your favorite presets load up projects there's no need to be clicking through loads of menus unless you're looking for very obscure things or maybe you're doing something very labor intensive like manual pitch correction if I'm creating folders opening up new projects I can just

type a name type the artist name song name and it will generate all the folders open the project pull in the tracks open up all my effects you usually pay quite a lot of money for these softwares so at least let them do a lot of the heavy lifting for you so that you can just be creative do your music production mixing master ing whatever it is and have a bit of fun with it instead of wrestling with the software this one is insanely controversial and I really don't know why but basically a few years

ago it looked like loudness regulations and specifications were going to be coming in and that it would make everything more beneficial to you if you mastered at slightly lower levels and uh followed the specifications for particular streaming services but it's become completely apparent to me especially after my last mastering video where I looked at what a bunch of Professional Engineers were doing and what levels they were hitting but to keep this brief basically the loudness Wars are over and Loud has won almost all Professional Engineers are pretty much disregarding the specifications that Spotify or apple

music are giving and we're simply doing what's best for the song or maximum loudness now this annoys a lot of Engineers because it makes people think well you know you don't need to hire anyone you can just do this yourself but I actually think and so do a lot of my clients that this makes it even more important to hire a mastering engineer because they can audition a whole bunch of loudness is give you loads of options and we can both pick the version that sounds best for your genre instead of arbitrarily following what Spotify

or iTunes or apple music thinks is best for your song in short the loudness Wars are over you don't need to master to any specific specifications those regulations exist so that when you submit your song it's not going to blow anyone's eard drums out or play back super super loud this this is a more practical tip soloing your channels is great when you're learning effects or you're learning processing but when I'm actually mixing this slows me down because it's so easy to make things sound good in Solo you know what it's like you mix something

that sounds amazing you play the rest of the tracks and it doesn't fit in you have to make a load of adjustments so what I tried to do and this is really difficult and disorienting at first is playing that track in the context of everything else if you're mixing the snare keep the rest of the drums on while you're adding effects if you're mixing the vocal maybe keep the guitars or the synthesizers on even at a lower level this is going to rapidly improve the speed of your mixing because you're not going to have to

go back and remix everything for the second third or fourth time when things aren't fitting in but also it reduces your ear fatigue because you will be working quicker not having to listen to the same sounds over and over again you've probably heard the phrase it's not about the gear it's about the ear and while this tries to be positive I think a lot of the time it's actually just wrong and it can sometimes come across as gaslighting when there's people sitting in front of really expensive equipment telling you that it's not about any of

that it's all about your ears some issues are going to be skill-based and you don't need more equipment it's all just about what you know but there are other times when you do need the right tool for the job now we don't apply this phrase to any other profession that I can think of if you're an electrician it's okay to have all the tools you need in your toolkit Gardener it's okay to have a great lawnmower video editor you can have a great color accurate screen otherwise you can't see what you're doing if you're a

music music producer mixer mastering engineer it's okay to have good equipment that lets you accurately hear your music when I was starting out I had awful speakers no acoustic treatment no amount of skill could have made that much better there are things that I could I could not even hear in my mix that were issues and having a good monitoring environment certainly would have helped the message here is not to go out and buy a load of equipment it's just to understand the limitations of your own equipment and don't let people Gaslight you while sitting

in front of loads of expensive equipment telling you that it's all about their ears and that none of the fancy equipment makes a difference cuz I've seen people in with millions of dollars of equipment and room surrounding them say that it's all about their ears and it's just like well why would you have all that incredible equipment if you didn't need any of it it's a little bit disingenuous so this one's a bit awkward cuz I know that I am a person online who's trying to share advice from time to time but at least with

me and other people in videos we've got a name a face there's a level of accountability if I make mistakes I'm either going to own up to them and fix them or people in the comments are going to tell me that and we can all learn from it but the amount of things that I picked up on forums and blogs as a beginner that I've had to unlearn because they're complete nonsense and at the time I didn't have the experience to know whether it was truth really legit or just a complete load of nonsense and

Bs to be honest it takes several years to be able to develop that ability to know so when you're uh more experienced or more advanced these these forums and blogs can be great because you can pick the bits you need and pretty much throw away the rest people sharing advice about levels for a particular tracks or saying that you can only EQ or compress by a certain number of DB like three or six DB when I was starting out in music production this concept of never compressing more than 3 to 6 DB was just spoken

like gospel all over the Internet and then you get into the more professional world and you realize that is absolute nonsense you just do what the tracks need and by far the biggest lesson here is that if there's anyone online trying to sell you any sort of formula or method to mix or produce a song or Master by a particular method or formula or by numbers that's absolute nonsense anyone that's professional knows that there's no such formula it's a very creative process and anyone trying to sell you especially a course uh that gives you some

exact step-by-step guide to like to a hit song or some perfect mix that is nonsense and I wish I'd known that soon as well so that's all I have time for here I've got loads more points that I want to get to but I'm aware this video is just going to get super super long which I said it wouldn't uh I'm trying to do some different things on YouTube and my other social medias especially with short form content at the end of the day I'm trying to do this to connect with the community and try

to offer stuff of value the sort of stuff that I wish I was I had seen when I was starting out so just let me know what are the sort of stuff you'd want to see and also let me know if there's any you know mistakes or lessons you've learned along the way I know some of you have been doing this longer than I I have and I'm sure you've made just as many mistakes as I have although I hope not but you tend to learn from your mistakes I've learned from them hopefully you can

learn from them all too so thank you very much for watching I hope to see you in the next video and have a great week bye for now