Same here, the book the most impactful on my production.
The 3 first chapters are strong keys: room treatment, monitors and dealing with low end.
A good pair of monitors + a sub also had a lot of influence.
3 Likes
yes, this is it, the technique is called CHECKERBOARDING, think about a chess or checkerboard, you canât have ANY black where there is red/white. Black is Bass. try and clear AS MUCH out of the low end as you possibly can when your big bass is thumping, those are your kicks and synths, you need to CLEAR THE WAY for this BIG FATTIES to thump on through. then when you have other sounds that have some low end content - pads, chords, some leads, beefier snares - those are red/white squares. keep the black depths of the bass far away from these hits.
so much for basic composition. real mixing is the art of tastefully breaking this rule to create interesting subharmonic distortion.
edit: NOTA BENE: this means, very explicitly, that a good mix STARTS WITH COMPOSITION. there is NO mixing or mastering technique WHATSOEVER, except perhaps TEXT EDITING THE BIT STREAM OF THE AUDIO FILE⌠that can repair a shitty composition with overlapping sub basses!
2 Likes
It would be great to have a dedicated thread where people can upload snippets of their tracks and get feedback from the community, strictly over the quality of the mix (balance, loudness, translation to different systems, etc.).
To make it more useful the person giving feedback could specify what theyâre listening thru.
For example, I could comment on someoneâs track saying âOn my Sony MDR 7506 it sounds a bit bass heavy and too piercing at around 3kâ.
I think it would be a great way to help fine-tune the mix of our tracks.
7 Likes
Thatâs a nice purist idea in theory, but in practice plenty of people get good results mixing through compressors.
Some thoughts.
Largely youâre going to get better at it by doing it and learning to trust your judgement. Itâll help though if you
- Get some decent speakers.
- Treat your listening environment with sound treatment.
As far as getting things right on a range of speakers (without having access to a load of different kinds of speakers) goes, you could use something like Sound ID Reference, which attempts to emulate different kinds of listening environments (cars, phones, &c.). Itâs not going to be exactly the same as actually listening to your music using those devices but itâs easier to do than printing the mix & running out to your car every 5 minutes.
A lot of good advice here, relevant for everyone actually⌠I just canât resist also to cite or summarize my own mistakes:
- frequencies that you simply donât hear on your system, especially in headphones. Including deep bass and especially extreme highs. Thatâs my general problem with drones/ambiences. The interesting part here is that cutting frequencies even with surgical EQ may worsen the overall sound texture, so this âreductionâ should rather start earlier, during sound design itself/before mixing.
- frequencies you do hear, but which do not translate to consumer electronics linearly. Mostly high end. I usually use phone speakers and cheap Marshall wireless headphones to listen my own tracks before sleep to hear which frequency range suffers and distorts the most. Bass mixing, oof, this is its own discipline today.
- stereo & phasing. This is the trickiest to me, as I like to layer drones and all that stuff. Narrowing stereo field and mono mixing is surprisingly relevant today. Just mix it that way and the problematic parts would be quite âvisibleâ. (Canât also ignore the fact that there are now plenty of headphones and speakers models with all sorts of sound enhancement âpluginsâ, like 3d-panoramizers and whatnot, so imbalanced parts would sound in unexpected way).
- music should sound loud during mixing
and after, of course. Not everyone has this option, but IMO mixing it on low volume is definitely a path to mistakes, unless you totally sure what you are doing.
1 Like
In some tracks, yes and it seems those subs need to be filtered out to bring clarity. As I understood from all answers there are a lot of the things Iâm missing when I mix and master and even when I create and select sounds!
There are some tools to help you out âŚ
- we can use a spectrum analyser for single tracks to discover, which frequencies your sound occupies. A good parametric EQ should do the job and should be available in any DAW environment.
- watching the spectrum of a sound and taming it in real-time may be a good approach. Example: many factory presets for synths have been createt to demonstrate the synth-capabilities rather then to use them directly in a mix. But we can get rid of the overloading sound-content by changing the parameters of the preset - or use an EQ before it hits the main channel.
- a kind of advanced mixing tools watch constantly selected tracks for frequency-overlapping issues and others and visualizes areas to be optimized. Example: Izotope Neutron.
2 Likes
Thank you for great tips!
Usually first of all I bring all tracks to -12db and then I volume up those that need to be heard better, drums for instance. The limiter is in the master already. Then I EQ and adjust volumes further. Then I put compressor on almost each track. So in this situation, should I change compressor output if track sounds low after compression? Then I put compressor on the master, after limiter. This is what I usually try to do.
1 Like
Thatâs quite the opposite of âsubtractive EQingâ and I suggest to reconsidering your approach. IMO the better concept is not to make important sounds louder but reduce the volume of less important sounds.
To make sounds louder means that there is still an unwanted frequency battle going on and the mix becomes even worse, because there is more energy battling in the wrong places.
Thatâs where EQs are useful to create space for the more important sounds and side-chain compressing to reduce energy of the less important sounds.
Example: Letâs assume we have a kick, a mellow pad at the same time, and we miss the punch of the kick.
Possible solution:
- put a compressor on the kick to make the transient more present
- use the kick sound as side-chain source for a compressor, which is taming the volume of the pad.
Every time the kick hits, the volume of the pad will be ducked and the kick sits better in the mix.
1 Like
Probably there is something that need to change. So when to EQ? When levels are set to the desired levels or I can make track louder for EQ process and then just set it at the desired level. Are results of EQing can vary on the volume? Sor sure you will here more when the volume is up but Iâm talking about my -12 db starting point.
1 Like
IMO your -12dB starting point is a good decision.
AFAIK the volume of a sound is not critial to EQing unless it generates distortion. But the volume can influence the output of a compressor and change itâs output significantly. This is why I prefer to put a compressor first and the EQ second in my tracks.
IMO, if the sounds do not occupy too many competitive frequencies, there is no problem to make one sound louder than others.
But if there is a frequency/energy competition area, reduction seems to be the better way 
Some mixing problems, particularly if the mix is muddy or unclear, like the vocals are there but we canât understand the lyrics, may result from too much battling frequencies at a certain frequency band. Possible solution would be to reduce other sounds competing energy and let the vocals just be loud enough to be heard clearly and sitting in the mix not on top of it.
3 Likes
How to make my music sound good or at least listenable?
why?!
add more distortion and call it hard techno or industrial techno!
2 Likes
Look for any basic mixing tutorial on YouTube, preferably in the same genre you tend to produce.
1 Like
Had a quick listen on EarPods and other than a slight stereo weirdness in some sections of an already weird song, I couldnât say it is unlistenable 
it isnât club music so it wonât stand out like a sore thumb within a dj set⌠I guess my question is: why do you think it is unlistenable? Is this a matter of having a sound in your head that youâre not getting (meaning itâs a production/songwriting issue) or is it more that you listen to it between other music and it doesnât sound as good. And, again, it really depends on which context do you expect this music to be played in. As I mentioned I listened to it in isolation in EarPods, and there werenât any obvious errors in the mix that I could discern as a casual listener.
1 Like
here another tiny checklist for an utterly forgotten issue everyone has, that is: ground noise leveling.
Prelude: You took your machines, you found a room, time, ideas and meetup with your friends to jam and someone said - lets record - quick all cables into the mixer, mixer to interface, interface to computer, computer records. You jam, and hit pattern on, off, fade in, fade out, tweak the synths, oh boy sounds amazing⌠Did you record that⌠men, is that nice⌠30minutes gone like nothing, lets see what do we have? Oh a little noisy, noisy there, noise everywhere, a total mess ohh noo, offf_ffff ssshhh bom fffffff bum ffff. crap! All that fun time spend for nothing⌠The recording is crap, the moment gone, the jam over.
Well. You forgott that every proper orchestra session starts with leveling, tuning, denoising and only then dramaturgy, composition and documentation.
But how to fix it? In the recording you canât fix it, thats crap already 
⌠Where did it come from? Is something broken? My interface to cheap? Cables to cheap, the microwave on, refridgerator, grandmas chinese heating planked burning? no all turned off, there you go, now you start thinking. Sure those all can make stuff noisy, in particular mobile phones. But thats not your issue, your issue is you pick up with massive gain on top raher than trying to push natural appearing noise down to many -db.
- mute all channels, solo instruments one by one
- fade each soloed mixer strip to 0db <â super important.
Dont do gain (multiplication above 0db) if you can. - now each source should be turned up so that its peaks can reach 0db on your mixer strip. If it reaches more than that no hurry, that is just fine as long no distortion is result.
- still to quite? Then turn up the source if you can, not the receiver (mixer), unless no distortion appears all is still just fine.
- now turn down the mixer strip. What you just effectively made happen is that natural noise is pushed down.
- now unsolo the channel strips and still try to level downward, not upward. If you still want more âgainâ then idealy do that at the source first and only after that on receiver (mixer) side.
If you record a session now, you thank me later. 
ps: fixing ground noise down around -12db that way is not a rare occation, its the whole deal.
2 Likes
Consider paying a professional for mixing/mastering. You can add a few coins and ask for advice and youâre likely to find someone amicable. Mixing/mastering folks do study for a long time for good reason and they tend to be generous, as seen in this thread.
2 Likes
I think I found an answer by reading this thread. I didnât filter sounds properly that created a muddy structure that I couldnât then level, so I had to lower say, bass because at the level I wanted it it was too occupational and was on the way of other sounds and I ended up having very weak bass and kick and unbalanced mix in general. I mean I need to start filtering. Heavy filtering
I learned a few important tricks along the way;
- align tuning of sounds, especially check tuning of bass and kick
- EQ/filter out all frequencies of all sounds that are not relevant
- Using a limited set of send fx often works much better for gelling than inserts
- less is more: picking the right sounds for the right frequency areas is half the battle
- call and response: use 2 sounds/instruments that do call and response
- In arrangement and chord structure: use tension build up, and then go into release
- For ear candy and polish add sprinkles of little sounds all over the place, like risers, noise, bleeps, bloops, human voices etc. Almost unconsciously on a level thatâs almost below the sound of the track. Dont repeat these.
- song structure, chords and melody are much more important than sounds. You can even create great sounding songs with general midi sounds.
4 Likes