Quartz 4

Mixing Explained and Best Practices

2 min read

  • Super important and applies especially to me:

    • Make sure tracks don’t clash with each other Mixing already starts at the arrangement stage. Like if I strum my guitar haphazardly, it will obviously muddy everything up. It’s cuz if you really take a close look at your favorite songs, you’ll see that the instrumentations and vocals have their own pockets, it’s like a puzzle. Each have their own space. And if I haphazardly make sounds where another track could use that space to enhance itself, it will make things worse. If you do this correctly and let the song breathe, the music will mix itself.
    • Phasing/layering (especially for low end freq) Sound is waves. If the waves are opposites, they will cancel each other, and no amount of production will fix it because when you export the music, all the tracks on it will be combined. This is also related to the first bulletpoint.

  • Others:

    • I think I need to learn proper vocal layering
      • Just putting two vocal tracks together to enhance the chorus doesn’t seem like the way to go. I think this is also because of possible phasing. There’s prolly a better approach for vocal layering Vocal Layering Explained

  • Other mixing best practice

    • Moving frequencies towards the sweet spot

  • Moving sounds forward backward and left and right:

    • Volume - Forward and Backward
    • Panning - Left and Right - There’s actually not a way to put sound on both sides, when sound is centered it means both right and left speakers are playing it
    • There is something nice to learn tho, which is panning. Instead of putting both lead and rhythm guitars dead center, put them in different places instead. Put the rhythm off center and lead off center on the other side for example. Also, forward and backward via volume. It would be also nice if maybe the rhythm is moved towards the back a bit. Essentially, just imagine a real band. How they’ll be placed when they’re playing. Vocalist on the center, both guitars on the left and right somewhere. Drummer at the center rear.

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