5 Essential Keys To Mixing
May 30, 20215 Essential Keys To Mixing*
Hey! Today we’re going to talk about the five essential keys to mixing.
Hi. My name is Steve Collom for The Secrets To Music Success dot-com, and today we’re going to talk about the five essential keys to mixing your song.
So before I dive in I just want to let you guys know, if you have a song and you want to get some feedback and you want some guidance on your stuff, head over to The Secrets To Music Success dot-com and sign up to my mentorship program, where I actually listen to your songs and give you great feedback on how you can improve your song, how you can actually reach that next level of success. And also included in that membership I also offer a – I invite you to sit live in the studio with me virtually, on Zoom, and we go through a whole song. Last week we went through how to make your singer-songwriter song more modern, so that’s a great one. And every month we do these, so make sure you head over to The Secrets To Music Success dot-com.
But let’s go ahead and dive in! So number 1: you’ve got to cut your lows.
- Cut your lows.
So what does that mean, cut your lows? That means putting a high-pass filter, meaning the highs or the high frequencies pass through, except for the lows. So you want to put a high-pass filter on everything except for the kick and except for the bass guitar.
Now, there’s a little trick that I do with the bass as well. I do take a little bit out around 60 Hz, depending on where that kick is kind of sitting. But you’ve got to – like for a snare, for example, there is no business down in 150 below, and it’s like you can – unless you – and, of course, I put out all these, and I will tell you a bunch of times that these are rules that make your song sound great – now, rules can be broken and you can get creative in doing all sorts of stuff, but just know if it’s not working, you’re like Well, I know why: because I’m kinda breaking a rule and trying to do something that’s not the normal, and so you’re going to have a not-normal sound.
So the first thing is – let’s just go through some instruments:
acoustic guitars – you can cut a lot of that low stuff – 150, 200. Play around with it, you know, you might want some of that low in there, maybe, depending on your mix. Maybe you want some lows in the acoustic guitars and no lows in that piano, maybe, or maybe vice versa. But go ahead and just cut everything from – I don’t know – about 150, do a gentle slope. Start with that.
You’ve got to have a low cut stuff on because those frequencies build up. Let’s just say you have, like, a low rumble in your low range – I don’t know, around 150, 250, somewhere around there – get this low rumble on all your tracks. That actually adds up and it makes your mix muddy. So that’s a big, big deal.
When I first learned how to cut all those low frequencies and made sure I had a high-pass filter on everything, I was just amazed at how clear my mixes were. It was night and day. So you’ve got to do that. You’ve got to learn to just cut the lows.
So the only things that I have going through that have the lows in is:
kick drum because I want that, that’s where all the punch is, that’s where the kick drum lives, and
bass guitar, I kinda play around with that.
But the bass guitar and the kick – you’ve got to kind of marry them. You’ve got to find that balance that’s right for your mix. You know –
cello, I might put a little bit of – it might get more close in there.
If I’m doing an acoustic song, maybe it’s an acoustic song with no kick drum in it or anything, maybe I’ll go full out and I’ll have a lot more than those frequencies in the acoustic guitar. But sometimes you find, even with acoustic guitar, those frequencies a little bit boomy.
So that’s number 1: cut your lows. All right.
- Compress lightly.
Now, what does that mean, ‘compress lightly’? A lot of people think that it’s, like, I gotta throw a compressor on everything and just squash everything down till it’s just squashed. No!! Well, do it lightly. Remember this number – write this number down: minus 3 [-3]. That’s kind of like your max. It’s kind of like your magic number.
What I do is I put a compressor on nearly all my channels. Now, a lot of the stuff that you get – like, if you get a sample off Splice, a lot of those I won’t compress because they’re already compressed, so I won’t do that to them. But most of my other channels I have a compressor on it. But I compress lightly. There’s a saying that many hands make light work, and I use that for many compressors doing light work. So, if you think about it, if you just have a compressor that’s just kissing some, getting some of those top frequencies down, just hitting some of those tangents, so you’re just knocking them down a little bit – just a little bit, no more than minus 3.
Then you send that to a bus, which we’re going to talk about in a minute. And then from that bus you bop them down just a little bit as well. So we’re going to talk about that in a minute. But you’ve got to make sure that you just compress lightly. Don’t be going -5, -7, -8, -10 unless that’s the sound that you’re wanting. That’s that. Maybe you’re doing something to a sound – maybe you have a pad and you’ve got like a side chain kick coming in and it’s compressing and you’re like Boom! Minus 10, -10. That’s an effect. That’s something totally separate. But I’m talking about if you just want the clarity of each instrument, make sure that it’s no more than -3. Your magic number is minus 3, -3.
All right.
- Automate, automate, automate.
Now, automation is your best friend. Trust me. Automation is so cool. Now, if you think about it, what automation is – and you’ve got to find out how to do it in your DAW – automation is like a musician on the stage. It’s moving, and you want that sound to be moving. Let’s just say you have the chorus, maybe an acoustic guitar or a piano, it’s just too loud in the chorus and you want that down a little bit: automate it down. Don’t try to use a compressor to do what you think it wanted to do. Go ahead and automate it. Go ahead and automate.
Automate your reverb, so start your song with less reverb and, as the song builds, you’re putting more reverb in it. Automate the breaths in your vocals when you’re singing the song – automate those so they’re not too loud, they’re the volume that you want them. Automate all your vocal runs, you know, automate how strong you want your Auto-Tune, automate it – the list goes on. You’ve got to learn to automate.
Now, I remember with my first mixes when I first started, I didn’t know how to automate and I didn’t automate at all, and it was just very linear. It was very, very just – like, it didn’t move. The sound didn’t move. And when you go to see a band or an artist sing, they’re moving. They’re moving around the stage, you know. You’re hearing the sound from the speakers, but there is movement. They’re playing a little quietly in the verses and then they’re playing loud and the dynamic is just huge, and they’re just moving all over the place. It’s that movement. Automation creates that movement.
So learn how to automate. That’s number 3. It’s a big one, number 3. All right.
- Send your channels to a bus.
So what that means is, and I promise you, this will make your mixes sound so much clearer and so much glued together – more together. As an example, I send all of my acoustic guitars to one bus. So that means – let’s just say I’ve got four, even six tracks of acoustic guitar, I will send them to one channel. It has a compressor on it [one of my favourite compressors at the moment is the Solid State Logic G Compressor. It’s glue. It just glues it together. It’s really cool. So I put that compressor on there, too, and I actually have an EQ on that channel as well. But that’s just my default, so that’s what I use just as default, and then I’ll tweak from there. Maybe I’ll use a different one.
But all my acoustic guitars, my six channels of acoustic guitar, are going straight to my acoustic guitar bus, and on there I put a compressor over the whole of it and it just glues it together. I do it for all my electrics or for my pianos or for my strings or for my brass – whatever I’ve got in that song, I will send it to a bus. So, off the top of my memory, my standard bus channels are:
acoustics
drums
drum parallel compression (which I won’t talk about just yet – well, basically, you just squash it like nothing else – this is where you break some of the rules, but I squash it like nothing else with 1176, the drums, and then I have – so I have two channels of drums. I have the normal one that’s bussed – normal stereo drums, and then I have a parallel compressor, but we’ll get into that later, in another video).
So then the next one I might bus –
bass bus
acoustics
electrics
ukuleles
strings
pianos
brass
and then I send all of those busses to one more mix, and that’s my master channel, and then I put my mastering plugin on that, kind of thing, and that’s what is going to bring us to the next point, number 5: limiter.
- Put a limiter on your last channel.
You’ve got to put a limiter on your last channel, on that main master bus. So you’ve got to have one limiter, on your main bus. And so that’s so important.
Now, the limiter – basically, you can make everything at a nice level, loud level, before distorting. You don’t want it to distort. So find out how your limiter works, but the main thing you will want to see on your limiter is you want to set the output gain to as close to zero as possible. I do 0.01, so I’m as close as I can to get to the zero.
And then you just pull down your threshold till we get to that magic number, -3. So you just that down, your threshold, you pull it down or you turn up your gain, however your limiter works – you’ll have to find out how to use your limiter and you just turn it down till it’s kind of like -3. If you’re going any more than that, -3, you’re going to start really hearing it. You’re really going to start hearing it.
So make sure you do that and you’re off! You’re on your way to a great mix. You’ll find that these are essential elements that top producers use all the time, top mixing engineers use all the time. These are where you start, and then you start getting creative from there. You can start breaking some rules and then you can start adding things and start turning things on and off, or finding out what you want to tweak, you know – add more EQs and all that kind of stuff. But you gotta start there.
So, just to recap again, the five essential elements are:
- Cut your lows.
- Compress lightly – many compressors make light work.
- Automate, automate, automate.
- Send channels to a bus.
- Put a limiter on the end of your mix.
So very, very important. Now, if you follow these tips, I promise you your mix is going to be so much clearer and you’re just going to be amazed. So find out how to do it in your DAW. I make these videos so it’s not just ProTools, it’s not just Logic, it’s not just Studio One – it’s all DAWs. These are fundamental laws of mixing.
Wrap-up
So awesome, guys! Well, I hope you enjoyed that, and if you did, please give us the thumbs-up – it helps our videos go higher in the search engine.
More free stuff
And head over to The Secrets To Music Success dot-com and download my free PDF on mixing tips, a bunch more mixing tips than this, and I also have some pop songwriting tips and a bunch of freebies there. So go ahead and head over there and check that out, and I will see you in the next video.
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*Source: 5 Essential Keys To Mixing YouTube by Steve Collom, uploaded 25 May 2021.
Transcribed with care (and Australian spellings) by Kate Battersby on behalf of Steve Collom and The Secrets To Music Success.
