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5 Tips for Mixing Your Own Music
by Daniel Dixon, iZotope Contributor June 3, 2019
In today’s musical landscape, more artists and producers are adding “mix engineer” to their credits. While this level of creative control is great, there are challenges that come with being a jack of all trades. It’s hard to let go of ideas you spent a lot of time on and listen from a new perspective.
For those who wear many hats in the studio, here are five tips on how to mix your own music.
Q. How do I make guitars sound more ‘epic’? |:
I’ve been struggling with recording and mixing ‘epic’ guitar sounds. I’m after something that balances aggression with tone, but which doesn’t sound too distorted like so many contemporary hard-rock records do today. Do you have any tips that might help?
Great tips from Mike Senior as usual.
6 Times to Automate EQ for Effect:
For mixing engineers and producers alike, it pays to become intimately acquainted with the virtues of automation. Swooping sounds from left to right, enhancing emotion with level boosts, or fixing complicated problems with real-time adjustments—all of these moves separate the quotidian from the marvelous.
But riddle me this: how often do you think about automating EQ? Perhaps not as often as you should, for automating EQ can create both dramatic and transparent effects. Whether creating something truly bespoke for your mix, or cheating an element forward/backward for the master, a bit of active, automated EQ sculpting can be a serious boon, if done well.
Here are some instances where you can employ the practice.
Here’s Where Your Vocal Tone Comes From — Bobby Owsinski’s Music Production Blog:
It’s amazing how different each person’s voice can be from another, but also equally amazing how similar two people’s voices can be to each other. When recording a singer, it helps to know how his or her vocal tone is actually being produced in order to capture it more accurately. This great article by Jamie Ehrenfeld in Soundfly recently illustrates exactly how the body produces your vocal tone. Here’s an excerpt.
A Basic Guide to How the Human Voice Produces Resonance — Soundfly:
From the very first breath producing the initial cry that assures onlooking adults a newborn baby is healthy, humans phonate as a sign of life. Children produce sounds with their voices long before they develop the faculty to consciously alter how they’re doing so. We grow as expressive musical beings. And as we grow, we begin to hone the use of the voice as an instrument of musical and expressive communication.
Logic Pro X keyboard command of the day. #LogicProX @StudioIntern1
Consolidate Project…
Gather all resources together and make sure they are stored in the project (folder or package).
Essential to keeping projects that can be shared with others. I copy all Apple sound files, sampler (Alchemy) files and others.
I think about what would happen if plugins could be copied as well? Bigger projects. Lots of issues.
Harrison ‘MixBus’ includes “play-only” plugins in saved projects. If I share a ‘MixBus’ project with someone they get the sound as modified by plugins. They can’t change the plugins, but they don’t simply vanish.
Consolidate assets in a project — Logic Pro X:
Using the Consolidate command, you can create a “consolidated” copy of a project, and select which types of assets are copied into the consolidated project.
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