Audio and Music Mixing

Audio and Music Mixing

When you are starting a mix, you should do what they call a faders up mix. This tutorial will call this the basis of your audio mixing experience. Once you have your general audio signals at a reasonable level, you want to follow this mixing tutorial and start to put equalizers on the tracks that you think will require any of the techniques in this mixing tutorial.

Equalization:

The first thing we want to do in this free online mixing tutorial is get a hp and lp filter on each instrument that you think needs it. This includes the kick drum, snare drum, hats, overheads etc. There are many freeware equalizers that you can use for this purpose. Search the free plugins at the kvr database to find some. Next, clear any mud or boomyness in the 300-400 range on each instrument. If the instrument sounds too thin, go ahead and add some of that “mud” back in.

If you find that during this tutorial for mixing that you need only one band of equalization, you can grab any free graphic equalizer and just pull down the single frequency. This is common practice, since it saves cpu power using a free single band or graphic vst equalizer.

This free online mixing tutorial for audio material assumes you know at least the basics of audio compression using compressors such as the dbx 160 the 1176 or the api 2500 compressors.

Never push over 4db of compression on any instrument, well unless you want your audio to be completely smashed with no dynamics, this online free mixing tutorial assumes that you do not want that.

Here are some great compressors:

Compressive Pro by Martin Eastwood

Density mkII by Bootsie

MCompressor by MeldaProduction

ReaComp

Side Chain Compressor by slim slow slider

In the final stages of this audio mixing tutorial, you will need to know a little about digital reverb. ER times, Reflections, Densities and so on. Convolution reverbs free or payware are a bit costly and give a tunnel type effect. You should use a algo reverb whenever possible, there are many freeware algorythmic reverbs available on the net for free such as KR-Reverb FS. Waves also has a bunch of great reverbs.

Audio and sound mixing is a very rewarding career. Luckily most of the information can be learned pretty quickly due to the fact that a lot of it is talked about openly on the internet.