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Posted by mzvirbulis on Aug-22-2007 00:49:

For people who have trouble.....

I thought i might just give some quick and brief advise to some of you TA's that have trouble making your music sound clean and professional.

In the last couple of months i think my own music is starting to really sound nice a clean, so some tips from the top of my head are:

- Psychoacoustics (This has given me better under standing of how to sit my elements in a mix, espcially when reading about it i had improved mixing straight away) very important if you want them nice clean production's you always dreamed of.

-Start basic ( I started on using reason3... now i rewire it with ableton live 6 plus a nice jp-8080, motu ultralite and event tr8's, it's simple and effective gives you a great start to learn how things work within a rack with an easy work flow and doesn't complicate things. important is to know how to design sounds properly, this is vital in making good music and also have found presets always suck most times....this is why you need to learn your synths inside out. And bigger and better synths are not always they key no matter what if you cant mix you music well make good patches your pretty much stuffed....

- keep at it ( i have been doing production for about 2 years on and off and i have had a fair share of making absolute crap tunes, really the only way to improve is keep reading and experimenting. soon you will find yourself improving like an exponential graph.

- Learn to EQ and compress effectively, and when to use compression.
for example know how each element should sit within the freq spectrum, depending on genre: kick's are more about the punch and most likely need to be rolled off.(depending on sample)

- Monitor at medium level not to loud as everything will be abit out of wack. but every now and then turn it up. also as said alot.... cross reference your music with what people will be listening to your music on.

pretty much it comes down to know how to make good music with your tools and you will get there someday.And feel free to add some of your advise plz

cheers
mattz

Posted by echosystm on Aug-22-2007 01:00:

Posted by 3F05Q on Aug-22-2007 04:38:

Not too sure Captain Obvious applies here. Please try again.

mzvirbulis: What concepts of psychoacoustics have helped with your mixing? Do you have any links to articles that you've read?

Posted by MrJiveBoJingles on Aug-22-2007 13:50:

I thought of making a thread like this. I don't quite have a "professional" sound yet, but I'm closer than ever and I've learned a few things by making a bunch of mistakes:

1. Stereo panning: Pan elements of your percussion to the left or right (except for the kick and maybe snare), but not necessarily all the way to either direction. With your synth sounds, try to make the left and right sound a bit different in some way (by using delay, a stereo widener, modulating pan controls, or whatever). Newbie mixes tend to have everything in mono -- at least mine did. Mono mixes tend to sound uninteresting and unnatural.

2. Use the right amount of reverb and delay: What's the "right amount?" Neither too much nor too little; this will depend on the sound you're going for, but when I listen to newbie tracks I usually hear either completely dry, harsh percussion (no reverb at all) or synths / percs that are drowning in reverb / delay.

3. Balance your frequencies: One bad habit newbies have is making their hihats horrendously loud. I've seen it again and again. I used to do it myself. I'm not sure why this happens, but it probably has something to do with mixing at high levels for long periods of time; your brain gets "used" to the volume of a hihat and it starts to sound too low, so you turn it up. Like mzvirbulis said, monitor at a moderate level. Other things to look out for: a kick that drowns out the bass / bass that drowns out the kick; snare or clap way too loud; too many elements in the same frequency range.

4. Levels: A couple of things here: Don't try to make every element of your mix equally loud; that makes it flat and boring. Don't expect a compressor or limiter to compensate for poor mixing; thoughtlessly slapping a limiter on a redlining mix might work occasionally, but it can really sound like shit, too.

5. Learn your synths / samplers / equipment: I think that in an era of cheap software many people no longer have a certain sense of "respect" and fascination that might have come from owning just one or two hardware synths. When you have a bunch of easily accessed, cheap software, it seems like people tend to try to "plunder" synths for certain sounds, fiddling with them superficially for the perfect supersaw (or whatever), like somebody ransacking a room in search of some cash, moving right onto the next room (synth) when the objective isn't found. I think this is part of what leads to shallow musicianship and boring sound engineering. Not everybody does this, but it seems like a lot of newbies do. If you're a newbie, be an exception on this front. You don't have to learn the theory behind different synthesis methods (although in my experience that helps tremendously and is fascinating in itself), but if you want to make interesting music and sounds instead of cookie-cutter crap you should really try to be a synthesist, someone who knows his equipment, rather than just a preset-hoarder. There are few if any synths out there that simply can't make any cool sounds, so keep exploring even when you get a bit frustrated.

Posted by Chepi on Aug-23-2007 04:33:

thanks for the tips guys, great stuff!!!!