Mixing

I think it’s time we talked about your fader.

Diffusion and density.

The speed of sound is constant.

You have a choice when it comes to engaging a filter.

If you max out your signal and pan it to one side, you’re probably gonna clip your output.

This is your friendly reminder that your microphone comes with reverb.

Tricking yourself is just not a good long-term strategy.

Speakers are kind of like a pair of new shoes.

Level isn’t the most important element in your mix.

This switch right here is something a lot of seasoned engineers understand instinctively, but don’t really articulate.

There are a few reasons that pro audio connections often run over balanced cables like this or this.

This isn’t a stereo connector.

The best mixes are crafted by the top mix engineers, but that’s not why they’re the best mixes.

When you first started recording, you probably just stuck a microphone in front of your face and began to sing.

There’s a reason we teach mid-side recording, and it isn’t because it sounds good, although that’s one of the reasons we like to use it.

Stand by, this is going to be take three and rolling.

At its core, a compressor is not actually such a complicated device.

When everything is stereo, nothing is stereo.

A really common misconception about mixing is that your job is to make everything even.

When the TV is on too loud and you turn it down, you are acting like a compressor.

How tetrachords combine to form every mode and scale. Interval patterns, visual breakdowns, and practical applications.

Sometimes stereo is like an added byproduct of what you get when you use multiple microphones.

They say monsters aren’t real, but I’m not so sure.

This is a story about perfection.

It’s only a matter of time before you’re humbled by someone with far less resources than you creating at a very high level.

Somewhere out there, somebody’s telling you that it’s dangerous to use natural phase EQ because it imparts a phase shift on your recordings.

Your reverb has a job to do.

Let’s talk about why you’re having a hard time hearing compression.

As soon as you send a signal anywhere, your stereo output, your headphones, you’re using a bus.

Stop singing. There’s nothing in your vocal chain that will substitute for a good performance. I can fix your pitch, I can fix your timing, but if the vocal doesn’t…

I don’t give a rat’s ass if you use presets or not.

Here are 10 things that are more important than your vocal chain.

As your equipment begins to age, it’s gonna need exercise, just like you will.

It’s a radical idea. But I teach mastering before I teach mixing, and I don’t spend a lot of time on it. Two reasons. Mastering is pretty straightforward. The objective…

If you’ve played Fallout, you recognize this immediately.

Don’t look for a job in audio if you don’t understand this.

Level and volume are used interchangeably but measure different things. The technical distinction every producer should know.

Whether you call it a bus or whether you call it a send and a return, the utility of running effects like reverbs and delays in parallel rather than in series is more than just a matter of resource management.

When you place reverb on a channel, does it sound different than when you put it on a bus?

Those of you who are making risers in your music are going to want to have a listen to this.

"Pre-delay is about more than just the time between the original sound and the onset of reverb, as you may have heard." Most people assume that reverb time is the factor that tells you how large a space you’re simulating, but actually there’s a lot more going on.

You have what’s known as an echo threshold.

Within the lexicon of recording and mixing, the concepts of phase and polarity are similar enough.

A440. Here’s what we’re talking about. What it means is when I play this note, this string vibrates at 440 times a second. An octave up, 880. An octave down,…

Here’s a follow-up to the phase inversion trick I shared with you the other day to get you untethered from your headphones It works on a similar principle, but it’s a little different in this scenario.

You can expect to have a hard time understanding what a multiband compressor is if you don’t know what a compressor is, but you should also be familiar with a crossover network.

If you go to school to be an audio engineer, one of the things they’re going to talk to you about is mid-side.

Let’s talk about mastering, because it’s not just about making stuff loud.

If you go to school to be an audio engineer one of the things they’re gonna teach you about is speaker delays It’s because of the legs so here’s the thing sound travels at roughly 1100 feet per second that works out to about 1.1 millisecond per foot my front gate.

If you find yourself turning up your levels when you record and then turning them back down when you’re done, consider changing this setting in Logic Pro.

If you’re confused about microphones, think of it like ordering off a prefix menu.

If you are using the term "gained staging" as a verb, you might be overthinking it.

This cable goes one way.

Before we begin to discuss delay, echo, and reverb, let’s take a second to talk about the Haas effect.

Check this out and tell me if it makes sense to you.

Today at Beat Kitchen, we’re going to turn up the heat on our conversation of compression.

The EQ in your DAW may have an edge over even some of the most coveted recording discs, but only if you know how to take advantage of it.

Today we’re gonna build something.

Let’s clear up some of the noise around mixing in headphones and why maybe it’s not a great idea if you’re just starting …

Learn essential music production concepts including effects, synthesis, and mixing fundamentals. Perfect primer course for understanding DAW tools and audio processing.

Okay, let’s talk about compressor ratio and let’s imagine that instead of pitch, this is level.

Welcome to today’s first and possibly only episode of Stupid Logic Tricks, where I share things I almost never need to do, but I’m glad I know how to.

The next time you reach for the attack or release on a compressor, instead of thinking of them as a time, think of it as the gas and the brakes.

We can’t teach you how to mix, nobody can.

I think it would be useful to start a thread about things that made you a better mixing engineer.

Should I be concerned that the top part of this waveform is bigger than the bottom?

The goal of the upcoming musician basics elective is to get you to recognize that you can stack a bunch of notes together and create a chord.

Do you need room acoustics and sound treatment?

I want you to meet Rich Crocenti.

I think it’s important to set benchmarks for yourself.

Don’t be intimidated by a compressor, you deal with stuff like this all the time.

It doesn’t matter what your jam is, even if you’re in a math rock, what moves you isn’t numbers, it’s music.

When dialing in an equalizer, it’s helpful to think of the workflow is happening in two stages a targeting step and an adjustment step.

Today I’m gonna tune this monster.

Phase in 60 seconds, let’s go.

Welcome to a ton of new followers and I figured I’d introduce myself.

If your compressor has a knee, it’s offering you something of a compromise.

Here are two really fast workflow features that’ll help you with labeling things and making markers in Logic Pro.

Everyone learns what a compressor does. The real question is why. A compressor isn't a one-trick pony — it's the same tool solving a whole variety of problems.

We see both experienced and beginner producers at Bee Kitchen.

I can’t believe I’m saying this.

Stereosaurus, monoreverb.

As you iterate through versions of a work in progress, bounce each version as a file so you can compare mixes without reopening sessions.

Raise your hand if you have trouble hearing compression.

When you’re arranging you have to think a lot like a mix engineer because every instrument is going to speak differently in every register So the chord that sounds great here May not sound great down here But this note sounds fabulous so we restructure the core And oftentimes when we’re looking at chords like this we’re trying to find the spot where the instrument growls without becoming overly dark *Music* *Music* *Music*

What makes music tick?

Before you mix in earbuds, I want you to try this.

"Heh, Nathan." I initially responded to a mastering session and have never been replied to.

This is your routine reminder that what you do is extraordinary.

Sometimes we can easily explain the relationship between two chords using an established music theory device.

When you start out, you don’t know a lot.

When we talk about stereo, there is no center.

The practical application of a multiband compressor comes into focus when you consider not just how it differs from a regular compressor, but how it differs from a traditional equalizer.

You know how compressors make stuff quieter?

After the onset of the original sound, the anatomy of a reverb occurs in three distinct stages.

There are 12 keys. Does it matter which one you pick? As musicians, we’re taught early and often that we should be proficient in all keys and while that’s true,…

The power of a compressor really comes into its own as we start to adjust the attack and release time.

Check this out and tell me if it makes sense to you.

Is the circle of fifths overrated?

Time and time again, I see students run into trouble because of assumptions they make around the word "stereo." I’m not trying to take you down a notch by making you feel like you don’t understand something that you thought you did, but signal flow legitimately trips a lot of people up, so I want to challenge you by thinking about this example.

You know that frequency response chart that came with your nice set of speakers?

If you’ve ever tried to explain a compressor to someone who’s new to music production, there comes a moment where they look at you with a really puzzled expression, and it’s probably because they’ve heard the word used in two ways.

Real piano. Sample piano. Oh boy. Gone are the days when piano in a can sounded like this. There are lots of great options these days and if you’re expecting…

Jack Nietzsche used to say, "Reverb is like garlic." You can never have too much.

You should no more put a chord in the middle of a chord sequence because you think it is supposed to be there.

With great power comes great responsibility.

Stereo is a dangerous word because most of you started producing music assuming you knew what it meant and most of you didn’t.

Think of an artist that you admire, and in the comment below, share what you think is their worst work.

"How do I know how much compression to use?" Just use your ears.

(water splashing) - Teaching songwriting is a little like teaching someone how to ride a bike.

I don’t know you, but your room is really bad for mixing, and I can say that because pretty much every room is really bad for mixing.

One thing that tends to confuse new engineers is the difference between phase and polarity.

Hey teachers, when you ask your class any questions, it’s a little bit like saying, "Does everyone understand?" If you don’t hear anything, it doesn’t mean it’s time to move on.

Reverb. I am brimming with things that I want to say about reverb. There’s no way I can put this into 60 seconds, but effects mixing and synthesis starts next…

It doesn’t matter what your jam is, even if you’re in a math rock, what moves you isn’t numbers, it’s music.

If you know someone who’s making cool beats but they’re still adjusting stuff by ear, getting things sounding good without entirely understanding what those settings are doing, their success relies as much on luck as it does on skill.

Taking a break isn’t just critical for your body and your mind, but also your spirit.

Distortion comes in lots of flavors, but one thing they all share is that distortion adds high frequency content to your program material.

Learn to record your own vocals or somebody else’s because regardless of whether or not you’re making vocal-based music I can’t think of a better way to get you out of the box getting signals from place to place Navigating takes comping not to mention all those tools you need and if you can’t or won’t sing find yourself a vocalist Or we’ll find one for you vocal kitchen It runs six weeks two instructors from mouth to mic to mix will take you through warming up getting a great performance And delivering a solid vocal mix everyone deserves the chance to learn to work with vocals and vocalists share that with someone who belongs in a big kitchen

Co-prime sequences are a backbone for evolving variations in pattern-based music.

Can you have your cake and eat it too?

The topics in this 10-minute video include the harmonic series and the physical nature of sound.

With or without an audio degree, you wouldn’t be the first musician to come to me, never having been told what key tracking is and what it’s for.

This old relic, this is your grandma’s motorized fader.

Welcome to your first day of mastering 101 at Beat Kitchen and I want you to look at the person on your left and look at the person on your right.

A student recently told me that the "aha moment", the one where they finally understood what a compressor was doing, was when they recorded a compressed signal so they could see and feel the resulting waveform.

A producer today is like an island and to me nothing epitomizes that more than the topic of automation.

One of the hardest things about learning to mix, especially when you’re starting out, is you’ll have no way of knowing when you’re done.

So basically the way our classes work, we try and get you in and out of a DAW class as soon as humanly possible because we want to get to the fun stuff, the interesting stuff.

This little unsung hero is part of my workflow in Logic and it’s called Create Track.

What came first? The musician or the instrument? It sounds a lot like the chicken and the egg question, which actually I think has been settled. From an evolutionary standpoint,…

You could imagine the way this space sounds.

Hey everybody, you may be aware of our songwriting incubator, but we’ve got some new classes coming up in a new format and I wanted to tell you about it.

If you get confused because things don’t sound the way you expect them to, that happens to everybody.

You want to get better at mixing?

Creating an EP is a fabulous goal, but it’s not necessarily a great goal for a class.

The flutter echo is created when you have two parallel surfaces.

In the beginning, you didn’t know what a DAW was.

This Friday, I’ll be kicking off Beat Kitchen’s Digital Marketplace Summit with a free workshop for members.

Transform Logic Pro X from beginner to power user: comprehensive guide to advanced settings, custom templates, workflow optimization, and professional interface customization.

Complicated doesn’t mean better.

I’ve gotten some interesting questions people asking me to clarify what do I mean by an arrangement?

There is a myth that’s pervasive around here, which is that people can teach you how to mix.

Welcome everybody. This is Mark Jaffe from Five Bridges. Mark is a wonderful attorney who really takes a focus on creative stuff and he’s agreed to come in and talk…

Feeling stuck when you’re working on melodies and phrases, there are lots of home remedies for this, but they usually involve the same thing, which is to somehow kickstart your process and get you doing something new.

For most of you, the whole hardware software debate is overblown.

So you’ve seen a few Beat Kitchen videos and you want to learn more about the whole program thing.

Unison, temperament, stretch.

I’m excited to announce that Beat Kitchen is launching our scholarship program with a pay what you can tuition option.

Make yourself a bootable backup drive with all your installations on it while everything still works and stick it in a drawer for when you really need it.

If my recent videos on things like compression have helped you crystallize those concepts, you should consider joining our class.

Compressors aren’t actually super complicated, but they are a little complicated.

Hey, there’s nothing inherently wrong with presets.

There is no best microphone.

Even if you have no interest in electronic music, if you want to get into music production, the language of synthesis is the language of sound.

So the challenge is to make something every day and not worry how it comes out.