5 Ways to Improve Your Mix (The Final Touches)

Transcript

hi friends and welcome back to my channel and if you're new here hello my name's george agambar and i'm a uk music producer today's video is all about the small adjustments you can make to your mix to make it sound even better now you hear me say a lot that it's that last few percent those tiny little changes that make all the difference and so today i thought i'd go through the little edits that i find myself making at the end of my mixing process that i think really improves the sound of my mixes so if you want to learn more about this then make sure you stay tuned and hit the button and notification bell for new videos every wednesday [Music] i've thought of the five main things that i like to do when i'm nearing the end of the mixing process now as a disclaimer not every trick and technique is going to work on every track you're working on some may and some may not you've just got to adjust it according to what sounds best on your specific mix but today we're going to be having a look at distortion reverb volume automation side chain compression and high pass filters [Music] when i think that my mix is pretty much there i like to sit back and listen to the sound of the drums and think do i like this sound is it driving the music forward enough are they punchy enough and are they energetic enough and the majority of the time if the answer is no the problem will lie within the snare not hitting hard enough within the mix and so to fix this i normally turn to distortion now i'm not talking about guitar pedal distortion here i'm talking about harmonic distortion and so i put an exciter plug-in on my snare drum and this is because it adds high frequency information that really cuts the sound of the snare through the mix i've put the excited plugin in on the snare i have and let's hear the difference it's made to the sound of the snare when it's in the mix so it really brought the snare out and made it sound a bit more present in the mix [Music] then i look at the cohesiveness of my mix do all my sounds sound like they've been recorded in the same room i don't want one instrument sound like it's been recorded in a top-notch studio and the other sound like it's been recorded in a cave that just confuses the whole image of the music and so what i like to do is to apply a tiny bit of the same reverb onto all my instrument and vocal tracks and this just helps make all the tracks sound like they've been recorded in the same space and add that cohesiveness that i'm looking for if you play the whole mix with reverb on each track i think that it'd be quite hard to hear the difference because it is quite subtle so for this example i'm only using a few of the tracks we have and i'll play them with and without reverb so hopefully it'll be a bit easier for you to hear [Music] so far we've been looking at making changes to individual tracks but now we're going to look at the mix as a whole and now this is a trick that i use when i feel that the vocal is being hidden by the mix or it's not quite sitting properly in there or it's not quite cutting through and punching through enough and this is when i use side chain compression i select all the tracks in my main mix apart from the main vocal track and group them together i then apply a compressor to the group and set the side chain input to the main vocal track i want to make sure that the compression can't be noticeably heard on the mix and that it doesn't get reduced by more than one decibel so i'd adjust the parameters accordingly let's hear the mix with and without the sidechain compression [Music] crazy [Music] and as you may be able to hear the mix was turned down in level ever so slightly when the vocal sounded and then increased in levels when the vocals kicked out again [Music] the next trick is one that's very well known and well used by lots of different engineers and producers it's when you turn the volume or the level of the chorus up by one decibel at the most and now there are lots of different reasons that this could make the chorus sound better it could perhaps be because we can hear more details when it's at a higher level or maybe because we're getting more immersed in the music when it's louder or even just because louder music is a proven stimulant but whatever the reason it is that it does sound better at a higher volume it's a really really quick way to make your mix sound instantly better and more exciting as you can see i have the master track fader set to touch so that when the chorus hits i can slide the fader up by one decibel to automate the track's level so let's hear the pre-chorus leading into the chorus with and without the one decibel changing volume [Music] without you i'm finally free [Music] again this was a subtle little change but to me it made the chorus sound more exciting and have more impact [Music] the last one is a trick that i learned about recently but i thought it was just so interesting and cool that i had to mention it is when you put a high pass filter on the entirety of your mix at around about 90 hertz people will start to become accustomed to not hearing those very very low sub bass frequencies and then when you really want the bass to hit and make that impact you take the high pass filter off and suddenly you've got over an octave more of bass coming into your mix so let's have a look and see how it works so as you can see i have a high pass filter on my stereo out channel halfway through the example i'm going to take this off and we can see what a difference it [Music] without makes i'm finally free [Music] [Applause] and actually i'm very surprised that it's worked out well i think that this is definitely a technique that i'll consider using on future mixes perhaps not acoustic lay back tracks but certainly the more electronic and pop ones possibly even rock too [Music] so those are my top five tips and techniques that you can use to make your mixes sound instantly better now i will say again that not every trick not every technique is going to work on every track you have to do what's best for your mix and i'll also say don't just use these techniques and tricks for the sake of it in the hope that it'll make your mix sound better do it for a specific reason thank you so much for watching this video i hope you found it useful and interesting let me know what you thought in the comments below and if there are any other videos you'd like to see in the future make sure you hit the button and notification bell and i will see you again soon [Music]