If you’ve been mixing for a while, you’ve likely heard of gain staging (that’s why you’ve come to this article). The idea of gain staging has been around for a long time and continues to be an effective practice for achieving great, consistent results in both analog and digital recording and mixing. In this article,…
Vocals are often the most important element of a song and mix, while EQ is certainly one of the essential mixing tools. When it comes to EQing vocals, there are no simple step-by-step instructions; no vocalist, performance, or mix is the same. However, there are certain considerations we should take into account when EQing vocals,…
Great mixes have dimensionality, mimicking the three dimensions of the real world: height, width and depth (and time if you consider the fourth dimension). The dimension of height may be a bit more difficult to conceptualize in our mixes compared to width and depth, but it’s certainly worth understanding and striving for. In this article,…
There’s a lot of terminology in the world of audio engineering, and the term “group” often carries several meanings. If you’ve ever been confused by the term group/grouping when it comes to editing and mixing in digital audio workstations, or you want more information to make better use of audio groups in your DAW, you’ve…
We’ve all been there at some point in our mixing journey, spending a good amount of time on a mix, only to have it play back much quieter than our reference mixes and all other commercially released tracks we compare it to. With the loudness war spanning multiple decades, loud mixes have been considered “necessary,”…
Mix bus processing can be intimidating and can make or break a mix. Certain processes, such as compression, can help tremendously in polishing and finalizing a mix. There are no simple step-by-step instructions when compressing the mix bus because every mix is unique. However, there are certain considerations we should take into account if we…
Dimensionality is a sign of a strong mix, and in stereo mixes, width is perhaps the obvious dimension we want to get right. If you’re wondering how to not only make your mixes wider but also enhance the entire stereo field between the left and right extremes, you’ve come to the right place. In this…
If you’ve been recording or producing music for a while, you’ve likely heard the term “print” thrown around to some extent, and if you’re confused by it, you’ve come to the right place to find the definition(s) of the term. In this article, we’ll break down what printing means in audio to catch us up…
Doubling, whether recorded at the tracking stage or “faked” at the mixing stage, is a common technique in modern music production. If you’re intrigued by learning more about doubling, you’ve come to the right place! In this article, we’ll dive into both strategies for achieving the doubling effect in our mixes, discussing how doubling works,…
As we become proficient music producers, we must develop a wide variety of production techniques. We’ll undoubtedly use some techniques more than others. Some are more commonplace while others are fairly niche. However, it’s worth having these techniques at our disposal, if not for the techniques themselves then at least for the understanding of the…
Music production, and by extension, mixing, is a creative art form, and so it’s perfectly reasonable that there are multiple strategies to go about mixing. Two fairly opposite strategies, from a processing standpoint, are top-down and bottom-up mixing, and if you’re unsure of what they are and whether you should use either, this article is…
If you’ve ever struggled to balance two (or more) similar-sounding tracks together in your mixes, chances are you’ve had difficulty dealing with frequency masking. If your mixes aren’t as clean, clear and punchy as you’d like them to be, you could have an issue with frequency masking. Let’s discuss what this is and what we…
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