While mixing an electric guitar is not difficult, many of the more complex techniques can take some practice to master.When you are just starting out, there are some basic practices you can follow. If you follow these steps, you can avoid common mixing pitfalls and get started on your way to success.They’ll also provide a solid … Read more

You have a great take and a hard beat, but the vocal will not sit right. Turn it up and it is loud and harsh and still gets swallowed by the 808. Turn it down and the words disappear under the beat. The ad-libs are fighting the lead, and the delivery jumps from a whisper … Read more

Your guitar tone sounds massive in the room, then you drop it in the mix, and it turns into a muddy, fizzy mess that swallows the vocal and clashes with everything. So you boost the highs to get clarity, and the fizz gets worse. You cut the lows to clean it up, and now it … Read more

You drop a compressor on the kick, set 4:1, attack as fast as it will go, and the kick gets quieter. Not louder. Not punchier. Just smaller. You bypass it. The kick comes back. You re-engage it and try slowing the attack. Now the transient pokes out, but the body of the kick disappears. Twenty … Read more

The kick is the foundation of a song and without a strong foundation, your mixes will fall flat when played outside your studio.This is why I want this to be the only tutorial that you’ll need to finally get the best kick drum EQ cheat sheet that you can use in any genre.After reading this … Read more

Getting the perfect snare drum EQ settings is crucial for most music genres since the snare is usually one of the main instruments.In this post, I’m going to reveal the best-kept secrets to help you get a fat and punchy snare sound using an equalizer.Even if you don’t know which frequencies to cut or boost, … Read more

You’ve spent twenty minutes on the snare. Attack at 5 ms, release at 80 ms, ratio at 4:1, and it still sounds either flabby or strangled. You pull the threshold back. Now it’s flabby. You push it down. Now the crack is gone. The kick is fine. The vocal is fine. The snare is fighting … Read more

You have stacked the harmonies, doubled the chorus, and added a couple of ad-libs. On paper the vocal should sound huge. Instead, it sounds like a narrow lump in the middle of the mix, with everything fighting for the same spot and nothing breathing. So you start dragging pan knobs around, hard left here, a … Read more

You have 20 tracks lined up. The recording is clean, the levels are set, and every plugin chain is loaded. You stare at the pan knobs and freeze. Do the rhythm guitars go hard left and right or 60 percent off center? Where does the second keyboard go? What about the shaker? You start nudging … Read more

I’ve put together an instrument panning cheat sheet that will help you avoid guesswork or getting stuck whenever you’re panning sounds in a mix. Knowing where to place instruments in the stereo image will help you get wider mixes that sound clearer and make the song exciting to listen to. Without panning, your mixes will … Read more