hey what's going on out there i'm sean divine hope you all are doing well today's video we're gonna
be uncovering unwrapping debunking five mixing myths that are killing your mix these are topics
ideas that have gotten out here i get questions about them almost daily now been thinking about
doing this video for a while but now i've just decided it's time because i don't want you all
to be limited to be restricted and to have these dictate your mixing process
in a way that is not going to give you the results that you want anyway so don't know how these got
out here like this but especially in 2021 a lot of this stuff is just absolutely irrelevant
so let's go ahead and dive in the first mixing myth that is killing your mix is mixing
in mono entirely meaning you're mixing throughout the entire session in mono
i don't say this to discourage anyone but it just boggles my mind that i've heard from a lot of
people who are putting this into practice and it's obvious that you're confused about what mixing and
mono is supposed to be used for and what it means to do that in 2021 and why it's a really bad idea
to only mix in mono actually i get a lot of tracks that are sent to me where they're
bounced completely in mono for instance i mean right here this is just a beat i'm working on
and i don't do a lot of panning in my instrumentation until i get the vocals so that i
can build everything and you know kind of balance the sound stage with all of the elements here
but there's still a lot of instrumentation here that has stereo information so if i mono this out
even though everything you know is panned pretty much center in this beat i'm still utilizing
the width with the instruments with some of the samples i've used and when we go into mono it's
just a whole different limited sound space like we have this entire stereo field to use in a left
and a right speaker and in some sessions where i have 120 150 tracks having that stereo field isn't
enough space sometimes or it feels that way and we have to really work things in so trying to do
all this in mono in 2021 especially with all of us you know using headphones uh stereo speakers are
even on your phone like the phones aren't mono speakers so trying to do a complete mix in mono
just makes absolutely no sense and it's going to really make your process that much harder to try
to fit everything into this mono uh signal this brings up a whole new conversation in the modern
world with the mixing and mono thing which is that we're starting to have spatial audio right you're
seeing this technology that's being introduced more and more people are going to be mixing
with spatial audio and the whole purpose behind it is to create a more exciting listening experience
just like stereo did when we transition from monitor stereo but it's also going to give
us as engineers a lot more space and freedom in terms of where we can place tracks in this field
for the listener it's going to give us a lot more room to work with mixing in mono periodically or
occasionally throughout the mix as an additional reference is very useful something that i do in
every session of course and i think that that's where this misconception or myth kind of started
it's not meant to be used all the time but if you flick into it you can very easily identify
phase issues so if you hear an element get dramatically quieter or if it disappears
then obviously you have a phase cancellation there flicking into mono can identify a lot of
these phase issues turning on mono also makes it easier to be objective about where things
are sitting level wise your essential balancing so rather than having some of that stereo width
kind of distract you and think that things are maybe louder than they actually are turn it into
mono and then you can make sure that that balance is working there as well the second mixing myth
that is killing your mix and this is a big one is all clipping in the daw is bad inherently bad
it's it means you're not professional and that your mix is going to be terrible a lot of people
just assume that if you're clipping you don't realize that you're clipping but the thing about
in the daw that's very different than being in the analog realm which is why clipping had become such
a thing that's like avoid at all costs because it reacts very differently in the daw we have 32-bit
floating point processing so i've talked about this i'm going to put a link to a gain staging
video all you need to know about gain staging get rid of the stuff you don't i'll put a link
to that if you want to check it out essentially in the daw we have infinite headroom so that means
while we're in here we're routing things we're going to the stereo bus there's ways that we can
get around you know clipping and have it to where it's not affecting anything in a negative way
uh so for example here let's just say my kick drum right now it's not clipping i'm just below zero
okay let's just say i pump the kick up until it's clipping
okay so it's clipping on the individual track as you'll see i'm utilizing bussing and vcas
so in the daw when you utilize the vca so right now we're sending this clipping kick drum
down here to this instrumental vca so again since we do have this floating point processing this
clipping is being dealt with here on this this uh aux or this vca and so that's not going to affect
the way anything you know sounds because by the time it gets to the stereo bus
again we've dealt with that clipping so we have some room to finesse the issues that in the analog
realm clipping would be a problem right so if you clip something heavily in the analog realm
you might get some harmonic distortion or you might get some really nasty
analog distortion that's not intended going back to vcas you can utilize these in the daw to make
it to where you really don't have to worry as much about pushing things about mixing hot about
maybe clipping a channel because if you get the essential balance right and then we utilize that
vca at the end of the process it's very very easy to create headroom so all this worry and headache
that a lot of you are having you know going throughout the mixing process and being like
well i've got to have this much headroom i don't want to clip this channel this is bad
you know that's not facilitating your process but if you just go through and get the balance right
you know do what sounds right don't be reckless then when you send everything to a vca like let's
just say for instance that i mix this quite a bit hotter like 5 db hotter than i actually did
but on the vca at the end of the process i could just bring that all back
the balance is all there everything's going to be fine going down to the stereo bus the problems
with clipping in the daw and pushing things recklessly come you know once we leave the daw
so a lot of you are you know clipping the stereo bus very heavily in a not pleasant way and then
you're not processing with a limiter you know true peak detection you have a lossy conversion to mp3
something like that you're going to notice big time and even wave when we have that
conversion you'll hear that distortion and it's not pleasant but if you have a limiter which this
is going to happen in any mastering you're going to have some some peak limiting that's going on
you're going to be able to hear exactly what this is going to sound like outside of the daw so no
matter how much clipping and everything that's going on in here you know with that limiter it's
going to deal with it in whatever way whether it's pleasing or not you know you're going to be able
to decipher that and then make decisions based on it the third mixing myth that is killing your mix
is that loudness is solely determined by lufs or any other numerical measurement for that
matter um i can't tell you how many times i get hey sean my l-u-f-s is this level it's
the same measurement as you know this popular song but why does my song not sound as loud or
hey sean i'm trying to get to this specific l ufs measurement because i want my song to be as
loud as this other song that's at that lufs yes lufs is one of the more accurate measurements of
perceived loudness that we have it's still just a numerical measurement it doesn't take into account
all of the different factors that the human ear takes into account in terms of loudness
i'll give you a very simple example of this we've got an 808 here and i have
some harmonic processing some distortion to actually make this 808 be perceived louder
not only on you know bigger speakers a sub but more importantly on like the phone or a laptop
now if i turn this off keep an eye on the l ufs measurement and just listen for the 808
so i'm gonna go ahead and assume that those of you on smaller speakers laptops cell phone
computer monitor you're probably not picking up a lot of loudness on the 808 right now
but if i turn on this processing this distortion saturation harmonic stuff
some dynamic processing take a listen to it now
very similar l ufs reading but we've got a much higher perceived loudness i mean even just on
my monitors here in the studio that 808 sounds much more aggressive and definitely going to be
the same way on smaller speakers like your laptop cell phone computer monitor and this applies to
all the different aspects of your mixing session this isn't just on low end you've got to consider
the playback environment you could have a massive low end in your mix
but if someone's listening to it on a cell phone and then your mids your high mids or your highs
aren't as loud in terms of the frequency spectrum your mix isn't going to sound loud
so i think this is where a lot of you are messing up is you're measuring the lefs
and you're getting a high lufs level because of a really heavy low end but then your mids
and your highs you know you're not utilizing saturation you're not utilizing distortion
some of these other things that we focus on to create actual perceived loudness
none of that's there so the rest of your mix beyond the low end doesn't have a high perceived
loudness so if we pull up you know an analyzer here and we just take a look at what's going on
relatively balanced yes the low end is heavy but if we had a vocal on this that's going
to fill this space from like 500 you know up into 8k and beyond and that's where we get a
lot of perceived loudness i think people tend to kind of forget about the mids we
focus a lot on low end we focus on getting a bright crisp high end but perceived loudness
lies very much in this mid frequency section so i would focus on you know doing some different
processing here the next mixing myth that is killing your mix is that you need to utilize
compression on all your drums and also utilize things like compression on your stereo buss
parallel compression there's a lot of misconceptions about
compression but these are just a few of the main ones and especially with drums i hear a lot
of people ask me when i'm mixing sometimes they don't see a compressor on my kick or my snare
if i'm using a sample that's already been processed it's already been compressed
it's already been limited the only thing adding compression will do in that scenario is kill my
dynamics which we work so hard to retain that the compression is actually going to do the opposite
of what you want it to do using compression with like rock drums live acoustic kits obviously
something you're going to be doing a lot more often but you can overuse it and you can overwork
it to the point where you're losing a lot of the punch a lot of the dynamics and the impact
it's kind of cool but it would sound a lot better just maybe on like the room mics or something like
that rather than on all the drums i didn't use any compression on this drum buss and it sounds good
no compression on the drum bus nothing wrong with that now going down to the stereo bus once again a
lot of you feel like you have to have compression on your stereo bus which this could not be further
from the case the compression that is used down here should be used extremely lightly you'll see
my common settings on the ssl bus comp are going to be very low ratio 1.5 maybe a little bit of
makeup gain but i just kind of kissed the needle just to give me a little bit of glue
something very subtle like that that's the way that you want to use compression on your stereo
buss we've got to get the balance right we've got to get the overall levels right in the mix
and then we're just kissing a compressor down there you're going to be using a lot of your
compression on your individual tracks you know your vocals are going to be compressed
in the mixing process so adding a lot of compression after the fact is just going to
give you a mix that's very flat lacking a lot of dynamics a lot of the amateur mixes that i
hear the biggest problem is you can tell that they just smacked compression on everything including
a lot of those drums that we're talking about and the stereo buss you know four to one ratio with a
lot of gain reduction and then they're using the makeup gain and it's just you know creating us a
flat pancake i think people associate compression with loudness but when it's not used properly it's
going to do the absolute opposite for you in the context of your mix the final mixing myth
that is killing your mix is that you need a ton of headroom in your mix prior to mastering so this
is another one that was much more applicable to the previous era when you're in the analog realm
you know you want a lot more room to work with but here in the daw things once again work quite
a bit differently what i generally will do is i will mix into a limiter because it's going to
be introduced at some point when you get to the mastering process if you leave a ton of head room
the mastering engineer is going to have to bring that up somehow it means they're probably going
to be pumping a limiter that can fundamentally change some of the balance of your mix you might
have your drum mix set in a way that sounds pretty good with all that headroom but once that limiter
is pumped up maybe your kick starts to get hit in a way that the low end doesn't sound right the
point being when you leave a lot of room for that limiter you're leaving a lot more guesswork so
i'll give you an example here with this song you know i did mix and master this in the same session
but i mixed into the limiter i'm just using it just as a true peak limiter this is not for the
wealth not for my health only for the most high multimillions never give us the feeling when
we've been reeling in the media keeps rambling on it's not the faith to lean on but the truth and
so we've got our peak reduction happening again i am mixing quite hot into this but this is
exactly what would happen if you know i brought all these levels down and then i introduced the
limiting later it's not going to change as far as the results go and so you're better off going
ahead and hearing what that's going to be like sessions that i have had a lot of headroom and
the ones that i haven't you know the processing was very similar and they don't sound you know any
worse or better uh because of the lack of headroom all right charles so those are the top five mixing
myths that are killing your mix along with some quick examples to go with it and show you that
these topics and ideas they're overrated they're antiquated they're not helpful especially in 2021
and uh not to discourage you all who might have been uh putting these in practice that's why i
made this video is because i could just see it was becoming very obvious some of these things
have gotten out in a way that are being taken very literally i just didn't want more people falling
into these traps of these thought processes knowing that they're not going to get you the
results that a lot of you are after so if you have any to add you've got some stuff that you've heard
that you're just like you know i tried it out and not helpful at all love to hear about those
as well the only way you can really know is to put that stuff into practice so if you hear something
if you're taught something you know try it out and if it doesn't give you the results than you want
then it's not the right thing for you it may be the correct way for
a lot of other people or maybe in a previous time but it may not be relevant to you and so you've
got to experiment you've got to be curious and you know just try to do the things that sound best for
you and for your mix so i hope this is helpful y'all if you got anything from the video please
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