If you produce and mix your own music and your mixes always end up sounding muddy, there are
8 things that you are probably doing that I'm gonna help you with today, and your mixes are gonna
sound much clearer and crisper as soon as you put these eight techniques into practice. My name is
Will from EDM Tips and I've helped thousands of music producers over the last six years
get their music up to a professional standard and releasing music regularly. Now, I know what
it's like to have your mixes sound muddy when you compare them to your favourite producers, it's very
frustrating and I've been there a million times and rather than just that really annoying advice
"Trust your ears", I want to give you eight actionable steps you can start using today
in your own music, so you're gonna hear real results straight away. And tip number eight on
its own is gonna save you hours every time you use it and make your mixes sound amazing. So, firstly,
let's determine what a muddy mix actually sounds like. So, this is what we're going to start with
Yeah, it sounds pretty good but things are lacking clarity, they're lacking their own space,
and this is what we're going to end up with after
going through these eight steps i'm going to share with you today
Much, much better. I'm sure you'll agree and you can do the same too. If you enjoy this
video, consider subscribing to my channel for tips like this each and every week and you
can follow me over on Instagram for daily music production tips as well. If you want
more mixing techniques, you can download my free mixing guide below this video,
and without further ado let's hop into the DAW and get it done. Okay, so the first step
actually doesn't really have to do with mixing at all, and that is the sounds that we select
to use in our tracks because if you get the wrong sounds, then your mixing is going to be
almost impossible to get sounding really good. Now let me give you a quick example
of the difference that sound selection makes. So, if this is our track at the moment,
we've got everything playing,
now let's listen if we just solo the kick and the bass
and we choose a different kick and see the difference it makes to our entire mix.
So, let's go to our kicks and then start replacing a couple of them.
So, that's much weaker,
and that just sounds weird,
that sounds weird as well, and when you listen to it in the whole mix,
let's try another one,
completely changes the sound of the entire mix.
Much better. Now, this accounts for every single sound in your mix and just imagine the difference
it makes choosing the right sounds for your track. And when we get to step 8 I'm going to show you
exactly how you choose the right sounds in the right order but before that let's go on to step
number two. And, again, it's technically not mixing, it's composition and I'll show you exactly what I
mean. So, where in the last step the sound selection itself was really important, the composition is
actually the creation of the track itself. So, for example, if you've got too many instruments playing
in a similar frequency range, that's when you're going to start getting a muddy mix, and this is
how you can avoid that. If we solo our piano here, and we've got our piano melody and our strings,
they've all got their own place in the mix but
if we were to have this piano melody playing an octave down,
you then have the piano chords and the piano melody playing in the same place
and if you bring the strings and the arpeggio in as well... So, if we take the arpeggio down as well
to a similar frequency range as the piano chords and the strings,
listen how muddy it sounds. Same problem, right?
Everything's just occupying the same space musically, so it's never going to sound really
clear. So, if we switch everything back to the original position, listen to the difference.
So much more space in the mix, so much less muddy. So, whilst points one and two are undoubtedly the
most common causes of muddy mixes, let's go on to point three, which is phase cancellation. Now,
this term is banded around a lot but some people don't actually know what it means. So, to describe
it really quickly, it's when the left channel and the right channel have the same frequency wave,
and they're just reversed in polarity and they cancel each other out. Now, that can sound a bit
complicated, so I've thrown up a little diagram on the screen now and I'm also going to show you an
example right now as well. So, phase cancellation is most noticeable in the bass frequencies
simply because the waves are bigger in the bass frequencies. Now, if we have a bass line like this
it's pretty clear and crisp, and if we add some multiple waves
to that using unison, which just doubles up the waves and detunes then slightly,
this is going to start adding some of these phasing issues. So, listen carefully to what happens.
Sounds nice, and rich, and deep but if we switch the whole track to mono and listen to what's happening,
you can hear the power of the bass line is changing, and if we look at the meter here, you can
hear the volumes going down and up and up a lot, and if we switch it back to mono, so just one wave,
it's much more of a constant energy level. Now, the way that you can get around that is to simply
break your base apart. So, what i've done in this track, for instance, is to double up a secondary
Serum and just have one baseline on its own playing one wave, and that adds a bit more of that
energy back in, a bit more of a constant energy, whilst maintaining that stereo width.
It's quite subtle but the main thing that I've done is I've taken off the
low end of both of these waves and then created a secondary
baseline, just with a sine wave, and this is where the real low end energy is coming from.
And I've just got one sine wave, no unison, so it's nice and mono and on its own it sounds like this:
You'll need good headphones to hear that but then coupled up I've now got a nice wide bass
line, which still has that low end power and the phase cancellation issues have been avoided.
Okay, onto tip number four and that is frequency masking. Again, a very common problem.
So, frequency masking is where you have two different instruments and they're hitting the
same frequencies and one is kind of making the other one get blocked out. And, again if we look
at sound selection and composition that's usually going to fix a lot of these issues
but you could have done all that right and still you're getting some clashing
frequencies. So, here's an example of frequency masking. So, we've got our main vocal track
hitting these frequencies and then we've got a piano melody that we will bring in as well,
and you can see that it's hitting some of the same frequencies. Now, it sounds good because we've got
the sound selection and the composition done really well but we still might be able to have
those vocals pop through a tiny bit more. Now, there are two ways in which you can do
that. The first is simply find out where the main fundamental frequencies of the vocals are,
and I can see this is kind of where the highest volumes are and that's the
main body of her voice. So, that's around the 1k range, 500 to 1k. So, if we go to our piano melody,
you could just simply duck the eq a little bit in that range, not very much, just a little bit,
and that's going to allow the vocals to breathe through a little bit more. Now, the second option
we have is to put a compressor after the piano, open up this little side chain button,
and if we press sidechain and take the input from our vocal channel, what this is going to
do is actually duck the volume of our piano very slightly when the vocal is playing.
And we want a fast attack and fast release, and this is a very subtle effect.
So, you can hear that's doing it very hard, way too much...
So, with both those effects off, let's hear the difference and then we'll turn it on
for an A/B test. So, this is with no frequency masking work being done,
and then let's turn it on.
So, we can hear how much more the vocal cuts through the mix at that point. I hope you're
enjoying this so far, guys, finding it useful. Don't forget, you can download my free mixing guide below
this video and let me know in the comments what are you really struggling with music production.
I can't promise I'll be able to help but I promise I'll try, and if you're enjoying this video so far
and finding it useful, please, smash like and we're gonna get into my next four tips, which are all
about solutions to the problems. Okay, for number five - this is one of the things I tell my students
to do straight away and it just makes mixing so much easier. When you're mixing you've got several
different characteristics of sound that your ears have to decipher: you have frequency, you have
amplitude, you've got stereo fields, and a couple more besides but they're the main ones. So, what
we want to do to make things easier is to try and break those down, which makes our ears have to work
way less hard. Now, as I said, the thing I always teach my students to do first off is to create
a mono switch on the master channel. Now, all this does with a little keyboard shortcut is switch
the entire mix from stereo to mono, and listen to the difference it makes. So, this is stereo
and now it's all mono. Now, yes, people aren't likely to be listening to your music in mono but this
just means that your ears don't get distracted and deceived by the stereo field. So, you can focus way
more on the frequency. For instance, if we listen to our bass and our kick together on their own,
we're only focusing on the frequency and the dynamics. If we change it to stereo,
now it's just way more confusing for our ears.
And this is super useful, especially when you're creating stereo effects because sometimes
an effect can sound amazing in stereo but then when you sum it to mono, using the mono switch,
it sounds terrible and your mix just gets muddy. I use that mono switch to go from mono to
stereo just to check my mix hundreds of times on every track. Okay, tip number six and that is to low
cut pretty much everything, apart from your kick and your bass. Because the low frequencies tends
to be where the mud resides, so anything about 150 hertz. And if you're cutting everything at
about 100 to 120 hertz, apart from the kick and you bass, of course, then your mix is just going
to sound so much cleaner. So, if we look at our piano and turn off the eq, the low cut,
you can see there are all these frequencies down here, which are going to be fighting with the bass,
but we can just roll them off and you won't really be able to hear the difference, especially when
the bass is playing. Now, if you do that across pretty much every element of your mix, apart from
the things that really need some low end, then, again, you're just going to be clearing space.
So, this is our high piano and if we turn off this low pass here, this low cut, you can see
there are still sub frequencies. We don't need them, it's just going to be cluttering up your mix. So,
that is tip number six. Okay, tip number seven and this is another game changer.It's to use auxiliary
channels for spatial effect and this is really going to help clear up the muddiness in your mix.
Now, a spatial effect might be reverb, or it might be delay, or it might be a combination
of the two; and there are two main reasons why using auxiliary channels for your reverbs and
delays are better than putting them on the channel, most of the time. If we have our vox, our vocals,
and we were to put a reverb on the channel itself, reverb tends to be another place
where the mud resides, especially below about 100 to 120 hertz.
But if you have your reverb on your vocal channel and you want to roll off more than
that, then you're going to be cutting into the sound of the vocal itself. Here's an example
If we want to take out all those mid frequencies from the reverb and just have the highs,
well we're cutting it out from our main vocals as well and we don't want that.
Whereas if we have the vocal reverb on an auxiliary channel like this,
then we can eq that independently of the dry vocals. So let's put an eq on there,
which just gives off way more control.
The second thing that makes it really neat is that you can open up a compressor,
and much like we did earlier, with the sidechain compression
from the vocals against the piano melody, you can also do that from the dry vocals against
the vocal reverb, just to allow your main dry vocals cut through the mix a little bit more.
So, I've taken the audio from the vocal channel and i'm just ducking our vocal reverb very slightly.
Another great reason why auxiliary channels are great for clearing up mud in your mix. Okay, onto
number eight and this is the most powerful of all the tips we've shared today. if you're enjoying it
so far, do let me know in the comments below and smash like, but this is an absolute game changer
and this is my top down mixing approach. If you've got a track with 40-50 different channels in it,
it can be very confusing as to which ones you should mix first. So, my top-down mixing approach is simply
mixing in the most important elements first and then everything else has to work around them.
Case in point - the most important elements of a dance music track would be the kick, then the bass,
then probably the main clap or snare, so let's just turn off
all the other drums apart from the main clap or snare,
and, of course, the lead synth or the lead vocals, depending on what you're producing.
Now, if you can get those four or five elements sounding really good
in mono, just on their own, then everything else just has to work around them, and you can use the
other techniques that I've shared today to help you get your mix finished faster but the top-down
mixing approach is going to be the fastest way that you'll ever know to mix music. Well, there
you have it, guys, I really hope you've enjoyed this lesson today. As I said, you can download
my mixing guide, if you want more mixing tips on how to get the best, most clean, crisp, loud mixes,
and don't forget to subscribe to my channel if you enjoyed this video, and hit that like button
if you found it useful. Thanks so much for watching, and until next time. Cheers, and happy producing!