Hey whats up, it's Wick for WickieMedia tutorials.
And today is going to be the first episode that I'm going to be talking about mixing.
So let's start off with the very basics before we're going to be diving into
mixing consoles and just look at the basics of mixing music.
Let's take a quick look at the recording process.
When we're recording a song, all the individual instruments get recorded
separately onto a track.
The very first recordings were all done mono
that means we could only play it back over one speaker
and it was captured with just one microphone
So in order to create a balance between the individual instruments
we had to move the musicians throughout the room
So if someone would have played a solo, they had to step up
and walk towards the microphone.
where most of the people listen to their music over two speakers or over headphones 0:00:52.500,0:00:46.500 we're now working towards a stereo mixdown.
Even if you're doing electronic music this is still theory that's gonna
apply to you...
Let's take a band that we're going to be recording and mixing. We've got a drum-kit
We've got a bass player
we've got two guitar players. we've got a keyboard player
and we've got a small brass section. we're going to be placing a microphone in front of
every instrument. Every microphone is transmitting a mono-signal which is
being fed into the mixing console where we take care of the levels, and that's being
sent to tape.
Of course this is now mainly done on the computer, so we're recording it inside a
computer.
But i'm a still going to be using the reference of the tape machine a lot
just for the simplicity of understanding signal flow.
So the band has played their song and now we have recorded eight separate
tracks of their instruments.
Now we're going to start with the mix- phase and we're basically going to be
fitting the whole band into two speakers. I'm a drawing an illustration right here
that's going to represent that. We're going to be fitting everything between
the left and the right speaker and we should visualize a three-dimensional
space in between those speakers where we're going to be placing our mix in.
We can move instruments forward and backward by changing the volume,
or fader-riding. This is basically moving sounds over the Z-axis.
With the pan-knob on each channel we can move them from left and right between our speakers.
when we are panning sounds in the middle it means that they come just as loud out of
the left speaker as out of the right speaker.
We than talk about panning sounds into the phantom-image, because on a stereo-mix
we don't have any speakers in the centre.
We can kind of place instruments over the vertical axis with the means of frequency.
Assuming that the bass is low and the treble is high.
That means that we can basically now visualize our whole mix in 3d-space.
So this illustration makes the concept of placing the sounds into a
3d environment a lot more understandable.
Let's take a look at how we can illustrate some mixes.
Let's start off with the simple eight-track recording that we've just done.
Normally when we're mixing we are using the audiences view
as our perspective.
We had two guitar players which were standing at both sides of the room
so it would be nice to kind of pan the first guitar a little bit to the left
and the second one a little bit to the right.
This will create a little bit of space in our mix and it will reflect the way that it was.
A good rule of thumb is that we always want bass frequencies to come out
of the center...
So the kick drum and the bass-line will be placed in the center, or the phantom image.
The keys were on the left side of the room and the brass section was on the right side
so we're going to pan that accordingly as well.
This is already creating a very rich stereo image. So let's take a look at
some styles of mixing that we can apply...
Here we can see a very open and defined mix.
The gaps in between the instruments can be filled up with a little bit of reverb.
This can create like an aura around an instrument...
This is something which is really open and defined so it could fit very well for a jazz-mix for example..
Right here we have a more commercial type of mix which we would call 'the wall of sound'.
The focus on these types of mixes normally lays on the vocals, which seem
to be kind of like in front of the band or at least in front of the music.
So a lot of commercial productions either it being pop or dance or hip-hop
or even a pop/rock type of song this type of mixing style is applied a lot.
If we're going to take a look at more underground productions
you can see that the vocals are not that upfront as in these commercial-
types of mixes. So it could very well be that the mix that you're going for
doesn't have to have your vocals really upfront like in a commercial type of product.
You should go for this sound that fits your song and the type of production.
So when we start off with a mix it kind of looks like this...
You can see that that everything is still in the middle and also frequency-wise
it's definitely still like a mess.
So we're going to start with the volume and the panning
and place all the instruments where we want them to be.
You can see this already cleans up a lot and makes a lot of things more defined and separated.
When theres still too much overlapping frequencies
and we needed to define something a little bit more we can than filter off some of
the frequencies that we don't need, and highlight some of the frequencies that
we need to give a little bit of extra sparkle with the use of an equalizer.
When the dynamics of certain instruments are fluctuating too much, like for
example on the bass or on the snare, and we want to tame those peaks we can
use a compressor to make sure that these stay in balance a little bit better.
The next video is going to be an in-depth tutorial about mixing consoles
and we're going to look at the signal flow and a lot of commonly found
functions and knobs that we will run into.
And after that we're going to be applying all that stuff into
creating some mixes.
And were going to start off with some eight-track mixes, sixteen track mixes, from there on
we're going to go to twenty-four track mixes and even a lot higher.
I hope you've enjoyed this first tutorial, which was an introduction to the beautiful world
of mixing. Where so many things are possible once you just know how to.
And i'm going to be teaching you a lot of that stuff in the upcoming tutorials
So i hope you've enjoyed it, I hope you have learned something and I hope to see yall soon... Peace!