hey what's going on out there I'm Sean Divine today I've got a new video for
you all don't get discouraged by the title this is meant to help you so I
want to talk about reasons why your mixes may be suffering the top reasons
why you're probably not pleased with the quality of your mixes and what you can
do to improve really quickly so first let me just tell you that when I started
out mixing it was really frustrating I had to do a lot of experimentation and
just trial and error figuring out what didn't work to get to the point where I
was getting the results that I wanted to get in my mixes in my masters but I know
the feeling of you know getting a mix done taking it into the car or listening
on your friend speakers and just not being happy with it at all and just
feeling like you're not getting that sound you're looking for so let's go
ahead and dive into some reasons why your mixes suck and how you can improve
quickly all right so the first reason why your mixes may suck is that you just
haven't grasped the concept of blending the instrumental tracks and the vocal
tracks you can get the vocals sounding really good or you can get the
instrumental sounding really good but the balance between those two and the
marriage of those two is just not working for you and really the best way
that you can improve on this relationship is to listen to a lot of
music that you feel is mixed properly and things that you are you gravitate
towards and study the relationship and the balance between the instrumentation
and the vocal that's going to help you improve very very quickly just in trying
to replicate that relationship you're not trying to you know mix it this
exactly the same way or you know making it sound just like it but studying that
relationship because throughout time there's been a very evident marriage
again between the instrumentation and the vocal and there's a balance and if
that relationship is not balance correctly it just doesn't work
so really study that develop your tastes in terms of mixing that and you're going
to be able to apply that in your mixes all right so the next one is all too
common I get a lot of sessions from people where you just got too many
plugins you're using way too many plugins on you know certain instrument
tracks or vocal tracks you know sometimes I've seen references
with 15 different plugins on the channel and it looks like they just put them on
there because they could and you know you don't need to approach your mixing
and your effects like that the the less the better keep it simple focus on the
essential processes like EQ compression de-essing those things that are going to
give you the core of your sound work on that and you know try to really limit
yourself in terms of the plugins that you're going to put on there because you
don't need a lot of plugins most of my mixes you know they might be big
sessions they may use a lot of plugins overall but in terms of the channels
themselves you know I'm really trying to stay around you know five plugins
seven plugins max for a chain you know obviously I may use sins for effects and
things but don't try to impress your friends with all the plugins you're
using because at the end of the day you really don't need that much to get a
professional sound speaking of plugins don't get caught up in this game of
chasing to try to get every cool plug-in that's released I always encourage my
students to start with the basics start with what you have so if you have stock
plugins really learn those inside and out and focus on the essentials again
and you know just don't try to overcompensate for your lack of
knowledge and experience with plugins it's just going to get you into trouble
you want to take it a step at a time acquire plugins at a pace that you can
really learn them and you know exactly what you're going for and that way
you're going to be mixing intentionally you're not just going to be throwing a
bunch of plugins at something and hoping that it works the next reason why your
mixes may suck is because you're not comfortable with compression compression
takes a lot of time and experience to get the hang of I do have some videos on
my channel that will help you get things rolling there
is a video called learn compression in 12 minutes you can check that out which
explains a lot of this stuff but you really need to just focus on the sound
of compression what compression is doing how it affects your vocals and your
instrumentation you know especially in hip-hop with where the vocal needs to
kind of sit a very up front in the mix and it the relationship like we're
talking about before with the instrumentation and the vocal really
needs to be right in compression plays such a vital role in that
so again just practice compression experiment try different ratios try
different settings on your vocal listen to the vocal outside of your studio
listen to it on a lot of different speakers experimenting with compression
and you're going to be able to start to hear what it's doing and that is going
to help your mixes tremendously once you get the hang of the way the compression
affects your signals this one is all too common but it's just dealing with bass
so either you don't have enough low-end bass in your mixes or you have way way
too much now the reason why this happens is because a lot of people aren't able
to hear what's going on in the low-end due to the speakers they're monitoring
on it maybe because you're in an untreated room that is kind of
misinterpreting a bass and or you're misinterpreting the bass because of the
way it's being played and reflected off of your room and then it won't translate
well so you take it into a car or you take it into another setup outside of
the studio and you really realize wow the bass is not right so you don't want
to be on the side of not enough bass and obviously you don't want too much bass
there's a very fine compromise between that and again you've got to be able to
hear the bass properly to figure out what's going on a trick that I usually
will do is I go to my master channel and I put an EQ or something where I can
monitor only the low end and I'll just roll everything off until about 120 150
that's usually where a subwoofer is going to start to engage and it will
play frequencies below that point so if you do that and you
just roll off everything in your mix you can hear just what's happening there and
that's going to help you monitor the low end a lot better the final thing that I
want to point out today for why your mixes may suck is that your recordings
may just not be up to par you want to make sure that everything is engineered
well that you're getting the right performance that you're recording the
right layers so a mix engineer can use those layers properly and I always tell
students you know if you've got a recording that you're not necessarily
using the best mic or the best preamp in the world that's okay we can still
compensate for that in the mixing process however there's only so much we
can do with a recording that is not done properly so make sure you study the
basics of recording and engineering signal flow making sure to get your
preamp and your mic set up properly and that's going to greatly improve your
mixes and mix potential I chose so those are the reasons I wanted to point out
for why your mixes suck and also some ways that you can improve very quickly
again don't get discouraged it's something that you just have to work on
gain some experience but focus on the things that we talked about in this
video practice them study them and I guarantee
you your mixes are going to improve greatly if you have any questions or
comments feel free to leave them below if you learned anything in this video
please like and subscribe and we'll talk to you soon