hey what's going on out there i'm sean divine hope you all are doing well in this tutorial
we're going to be focused on nailing the essential balance of your mix so there's a lot of focus on
getting loudness and stressing about what's on the stereo bus and secret plug-ins that are going to
give you a great mix but many are overlooking that we are mixing and this balancing process
is the essence of what our final mix will be and ultimately the loudness the clarity
the space it's all created here in this balancing process so we need to get this right first so
let's go and dive in all right so we've got our session open here and i have all of our levels
zeroed out and a lot of times it's easy to just listen to the rough or the reference mix
and get a feel for you know how much space you have to work with how much space the different
elements are occupying and for instance if you have an element like a orchestral string that has
you know tons of low end information in it then we can just go ahead and you know filter out
some of that and create some space do some very light eq nothing serious at that stage but just
to make this essential balancing process a bit easier go ahead and activate pre-fader metering
which i have a command here in logic setup command p and when i turn this on even though
everything is zeroed out on our mixer we're still going to be able to see the levels coming in
before the plugins before the fader just as they're coming into the mixer
we want to have some room to kind of move the faders around and we don't want any excessive
clipping so if you do have a channel that's clipping just go up and change the region
gain or the clip gain adjust it to where you've got some headroom to work with second thing is i
mix into both a bus compressor and a limiter now this bus compressor is doing very very little so
i'm just going to activate that it's just going to be kissing the needle a little bit giving us
some subtle glue when i first started getting into studios i saw a lot of the engineers doing this
and i just like kind of pushing into that and knowing i've got a bit of a safety net and then
the other thing is is i will turn on a limiter and i'll just set the limiter to -1 ceiling true
peak because we want to be able to hear you know how the limiter is going to react to our balance
at some point there's going to be limiting introduced in the master it's all good we can
bring things back down but we want to go ahead and just hear what that would do once that's
introduced so i'm going to be utilizing the ssl uf8 of course you can just use your mouse
but this is just a lot faster way of working for me so i'm going to start with the drums
because if you start going in here and you're trying to mix all these tracks at once you're
going to get overwhelmed you know this is not a tremendously large session but if you had
you know 100 200 tracks and you're trying to bring everything up kind of in at once without grouping
things it's going to be very overwhelming no specific levels every session is different
so i'm just going to go by feel so let's go ahead and we'll just loop this real quick
all right so that feels pretty good on the instrumental balance again no specific
levels in terms of instruction manual of lufs for each element
you just got to go by feel and you know where their space and also thinking that we're going
to be adding vocals so i don't want to bring up you know our instrumentation to a point where
i'm not going to be able to fit in our vocals as far as vocals i like to start with the chorus just
to make sure that we get that right so let's go there i'm gonna go ahead and scroll down
i get a lot of questions about verses you know some of you might record verse 1 and verse 2
on a different day maybe you set your preamp a little bit differently and so the levels are
slightly different and you're curious of you know how to match those levels and it's quite simple i
mean if you just add something like a a loudness meter let's just go to the logic loudness meter
and we could just measure the integrated loudness across verse one so let's just do that real quick
okay so let's say we measured that whole thing and it was at like -21 and then we go over to verse
two it's pretty darn close but uh yeah we could bring that up just a little bit just to match it
that was just a quick essential balance and a lot of times that's what i'll do i'll just
try to bring things up as quickly as possible and do it very instinctively very intuitively
you don't want to overthink this balance and the more you do it the more things will just
kind of come together in a natural way but after you've done this of course you know you
would go back now and start tweaking you saw me making some adjustments you know once i brought
the vocals up i thought you know some of the elements in the beat were a little bit too loud
so then we go back and make those you know fine tweaks but then also after that essential
balancing now we would go back and do things like automation so if you needed to add some automation
we would go ahead and do this now so that we're not going to have to rely on compression or
you know kind of making too many adjustments to dynamics that could be detrimental to the mix now
i know a lot of you were probably looking at my metering and saying wow you're mixing pretty hot
but i didn't mention it and i don't want you all to worry about it at this point because you could
see i have an instrumental vca and a vocal vca and if we wanted to create some headroom at the
end of the mix i could just disable these things on the master buss and then we could bring down
the vcas so we could bring down the vocal you know let's just say six and then we'll bring the
uh the instrumental vca down minus six as well to create some headroom and that's
gonna retain all of our send relationships you know all of the uh the fader moves that we have
and we've got plenty of headroom on the stereo bus one of the most common
balancing mistakes that i hear is a lot of times the kick and the 808 or the sub bass
you all are mixing that extremely hot because you want it to hit hard but it's at the detriment of
the rest of the balance and ultimately that is going to limit the loudness that we can
get in the mastering stage because once we you know start introducing a limiter these limiter
plug-ins the compression plug-ins anything that's processing dynamics you know it's looking to sort
of process something that is balanced correctly so that you can get the maximum loudness out of it
and if you have those elements which are already going to be you know pretty much the loudest in
terms of metering you know once we're feeding that excessively loud bass into the limiter
then you know we can't pump things up we can't get the loudness across the entire spectrum that you
would expect i don't think that you can get enough experience especially when you're starting out of
just observing and also practicing this balancing process because it is so vital it's so crucial to
everything that's going to happen in terms of your mixing process and ultimately what the
song is going to sound like even you know once we get to the mastering stage this is the ssl native
template that is now available on my website so if you want to download this session with audio
you can practice your essential balancing if you learn anything in the video please
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