{"id":28632,"date":"2015-09-20T10:43:40","date_gmt":"2015-09-20T15:43:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=28632"},"modified":"2015-09-20T10:43:40","modified_gmt":"2015-09-20T15:43:40","slug":"bad-and-wrong-music-lessons-part-7-mixing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=28632","title":{"rendered":"Bad and Wrong Music Lessons, Part 7: Mixing"},"content":{"rendered":"

The usual disclaimer applies: I don’t know what I’m doing, this is more a journal of learning than instruction, follow my advice at your own peril, etc. <\/p>\n

My experiment last week<\/a> was educational. It highlighted several things I’ve been struggling with. There are three major things negatively impacting the quality of the music I’ve been making:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Mixing failures.\n
  2. The tools I’m using.\n
  3. The unfortunate ratio between my abilities and ambitions. Either the former needs to somehow increase, or the latter needs to be reduced.\n<\/ol>\n

    Let’s go over these in turn:<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

    Mixing<\/h3>\n

    You can tell this is a high quality spectrum because it has like, rainbows and glow effects and stuff.<\/div>
    You can tell this is a high quality spectrum because it has like, rainbows and glow effects and stuff.<\/div><\/p>\n

    You know what a spectrum display is. It’s that thing that makes the bars bounce up and down while you listen to your MP3 player. The really high quality ones even make the bars different colors!<\/p>\n

    This is how loud all the various parts of the spectrum are at any given moment. In the above image, the purple represents the pounding, low-frequency kick drum. A little above that is the musical bass line. Somewhere in the red-orange range is the high-frequency stuff like cymbals. Most of the actual music will fall in the middle. (I carelessly cropped out the decibel numbers and range labels above, so we’re sort of eye-balling it here. But you get the idea.)<\/p>\n

    If you want to mix like a pro – that is, not at all like me – then you need to be aware of what’s going on in the spectrum. If my kick drum is pounding away at the low end of the spectrum, making lots of purple noise, then great. People will feel that beat though the walls and it will make them want to dance even if the actual melody is boring. But then let’s say I add a really low-frequency bass to the mix. It sounds super groovy, so I make it loud. It occupies the lavender part of the spectrumI’m deliberately avoiding naming the parts of the spectrum in terms of Hz to avoid the ‘Well, ACTUALLY…’ corrections from music nerds. Wish me luck!<\/span>, but it also bleeds down into the low purple parts. The problem is that my bass now maxes out the low end. When the kick drum hits, the hardware just can’t make any more purple noise, and so the kick drum ends up muddled and lost. This is exactly what happened last week<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    This is the peril of listening to a single song for too long while you work on it. I could still “hear” the kick drum because I was used to it. It wasn’t until I came back laterAnd only after people pointed it out to me.<\/span> that I realized the kick drum was barely audible.<\/p>\n

    The secret here – which is what I learned from a few helpful videos people posted last week – is to “sculpt” the range of each instrument. Maybe in the bass I can use an equalizer to cut off all the purple frequencies, leaving only the lavender stuff. Then it won’t be stepping all over the kick drum, and the drum will punch through clearly, producing the desired level of ass-shakery.<\/p>\n

    But this is difficult because…<\/p>\n

    My Tools Suck<\/h3>\n

    MAGIX Music Maker<\/a> lets you “sculpt” the spectrum. However, you can’t see<\/strong> the spectrum. It only shows you how loud a particular instrument is overall, but not what areas of the spectrum it’s using. There’s a spectrum window for the entire composition, but not one for individual tracks. So you end up with two totally different windows: One where you make changes to THIS instrument, another where you see the results of those changes mixed in with ALL instruments. In effect, they’re only useful if you’re playing a single instrument in isolation and can’t actually hear what the final mix will sound like.<\/p>\n

    You can make changes, or you can see the changes, or you can hear the changes, but you can’t do all three at once. This results in a lot of groping around, guesswork, frustration, and juggling different windows that always seem to get in each other’s way. <\/p>\n

    The only alternative is to move to using better tools, but I don’t think that makes a lot of sense. Anything that’s an upgrade from MAGIX is going to be way too expensive. If I was making a living with my music it would be one thing, but it doesn’t make sense to spend hundreds of dollars – perhaps close to a thousand – on a tool that I’m barely qualified to use. This is a hobby, not a career.<\/p>\n

    Of course, part of the problem with this is that…<\/p>\n

    I Suck<\/h3>\n

    In my defense, I suck less than I did 6 months ago, when I sucked less than the year before. It’s not like you should expect to be able to make pro-level music just because you dabble with it once a month or so. <\/p>\n

    Still, it doesn’t feel good to post dross. <\/p>\n

    Speaking of which… <\/p>\n

    I Posted Some Dross<\/h3>\n