I’m trying to work through the Understanding Mixing Fundamentals course with Phil Johnston, but it seems you’ve only supplied an Ableton Live project that needs registered copies of both Ana and Kick.
Surely to do your most basic mixing course you’re not expecting your users to have to buy these?
I don’t understand why you wouldn’t just supply the project with bounced-down dry stems instead of needing the actual synth VSTs. It makes no sense. Or am I missing something very obvious here? Help!
Hi there @bluesquirrel
You can download a 14 days demo version for both ANA 2 & KICK 2 if you want to recreate the same sounds.
That said, the course is about aprehanding mixing in general and what’s important to pay attention to.
It’s more a “sit, watch, listen & learn” type of course IMO, you don’t have to try to replicate the exact same result but those fundamentals guidelines will be useful when it comes to mixing your own tracks.
There’s a Mixing Level 2 course done using Cubase as well, of course you’re not gonna get a new DAW to follow this other course ( although you could get a demo version again ). But just to underline that those courses are about workflow, techniques, common issues you will encounter when mixing your own music, tips & tricks and things you should pay attention to.
But yeah, I’m getting your point about stems when it comes to mixing, but that would be more for a different type of course focusing on trying to get the same result IMO. In that case, providing the “Dry” stems before applying any mixing techniques and the final “Wet” mixed stems would definitly be useful yes. But again, you’ll be targetting 1 specific song & mix in this case, here it’s more about learning about Mixing in general and getting some fundamental knowledge that you’ll be able to use in your own productions.
@phil_johnston could be something interesting to do IMO 
Maybe a “Mixing” competition rather that a “Remix” comp ?
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I take the point that the course works well without trying to copy it.
I did try using the demo versions of Kick and ANA but they both come with white noise bursts every 30 seconds. You can probably imagine what 20 instances of the same plugin bursting white noise at different intervals does to your sanity…
I would really love it if you could see you way to doing a second download of the VSTs bounced-down to WAV audio that could be loaded into any DAW. And if @phil_johnston wasn’t up for doing this, would another user be able to make one and msg me? Because watching someone use the tools and playing with them yourself are quite different learning experiences.