Sonic Academy proudly welcomes back mau5trap’s Dom Kane this week with an in-depth look and masterclass in mixing down his track ‘Voices In My Head’ taken from the massive mau5trap compilation ‘We Are Friends Vol. 08’
Starting with the original project file he exports the stems into a completely different workstation - Harrison Mixbus so he can focus solely on the mixdown, without being tempted to alter any of the elements and discards his ‘producer head’ entirely.
Throughout this course, Dom works methodically tweaking the different channels with EQ and compression and removing unnecessary frequencies without affecting the quality or energy of the track that could push sound systems in a detrimental way.
Lastly, he checks the stereo spread of the track before making any final tweaks to complete a perfect mix to move on to the mastering stage.
Filled with tips, tricks and ways of thinking that differ greatly from the production side of creating a successful track, this is a course not to be missed!
Great course covering the Mix Down stage. Dom nailed it in the way he’s bringing a very valuable “philosophy” & approach of this step of Music Production.
A good & well structured workflow is shown here as well as a tons of tips about what you need & don’t when it comes to this part. The all thing brought into an easy to grab formulation and nice picturing of fundamentals techniques that could sometime confuse or intimidate beginners.
@domkane excellent tutorial, really hope to see the Mastering phase with the same track, that will all make sense. Thank you for sharing.
yea, this time it’s about MixBus 32c, Dom is not covering Bitwig in this one. But like you mentioned, Mixbus is a terrific and much underrated Daw IMO. Anyway, since the course is focusing on Mixing Down a track, everyone can follow along with any Daw of his/her choice that suits the needs for mixing. And again, this course if full of good practice and tips & tricks on the subject. I just finished to view it and it’s brilliant, definitely one to watch !
Found that really useful, many thanks Dom, and great sounding track too. Mixbus question … do you ever make use of the built-in Mixbus channel strip eq’s and compressors (apart from the side-chaining) or do you find them a bit too fiddly?
@TJJ1066 - I do use the channel strip EQs fairly often, but usually for LPF/HPF functions, unless I’m treating something like an acoustic instrument/vocal and then I use those almost exclusively as the tonality has a place to shine. They can be fiddly, which is why I tend to stick with what i know when it comes to electronic dance music tracks because compressors/EQs don’t really need much of a unique character then.
@advancer - I don’t think you have to be unfamiliar with the workstation, but it just helps my mindset if for example, I know how to mix using MixBus32 but I don’t know how to develop a whole track or rework the sound-design etc in there, because then i don’t think about that stuff and only focus on the mixing. Personally whenever I try to mix in Ableton or Bitwig, I always end up getting sidetracked and start tweaking all the automations, and the sound-design, and playing with VSTs and forgetting that I’m supposed to be focusing on the mix levels. It’s just a way or separating the two different jobs.
I even recommend to people that don’t want to change workstation, to just export the stems and then import them in to a new project in your normal workstation so that you can’t see the VSTs and automation lines etc, so there’s no distraction from the mix.
@Tutorial 2 - Mixing and listening with the monitor off. I do this regularly and for this, I wrote a little program to support this. It’s only a black screen and you don’t have to switch off your monitor every time. Maybe someone likes this too. https://m2k1.de/black-back/
Not yet, that was only a plan, can’t tell you if @domkane & S.A have scheduled anything yet about this one. If under the scope, bear in mind that it could take some time, tutors needs to record their courses and some video editing & post prod work needs to be done.
@samelec - Nothing planned for definite at this stage sorry… I think SA had a couple of other similar ones planned from other artists, but I’ll keep the discussion with them going just in case. I think it would make a nice addition to the mixdown one for sure.
Thanks @domkane and @Tekalight. This was a great tutorial. Keeping an eye for the future mastering one just in case I have recently checked out How to Use MasterCheck which was great and IMO necessary to watch. Meanwhile am going through other tutorials on mastering here. Thanks again!
I like the very reduced and structured approach. However, this tut is very basic. 1) Lots of presets a used, instead of heaving a own approach to specific settings lika ratio or whatever. 2) NONE of the Mixbus features are used (EQs, Comps, etc). These are the core features of Mixbus. Only external plugins are used. 3) the speaker takes very long for really really basic, simple and obvious steps. For, example many many minutes expire, to explain how and why to use a high-pass on a whisper. ON A WHISPER. It so clear and self explanatory, that u use a highpass on a whsiper. This, in the mixing-process, should be a step that lasts maybe half a minute. In this case, it takes many many minutes. And last but not least 4) the Track by itself is allready mixed and designed very well. Reverbs, FX and so on are already done before. I somehow expected, that this is also part of the mixing-process. So finally, this tut is about some very marginal eq and compression settings
