Mixing tutorials?

digitalscream

Having come to the conclusion that my mixing could do with some serious improvement, does anybody know of any decent mixing tutorials? Primarily for rock music - pretty simple, drums/bass/guitar/vocals. Having been through Google, most of it is "20 tips for..." which aren't particularly helpful, and then the rest seem to be focused on individual instruments rather than getting it to work as a whole.

Danny1969

The video vault over at Gearslutz has some great vids :

 

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/showwiki.php?title=Video-Vault:Video-Vault

Another good tool is to listen to some of the rockband \ guitar hero stems that are available on the net, when you solo a track you can hear the treatment  it's been through to work within a mix and that can give you some good pointers ...... it's surprising how thin you sometimes have to make things in order for them to sit together as a whole

Dave Pensado gives some great tips at  Pensados Place on Youtube, there's also a great French guy but I can't remember his name

Cirrus

I would very much recommend Zen and the Art of Mixing by Mixerman.

I've come to find that most of a good mix is a good song, performance and arrangement. It's when one or more of those fall down that it starts getting tough. I also think that interest in talking about mixing techniques on Internet forums has lead to an awful lot of 'internet wisdom' - things which gradually become gospel just through repetition. If you learn this internet wisdom you end up mixing by numbers, and that's the worst thing you can do because good mixing is an art. Some examples of internet wisdom you might come across; 

- always high pass everything except kick and bass 

- you have to 'carve out' frequencies to get instruments to sit together 

- hard panning is unnatural 

- the overwhelming feeling that if you haven't done *something* to an individual track, you're not doing your job.

So yeah... Be VERY wary of learning by rote, and I really do suggest the Mixerman book.

spark240

The Presonus site has some good links to mixing videos..

steveb

http://therecordingrevolution.com

steveb

@danny1969 do u mean Fab DuPont??

Danny1969

@steveb

That's the fellow Fab DuPont 

Thanks

Danny1969

Cirrus said:

I would very much recommend Zen and the Art of Mixing by Mixerman.

I've come to find that most of a good mix is a good song, performance and arrangement. It's when one or more of those fall down that it starts getting tough. I also think that interest in talking about mixing techniques on Internet forums has lead to an awful lot of 'internet wisdom' - things which gradually become gospel just through repetition. If you learn this internet wisdom you end up mixing by numbers, and that's the worst thing you can do because good mixing is an art. Some examples of internet wisdom you might come across; 

- always high pass everything except kick and bass 

- you have to 'carve out' frequencies to get instruments to sit together 

- hard panning is unnatural 

- the overwhelming feeling that if you haven't done *something* to an individual track, you're not doing your job.

So yeah... Be VERY wary of learning by rote, and I really do suggest the Mixerman book.

Lol yeah there's a lot of mixing by numbers advice all over the net. Some of those examples you cite are valid some of the time for a mix, it's just people want to teach they are valid all the time. 

And your right about the performance thing, it's a relatively easy to mix drums if the drummer hits consistently well and can balance the kit volume himself. It's a nightmare trying to mix drums if the drum hits are inconsistent and the cymbals are hit too hard for the overheads to be usable in the mix

I do recommend learning the tech theory of audio though. As a mixer you can knock things into shape a lot quicker if you can recognize what frequencies are doing what, you can make the cuts and boosts so much quicker. 

 

Branshen

http://www.crazypellas.net/producer-talk-107/a-guide-giving-you-frequencies-for-the-sound-you-want-when-eq-ing-53269/

A simple guide to EQ-ing. I've only been doing this for a few months and found this helpful.

guitarfishbay

Roey Izhaki - Mixing Audio: Concepts, Practices, and Tools was recommended to me by a friend who lectures in music.

I have the first edition and it was absolutely worth buying.  It explains clearly what all of the tools available to you do, how they can be used, and comes with a disc with audio examples so you can hear for yourself.  At the end of the book he deconstructs a few mixes part by part so you can hear how they were built up.

This is the current edition http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mixing-Audio-2e-Concepts-Practices/dp/0240522222/ref=la_B0033CGIL2_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1390213401&sr=1-1