Shot in the dark, but any Music People on here, how did you learn to mix your stuff so it doesn't sound like ass? I'm a musician barely learning mixing in Logic Pro and stuck in "sounds like ass" land, I fear.
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
A few technical tips right off the bat: put a high pass filter on everything. Set it to 40Hz with a 24db/octave slope. This will begin helping with the too much energy problem. With guitars and vocals, move that up to 160Hz and change the slope to 6db/octave… 1/n
2/n you want the different instruments to play nicely with each other. They each have different areas of the sound frequencies they play at. Bass is strongest at 120Hz and lower; rhythm guitars at ~400Hz, leads at 1200Hz; vocals at 800Hz. Use EQ to cut other instruments to stay out of the way…
3/n the EQ should be gentle: 0.4 Q (which is width of the EQ: higher numbers mean a sharper curve) and -3db at most (experiment to find a pleasing tone). This means EQ guitars and leads at 800Hz to avoid vocals, for example…
4/n The most important knob to turn is volume. Not of the entire thing but for each instrument. Is it too loud? Turn it down 1db. Too quiet? Turn it up 1db. The second most important noon is balance (left or right placement)…
5/n if you have two of an instrument or sound in the same sound range, try moving one left and one right until you can hear both clearly. The goal is clarity: to hear every instrument playing its part; if you can’t your sounds are fighting each other…
And finally, try putting a high shelf on at 4Khz (this is the second from right EQ type in the Logic EQ plugin iirc). Set the Q to 1 and set the high shelf to -3db. It’ll take the edge off the highs without muffling them too much. I know a lot of this is technically minded…
one thing that really helped me was to think of the tracks in 3 dimensions: depth (reverb, delay), width (panning), and height (frequency). each instrument should have its own spot in that space
I learned a ton of stuff from recordingrevolution on YouTube.
In the end, the secret is to make it sound good on a car radio. (the top producers and engineers do this...and one studio actually has/had a "listening car") altho these days it's probably sound good on your phone.
...that's actually very encouraging, because what sent me into this sad-tizzy is listening to it on a new set of earbuds. It DOES sound good on my phone speaker and computer speakers, I think!
Phone and computer speakers don’t have that low frequency response your earbuds might have. If it sounds good on them and not your new earbuds it’s likely there’s so much low frequency energy and needs a high pass.
The biggest tip is to A-B your music against a track that is a similar style. I will often bring a track into my editor and then play my tracks and then switch to the "goal track" to see how they compare.
I'm late to the party but it looks like there are already lots of great tips here ☺️ I work in logic too, I'd love to chat sometime and trade tips and techniques
Ahh thank you!! I fear I don't have many techniques to share 😅 I'm extremely baby at the mixing part, like only just figured out is how to do Busses. Also some cool plugins! But I'm getting there and always wanting to learn.
Comments
In the end, the secret is to make it sound good on a car radio. (the top producers and engineers do this...and one studio actually has/had a "listening car") altho these days it's probably sound good on your phone.