How to mix (A Formal Report)

Hey guys, so today, I’m going to teach you guys how to mix. 

But this time, there’s going to be a slight twist to this blog post. 

I’m going to write this blog post as if though I am doing a business letter. 

I am going to write this blog post as if though I am presenting it to professionals in the music industry. 

Because what happens is that I currently have a day job and my boss says that I need to get better at writing reports in this manner. 

So that means that I need to get practice writing reports in this manner. 

So here it goes, How to mix a formal report

How to mix a Formal Report

Mixing is an art.

Mixing helps to create balance in a song, along with add some effects that will polish the song that you are mixing. 

Imagine a cake, Mixing is the icing on the cake. 

It just makes it better. 

Let’s talk about what exactly is done in mixing.

Creates balance

So when you mix, you are mixing to create a few different types of balances. 

For one your volume levels with all of your instruments and voices have to be at the level that you want it to be at. 

For most songs that have voices, you want to mix to mix vocals. 

So this means that you are almost always going to have the instruments in the background and have the voice front and center. 

Not always, and some instruments do get more volume. But that imbalance in the song is actually the balance that we need in most songs. 

If you really pay attention to your favorite songs, you could actually hear that the voice just cuts through the guitars and drums and bass

EQ is actually one of the tools that you use in order to get the voice to cut through the noise. 

The other tools are the faders. 

So let’s talk about the Faders for an instance. 

The Faders

The faders is the part in the mixing console that adjusts the volumes. 

The first thing you want to do in a regular song with drums, bass, guitar, pianos, and voice, is to set the bass drum fader. 

There are a couple of ways to set the bass drum fader.

The first way is to literally just set it at 0 DB 

Another way is to set it to -6 DB

The last way that I know of to set the fader is to literally get a white noise and put the white noise in your DAW and hear where the bass drum is barely heard over the white noise.

 Once you hear the bass drum barely over the white noise, then you know that, that’s where your bass drum should be at. 

Once you have that, next step is to take a reference track and you can either have it in another window or you could have it in your DAW, I personally have it in another window because I just want to stream my music and buying thousands of singles and albums that I would need to put in my DAW would be kind of expensive     But the proper way to do it is to put it in your DAW.

It’s faster to have it in your DAW.

The reference track is to have a goal of a mix that you want your song to sound like. This way you are moving towards a goal and you are not bouncing back and forth between different styles of mixing because you really liked one song but hated how this song sounded like. 

You then have to adjust the faders according to how the reference track sounds like. 

You will notice that there are some elements in the mix that are louder than other elements.

This is where the adjustments of the fader comes in.

The bass drum is supposed to stay set at wherever you set it, whether it was by 0 DB or -6 DB or the white noise method, keep it there. 

 You adjust the rest of your faders depending on how big you want each instrument to be.

 Say for example if you hear the bass drum is very loud in the mix and the guitars are soft, all you would have to do is set the guitars at a lower level than the bass drum so that the bass drum is louder and the guitars are softer. 

To be continued…

Broadcast

Alright guys, this has been part one to my mixing class in a formal setting. I’m only going to get better from here.

Thank you all for listening in on this blog post. Remember to pray, read your bible, go to church, and love God above all else. Like, comment, share, subscribe, and I will see you all next time.

If you want to go to heaven, then believe in Jesus and you will go to heaven. (John 3:16)

Thank you all for listening in on this blog post. 

German Gonzalez, signing out!