Part of the appeal of recording at a large studio is their expansive backline. Bigger studios will usually have dozen of options to choose from, which means lots of amps, microphones & preamps to mess around with!
It doesn’t have to be overly complicated to get good drums in your mix. There are plenty of small tweaks and automation that can happen to give you perfect drums, but what about a quick and easy drum mix that’s aggressive enough to blow most home studio & hobbyist mixes out of the water? Well that should only take about 5 minutes…
Going into a mix, it’s easy to get caught up in best practices and “clean-up” mode. When this happens, you forget that at its core, mixing music is a creative experience. So once you’ve got your tracks cleaned up and mix-ready, give some of these creative compression techniques a try.
DISCLAIMER: This post is not for the faint of heart. Don’t freak out. We’re going to intentionally clip our lead vocal. If you’re going to continue reading, I need you to promise me you’ll read through to the end (or at least watch the video all the way through). Deal?
While there are always new plugins coming out that you’ll need to learn as you go, there are fundamental mistakes that engineers make when it comes to multi-band processing. Here’s how you can avoid them:
If you’re not using impulse responses in your workflow, you’re missing out on an entire world of consistent, accurate sound that you can replicate over and over again. There’s a level of sonic accuracy and detail in a well-captured IR that you’re going to be hard-pressed to find in an amp simulator.
Electric guitars recorded directly into the computer are more commonplace in the studio than ever before - and for good reason. It’s easier to make edits to a DI track and you can tweak their sound as much as you want (at any point in the mix process).
A 3-dimensional mix is necessary to remain competitive in the music industry. With track counts soaring higher all the time, engineers need more than the traditional LCR approach to combat particularly dense mixes.
Okay, you caught us red-handed… We crushed the hell out of it. Cranked the Slay up to infinity and let it go to town. Fattened it up with a little extra Body and threw to the wolves (disclaimer: no wolves were involved in the making of this song, unfortunately).