13 - 4 tips for Musicians mixing themselves and Engineers Starting out

February 18, 2023

This episode is a solo episode from Jon that's focusing on advice for musicians who might be recording or mixing themselves and will also be appropriate to new engineers and producers who want some advice on areas to help their career when starting out as a producer within the music industry.

Order of the day

You don’t need to buy that expensive upgrade,

A lot of the consumer technology today is pretty amazing, you don’t need to sped 2 grand on a new sound card and 1,000 on a microphone. As your career develops this can be useful

Welsh clwb work experience - learn to work with what you’ve got

Try put off buying the thing you want for another another week, another month.

Audient ID range mic preamps have been lifted directly from their consoles and its a great preamp which we use all the time, in fact their8 channel preamp can be bought for amazing value second hand. We use this all the time in the studio

Musicians won’t care about the gear you’re using, they’re more interested in the sound you get.

Try working with what you have, a good monitoring environment and a decent set of speakers don’t have to break the bank.

Your room is more important

When mixing or recording, the room you’re recording in will have the biggest impact on the overall sound of the recording. In the mixing sense sometimes it can colour your mix, a small room when recording drums buyt there are tools that can help you here. The investment into your room will provide the biggest response.

Acoustic filters - When these first came out, I used to use it all the time thinking it was helping with my room. We’ve recently seen townsend labs bringing out modelling mics that let you compensate for using these…. Long story short, I’ve stopped using it. The reason being was it was more effective to put panels behind the person recording than it was implementing it.

Acoustic treatment - try to avoid the foam stuff panels if you cna help it,DIY and self made panels are great and a company like GIK acoustics will make your room sound a lot better. There are usually room packs

Room correction software, this can be great on its own but even better when combined with treating your room. The idea behind the technology is it will measure the acoustic response of your room by sending a frequency sweep of some kind to a measurement microphone and allow you to compensate for peaks or troughs in your room and blend .

Mixing - Turn it down

So we’ve started with the room and equipment now let's jump into the mixing your tracks. This is the most common issue I see when helping students in the past.
The most common issue I see all the time is mixes in Logic hitting a +10 on the master bus. Most of the time people have done this because they’re listening on laptop speakers or the monitoring environment isn’t loud enough. Everything sounds exciting but this will get rejected by a mastering engineer or DSPs if we’re uploading them to Spotify/CD Baby.
As you’re mixing, keep an eye on the master bus, and try to make sure you’re not clipping, there are a couple of tricks we can do to automate this in a mix and keep the balances set which we may come back to in another podcast.

Do the opposite of what you want to do

The final part of this episode links back to previous point and is recommended whether your in the studio or in live sound and that is doing the opposite of what you want to do
If the drums are too quiet, turn the guitars down
If you want to turn the vocals up, perhaps have all the instruments group together and bring them down.
If you want to brighten the overall sound of an instrument, try cutting the opposite areas and managing the tone this way
What we’re trying to do here here is to stop ourselves ending back in the positing of everything being louder than everything else and ended back in the last point where the master bus is back at that +10.
Everything sounds like a smush and sounds worse than when we started.

Final bonus point - Mixing

As you change one element of the mix, it’s going to impact another area of your mix, if you bring the vocals up in the mix, it could bury the drums or guitars. If the bass becomes louder, it could overpower the kick drum or you lose some of the body of the guitars. This is okay. Knowing when the mix is finished is difficult, for me its usually when I find myself dancing or bobbing along to the track that I’ll record the mix/bounce it out and go and check it. Sometimes just taking a break and coming back to your track with a fresh perspective can help you.

Summary

You don’t need that extra bit of gear

Spend that money on the room instead

When mixing, everything doesn’t need to be louder than everything else

Try doing the opposite of what you want to do

And be okay with the fact that mixing is cyclical.

Let me know what you guys think, are there any bits of advice you stick to when mixing or approaching your sessions. Have you held off from buying gear, leave me a comment below or send us an email on podcast at session recall

Nick and I will be back next week, we’re in the process of arranging interviews for the podcast which we’ll hopefully be able to start rolling out in the coming months.

Thanks again, I hope you enjoyed this episode and my only ask today is that if you think this episode would benefit someone please share it with them. See you all soon.

Episode Transcript

SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p
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[00:00:00] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: Right up really high. Everything gets squashed and we can't really hear things and everything starts sounding a little bit smaller.

[00:00:10] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Session Record podcast. If you're new to this podcast, this is a place for anyone who is looking to develop or sustain a career. Within the music industry, if you're a musician, if you're studio engineers, studio manager, and just looking to develop your skills and knowledge in the music business and navigating the music industry, and hopefully this podcast will be for you.

[00:00:30] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: So Nick's currently on his way back to Wales, so gonna be on sessions for the next couple of weeks and we've got a couple of interviews lined up. In the near future, which hopefully we'll be rolling out over the next couple of weeks and months. This is just gonna be a solo episode for me today, so it should be, hopefully it should be pretty short.

[00:00:45] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: The focus of this episode is really for musicians and artists. You might be starting out the career load, looking at recording themselves and mix themselves, and it's just a little bit of advice and tips that I wish I kind of had when I started my career in the industry. So this is gonna be split up into about four tips.

[00:00:59] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: I'll try and keep this as quick as possible. tip number. You don't need to buy expensive equipment and you don't need to get that expensive upgrade as soon as possible. This is sometimes known as Gear acquisition syndrome, which a lot of the consumer grade and entry grade equipment is really good. It's actually fantastic now compared to what we had maybe 10 years ago.

[00:01:17] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: So brands like Focusrite Audient, Universal, audio Antelope, all of this stuff has some really good entry level equipment. For example, Audient, they have their ID range. They might preempt on those sound cards that have actually been lifted from their large format consoles so that these consoles.

[00:01:31] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: 40,000, 50,000 pounds, and it doesn't cost them any money to actually just take the technology and put it into their sound cards. It's already been developed and they're really good. The audience, Mike Pres, we actually use in the studio, we got 16 channels in the eight channel preamp racks that you can get.

[00:01:47] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: You can pick those up for like, 200 quid, 300 quid secondhand, they actually can actually expand into some of the low level sound cars by adat. They're really good preempts, use 'em all the time, never had quality. One of the things I would say is that when I started out, I probably started out doing live sound and I remember I was doing work experience in club Ava Cardiff, and whilst I was working with them,

[00:02:08] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: I was also running an open mic night at the same time, and I bought a few bits and pieces of equipment, nothing really high into actual pretty budget stuff. And I remember talking to them, they asked me how the night was going. I said, well, I'm really struggling about, I could really do, you know, I could really do a couple of compressors and EQs or like outboard EQs and compressors and reverbs.

[00:02:25] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: And I remember them just saying to me, he's like, look, Having that information, having that equipment is all well and good, but you're gonna learn a lot more by just dealing with what, with the equipment that you have and working with what you've got and learning from that rather than just buying the next piece of pe next piece of equipment just for the sake of it.

[00:02:39] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: And it really stuck with me as actually when I started my new studio, I was in the same position in a way. I was like always wanting another eq, always wanting like another outboard compressor. I remember always thinking, oh, this is what I'll need to take, get myself to the next level and everything. And.

[00:02:51] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: Investing a decent amount of money for converters onto Mike pre's, and these are all bits and pieces that I'm still using in Rockfield I could take to Rockfield. I still use in Ebbw Vale. I remember it wasn't until I started working with Nick, I opened up a couple of sessions in Leeders Vale just to listen back to some previous sessions thinking, oh, I just wanna see how, how bad my recordings were.

[00:03:09] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: I remember opening up sessions, just listening back to recordings and thinking, this sounds great. It was actually, there was nothing wrong with the equipment I had. And there's always this thing of like, oh, I've only, I had this 1176, or if only I had some ne VQs or some Neve might freeze. Everything would be better just to say like, learn with the equipment that you've already got.

[00:03:24] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: Don't try spending tons and tons of money just for the sake of it. And I've seen instances where people have spent thousands upon thousands of dollars or parents on equipment. But they're not quite at a level where they fully understand how to work with everything. So just get the basics right first, and that can be really, really important from a studio perspective or a business perspective.

[00:03:43] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: Musicians don't care about equipment. You see all these websites with like, you know, I've got 1176, I've got some avid converters and everything. The most important part from a business perspective is the final sound and the output that you actually get. That's more, that's all that like musicians really care about or bands really care about.

[00:03:57] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: I don't really have anyone coming saying, oh, have you got a U 87 vocals? Or, I've only recorded the U 87. As long as it sounds good, no one. So again, try working what you've got. The most important element I would suggest if you're gonna prioritize on anything is your speakers get a decent set of speakers.

[00:04:11] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: They don't have to blow the budget. And then think about the acoustics of the room or like think about treating your room as you can as your first point of call. Building on from that, so obviously I've said that we don't need to spend tons and tons of money and equipment. We don't need to think about upgrades.

[00:04:22] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: If we are gonna think about something, say we're thinking about mixing, we're thinking about recording. The room is probably the most important element for recording. Good performer, a good musician can play. I get some really good sounds out of recording, but the room will play a biggest impact on the sound, overall sound that you're gonna get.

[00:04:36] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: A lot of people might be recording in untreated rooms and that can have a negative impact on the final sound and the output of it. And similarly, when we're coming to mix in, one of the difficult that we sometimes have is that there might be peaks and troughs that build up to certain frequencies in the room.

[00:04:49] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: If it hasn't been un, if it has been untreated. One of the things I would re. If you can afford to either build your own panels or bio some acoustic treatment for the room, that can have a really good impact on the output of the mixes that you do and improve the quality of it. And it also, especially when it comes to recording as well, this is something that becomes incredibly important for the overall tone of the sound of the room.

[00:05:11] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: We can kind of cover like frequencies, we control it like unwanted ringing in the room or something that can be ca that can be. Beneficial. What sometimes happens, one of the things that we actually say in, in our courses is the bigger the room, the lesser, the problems we have are acoustics and obviously for like, you know, drum kits, acoustic guitars, pianos.

[00:05:26] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: Sometimes we might want a liveing room, but having that ability to treat the room or control the overall sound means that can have a massive positive impact on the final quality that we're able to get. Just to make another point is, Started recording. I didn't have the acoustic treatment available. I was using like a reflection filter for vocals and I was pretty adamant that I thought this was gonna be a really good investment, I thought was gonna make a massive difference.

[00:05:47] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: But the, one of the things I don't really mention about the reflection filters is the reflection filter is going behind the microphone. So it's actually pit sopping like reflections coming in from the back. There's not redoing anything about the what's being picked up in front of the microphone. And sometimes that's where the actual issues can come and come from.

[00:06:04] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: So for the podcast, I'm just using a dynamic mic. It's like sure. It's an induction of the Sure sm seven dynamic mics in this room. Like, it sounds really good because the pickups patterns really small, so sometimes it's just like using the microphones that you have available for the room that you rate them to work in.

[00:06:18] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: What I tended to find with the, with the reflection filter, sir, I remember when I. The studio, I was still using it in the live room. I remember after a while just thinking, I just wanna hear what the mic signs without it. And I actually noticed that the, the impact it had, it didn't really have that much of an impact on it.

[00:06:31] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: And for the sake of setting it up, taking it down and all the rest of it, it was more hassle than it was really worth. So I actually stopped using the reflection filter. And it was, I was really more like focusing then about what was actually going behind the singer and actually having the paneling and the treatment for that to actually cover that point.

[00:06:46] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: We've also seen, like with the likes of say like Town and Labs, which is mic modeling company and they've seen be bought by Universal Audio in their modeling mics. I think they've actually got an option for actually putting on reflection filter to try and compensate for that because sometimes it can actually lead to picks and troughs and stuff.

[00:07:00] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: At least you may not want. Thinking about the room is so important in terms of the acoustics and how we actually capture the sounds. As great as possible in terms of treating the room itself. If you can get like self-built ones with Rockwall or like some kind of like absorption material, that's a really good starting point cuz it's cheap to make.

[00:07:17] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: If you can avoid the foam stuff, yes it's all right, but it's a pain, honestly. It's an absolute pain in the ass. If you take it down, you have to move it. I'm sure my dad still hasn't forgive me if using spray on acoustic. Dick to the walls. My my parents' house where when we took it all down, it ripped the plaster board off.

[00:07:32] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: Well than John, not the most popular person. I would recommend like, you know, like real traps, GK acoustics, that if you want just custom-built panels and stuff, and not, not custom built, but like specifically built panels, these are really good. They can like dead in a room, make it really sound really good.

[00:07:46] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: And it'll make a massive difference on the recording quality and also the mixed quality of the room once we've got the room kind of treated really well, the next, the other thing I'd also recommend that you could probably do this before, depending on budget, is obviously thinking about Sonar Works or IQ multimedia arc or basically room correction software.

[00:08:02] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: The benefit of these systems is that what they do is they take Measuring a microphone and they run full frequency sweeps into the room to measure the response of your room. In terms of are there peaks and troughs or there, are there low frequency buildups or is there gaps in the frequencies that we might be missing and compensating for without realizing?

[00:08:19] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: So the idea behind the room correction software is we try and get as flat a frequency as possible for mixing so that when we take our mixes to the car to other. The mixes will translate. And that's really important because sometimes we're not sure what we're hearing and we don't actually know what we're hearing if we're not that experienced.

[00:08:36] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: So trying to get a balance between the rooms or trying to get a balance of the overall quality of the speakers can make a huge difference and it's something that I would recommend trialing out if you can and see what you can do next point. Is mix in now. Mix in the, when we come to mixing, this is a common thing that I've seen from teaching students, especially in logic.

[00:08:54] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: Part of it is maybe to do with the speakers they're on. Often it's turn that shit down, turn that stuff down. And the problem being is with a lot of students, sometimes they might be listening on the laptop and trying to like make, basically make everything as loud as possible because they can't quite hear it.

[00:09:07] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: So if we've got a decent set of speaker, To actually monitor it like a decent volume. It means we can actually record at a lower level. We can actually mix at a lower level, which gives us something called headroom. Now headroom is really important because that's what actually gets the clarity in the mix, and if everything's right up really high, everything gets squashed and we can't really hear things and everything starts sounding a little bit smaller.

[00:09:29] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: I'm often seeing like logic mixes, especially where like the, in the massive bus going plus 10, plus 15, ideally we'd be like down at least 20 DV from there. So like down minus five, minus six on the mix. But as long as it's not clipping, that's the main thing. And as I said, the main issue sometimes is because what they're listening to isn't loud enough.

[00:09:46] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: If we send like the mix of this level to a mastering engineer, what would normally happen is we'd send it back to them and we go, this needs to be brought down. We need to take limiting off, and we need to try and cover that because I'm kind of limited to what I can do because there isn't much headroom.

[00:09:59] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: Everything's squashed, and I think we just need to revisit a. Okay, so the next thing that we actually do is, this is actually a mixing approach that I'd recommend to people in the studio also live as well, is actually doing the opposite of what you want to do. And this is sometimes when I'm doing like mixed reviews from students and everything, they might say, I can't quite get my drums of sound as big as possible.

[00:10:20] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: I can't quite get the drums of sound like they're curtain through as well. What can we do? And sometimes I say, I'll send me the session, let's have a look at it. You up the session, you still have the drums. Drums sound great. There's nothing wrong with these drums and not all. It is sometimes like, let's just turn everything else down.

[00:10:34] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: Let's bring the guitars down, let's bring the vocals down, the bass, whatever's getting in the way, and let's bring the balance out a little bit because I know like the habit is sometimes let's make the guitars really exciting. Everything needs to be really, really high up in the le in the levels, so.

[00:10:49] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: Having a listen to what other tracks are doing can be good as a reference point. And this can also, this can also actually happen as well on guitars as well. So it might be all like the vocals. So say that you wanted the vocals up. What you could actually do instead is maybe take the drums, the guitars, the bass, the synth, whatever other instruments are on the track, group them together and bring 'em down.

[00:11:07] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: So as we're building mixes, sometimes we might be doing. Big automation passes and lots of things going on, so it gets a little bit more difficult to start bringing things down. In my sessions, what I tend to do is on my mix template, I've actually got a set of channels which actually control like different elements of the mixes.

[00:11:25] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: So if I do need to bring like elements, say like I wanna bring all the instruments down by the drums, I've got a fade that I'll bring that down. I've got a whole instrumental part, which is the drums, guitars, bass, vocal. Drums, guitars, synths, whatever. Everything's set. The vocals, I can bring them down rather than having send the, the acoustics up.

[00:11:40] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: So there's, there's little things that we can do to actually kind of counteract that and kind of get out of the way from recording. So this can also happen as well from a live sound perspective when we're talking about doing the opposite of what you want to do. If the bass isn't Bryce enough, perhaps look at cutting some of the frequencies in the lower range.

[00:11:58] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: Let make it less overpower and then we could compress it a little bit more. We could look at lifting it up and it isn't getting overpowered by the base frequencies. So these things are like, try doing the opposite of what you wanna do. Just might be like contract counterintuitive way of doing it, but it's also to try and contract the, like say like Jim Simon Meatloaf song.

[00:12:18] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: Everything louder than Every, having everything louder than everything else. And what will normally happen on mix changes is you go. I want the drums up and the bass good. The guitarists will go, oh, well the drums are too loud. And I can, the guitars and the vocals go, I want me. And basically what happens is the track keeps building up like this.

[00:12:32] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: He's getting higher and higher. And then, well, that's no good to anyone because we're in the same issue as for before. That's something to think about and if we can. And so just trying to kind of balance that. So rather than turn the guitars up, try bringing like the other instance down to that level and it might give you a better mix.

[00:12:47] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: The final point again, so when we're on about mixing, we already mentioned it a little bit. This kind of comes about from conversations that I've had with artists who are self-producing or self mixing. Do they find themselves going around in circles? And this is like kind of a natural part of the mixing process.

[00:12:59] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: You will be going around trying to fix things or highlighting things, and that might then bring out other problems that you had noticed. So you might be doing a lot of drum mixing and then going to the guitars and thinking, well, the guitars getting lost a little bit. And then that might be right, we're gonna bring up the high end of the EQ or something.

[00:13:12] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: We're gonna bring up some of the midrange of the guitars out, and then that's kind of masking the bass or it's masking the sense of the vocals it. So what we're doing is we're going around quite a bit and we're making changes. It's a bit of a fluid process and sometimes it's hard to know when to stop.

[00:13:25] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: One of the things we could do is thinking about like taking break. , we could bounce the track off and come back to it. Biggest difficulty is sometimes getting tunnel vision and the regular breaks and having like moving away from the song will be like a beneficial thing to do. And sometimes it could be that like we've got too many, too much processing on the song as well.

[00:13:40] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: So that was more or less like kind of the, the, the areas I wanted to cover today. So just to recap, we have, you don't need to spend all that extra money on, you don't need that extra of gear. Try holding off or pushing off for as long as possible what you have. Investing in one or two bits of pieces of equipment to begin with will be good, and some of the budget entry equipment is amazing and it's really good quality and it's not gonna hold you back or impact on the recordings focus, right?

[00:14:02] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: Scarlet's, the audience ID range universal audio of you got a higher budget. All these have an excellent preamps in and they're not gonna stop you from recording where I would recommend you spending your money, first of all, if you can, is spending money on your room and thinking about acoustic treatment.

[00:14:17] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: The film traps, I wouldn't recommend maybe go for the other, like, you know, maybe try investing over building your own or buying some panels from someone like gk. And the other part obviously is talking about like room correction software. Cause that can actually make a huge difference. You've also got like headphone modelers or like ones where we can look at like headphone ranges.

[00:14:34] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: So the slight vsx is meant to be really good. Sonar Works also gives you profiles for he certain headphones types. I've got them from my pxs, my shanghais on my seven, seven ties, which I use normally when I'm mixing test in. When we come on to mixing, turn everything down, we don't need to be at plus 10, plus 11 or whatever.

[00:14:49] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: Bring everything down like the, the head room's really important for the, the volumes. When it comes to mixing as well, try have a go at trying to mi like do the opposite of what you're meant to be, what you want to achieve. So if we want the drums, allow to try tiling everything else down. If you want the vocals to come up, try bringing the guitars down.

[00:15:04] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: And again, try doing the opposite. So if we want the BA from more bass in the bass, take some of the high end out or vice versa, take some of the low end out to try and ex accentuate some of the high frequencies. And finally, with mixing as well, take regular breaks. It's fine to be cyclical. You will be in a process where changing one thing will happen to have an impact on something else, and that's a natural process of it.

[00:15:24] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: Again, when we're talking in the studio, we're bands. It's one of the things we have to educate people sometimes, and well look, if we impact this, this is gonna have an impact on the other bits and pieces. So it's just a conversation we have as we go along. So hopefully that's been been some useful advice for you guys.

[00:15:36] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: Let me know what you think in the comments. If there's anything you don't agree with or any like tips or advice that you could give to new musicians or artists who think about recording themselves, let me know our comments. Drop us in [email protected]. If there are any good ones, I will add them to the comments on YouTube.

[00:15:50] SR 13 - Tips for musicians starting out - HD 1080p: If you think this be episode would benefit someone else, please tag them. Please share it with them. Be would mean the world to us. We will see you all again very soon. Bye-bye.