No Dough Music

When you’re first starting out, one of the biggest challenges can be your own self-doubt. Are you doing things the right way? Is your technique correct? Maybe you feel like you’re hitting your head against a brick wall?

We all experience this problem. Sometimes all you need is a little leg up to get your started. When people ask questions about music production on-line, because of the general dark art nature of music those with legitimate questions are often faced with an unhelpful reply of “aah, it’s far more complicated than that" or "you need to be far more specific". While those answers may well be technically true in any given case, it however doesn’t mean a more enlightened teacher wouldn’t be able to give more constructive advice by looking at what the person asking the question is trying to achieve, delving a little deeper into the query. The answer remains that there are many ways of achieving what you are seeking and ALL of them correct. More Often than not what would be of great benefit to the learner is sharing just one simple way of doing things, one point of view or process method as an example and starting point, from which you can start to build your knowledge up and gain some confidence. A process to practice can help develop your abilities along the long & sometimes frustrating road of music production.

So that’s what I intend to illustrate with this example, One Way to Start a Mix down, Hey, maybe it’ll be the way that suits you best - you never know!

Firstly, are you Happy with the content and ideas, the song-writing and arrangement?

Before even considering doing a mix down and getting your song sounding good for public consumption you need to ask yourself a few questions. The biggest challenge of the modern era is the proliferation of technology and digital production! Yes, it has many benefits, I’ll admit, but the way it’s brought everything together has had one unmistakeable downside. People overlap their jobs/processes. They mix while writing, they master while recording. This is the road to disaster! Complete Separation in your mind is very helpful between writing and making changes artistically, right through to deciding ‘right it’s done’... and - only after that’s completed - beginning to mix. Thinking only of the levels of the EQ and the relative sound is so important. Our brains are wonderful, but getting them to be Artistic and Outside-the-box at the same time as being Subjective and Analytical is just a bit too much all at once for most people.

So...are you happy with this track? It may sound a little bit muffled and dirty, but is the idea there? Does it keep your attention? Most of all, does it have a solid artistic theme and idea? If so.... time to mix!

Zero All Faders

At this juncture I would always suggest a little housekeeping. After working on a project it’s inevitable that there will be a lot of clutter, muted tracks, surplus midi files here and there. Clear all that. If possible, organise your tracks into blocks where similar stuff is together. Basically, the idea is, when you’re mixing new ideas will form quickly in your head. You need to be able to grab faders and knobs as quickly as possible, as it’s important to try all these ideas out.

Rule Number 1 – It’s OK to have 10 different mix-downs, It is not a sign of indecision at this stage it actually gives you more options, so don't be afraid to try every idea!

Now is also a good time to go through your tracks and work on some low and high Pass Filtering. Nothing audible though, you want to set you filters to get rid of any inaudible sound that could build up to clutter your mix, for example ultra-low frequency booms on a vocal.

At this point export a copy of your rough mix and import it into your project, muted.

Always start by Dropping all the Faders to zero (infinity not unity gain). Music is very subjective, and if you continue to start your mix from the same start-point and just tweak around it, you can often get stuck in loops. Get out of the loops; if you end up with 10 completely different sounding mix downs that’s brilliant.