6 Things To Improve Your Mixes & It Won't Cost You a Dime PT 1
Hello to all my fellow audio engineers!
I'm here to share some tips that can instantly improve your mixes, and the best part is that it won't cost you a penny! These concepts have worked for many mix engineers for decades, and I started seeing major improvements to my final mixes when I started using them.
So let's dive into the tips:
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Pick the section of the song that has the most impact to mix first. This could be the final chorus or the bridge section. You want to find a section where all the instruments are playing and it has the most going on. The concept is to make this particular section, the climax of the song sound as BIG as possible. If you mix this section first and make it "slammin", then everything else will fall nicely underneath. Mixing the verse first and making it sound amazing will push everything to the limit, leaving you with nowhere to go from there. In other words, you don’t want the verses of the track to sound “BIGGER” than the chorus...
Gear - What Do I "NEED" vs What Would I "LIKE"
Hey there, audio engineers! In my last post, I discussed the importance of creating a business plan for your recording studio. I hope you took that advice and have completed your homework. Today, I want to talk about gear - what you "NEED" to have vs. what you "WOULD LIKE" to have.
First and foremost, it's important to remember that no piece of gear, regardless of the price, can make a poorly recorded song sound good. So, before you start thinking about buying expensive equipment or plugins, it's crucial to understand the basic recording principles, such as good mic placement and proper gain staging.
So, what gear do you need to record and mix a 4-5 piece band with acoustic drums? Let's take a look:
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Computer - You'll need a dedicated machine for your studio. It can be a Mac or PC, whichever you prefer, with a Quad-core processor minimum and at least 16GB RAM. The faster the processor and the more cores, the better.
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DAW - All DAWs basically do the same thing - they record audio....
So You Want to Own Your Own Recording Studio?
I get asked all the time by musicians and aspiring audio engineers how to break into the recording studio business. They want to know what the first steps are to making money and how to go about getting clients. Unfortunately, these questions are not straightforward to answer, and there are many things to consider before taking on your first client.
To help people with this, I will break down the topic into several different posts. Each week, I will add a new post to provide you with new information to absorb and think about. This way, you can start constructing a plan and begin your journey to becoming the owner of a professional recording studio, if that is something you really want to do.
First things first, you need to ask yourself why you want to be the owner of a recording studio. You need to be completely honest with yourself about this. Making money may be the obvious answer, but to become a successful recording studio owner, you must understand that this is a...