SonicScoop

Is it possible that there is one unusual question that can fix the majority of your mix problems? I say YES. As a platinum mastering engineer, I’ve worked on mixes from the best to just about the worst you can imagine… …And every time they can be improved, there is one simple question you can ask yourself that will completely eliminate the biggest problems in your mix. It works at every level, on every mix, every time.

Article Contents hide This is a guest post by composer, engineer and writer Nick Messitte. For a video podcast version of this article with both Nick and SonicScoop’s Justin Colletti, click here. The stereo bus is a place of magic and mystery…and sometimes frustration, especially for newcomers. One glorious move on the master bus and the mix elevates into “finished record” territory. But with one false step, you can mess up hours of work.

I'm a platinum mastering engineer, but I'll be one of the first to admit that you might NOT need mastering. At least... not yet. There's a fair chance you just aren't ready for it. You could be simply throwing your money away. Here's my take on who should-and who SHOULDN'T-get their music mastered. And if you fall into the latter camp, I'll give you a good idea as to where you're better off spending your hard-earned money instead.

I want you to step through the looking glass with me today. …We are going to be exploring an entirely different way to hear and experience sound—and a new way of thinking about the mix. Around this time last year, a GRAMMY-winning producer hipped me to the idea of hearing tones and mixes as being “convex” or “concave”. And now I can’t UN-hear it. We’ll talk about how this way of thinking (and hearing) can inform and even transform your approach to mixing and production today.

You’ve probably heard of dynamic range compression. You probably know what it does. And you may even know how to use it. …But what if I told you that there are at least 10 OTHER types of dynamic range control? And that you should learn ALL of them!? That’s what we’ll talk about today. I’m going to make it easy for you to master them all. Join me here. (Or check out the list below!) We can break dynamic range control into the following categories. (Get all the details in the video!) 1.

Is multiband compression worth all the fuss? Is it too complex? Is it too likely to cause artifacts? ...and is it best left to the rocket scientists and "real pros"? I think there are some important applications for multiband processing that can be useful at ANY level. That's what we'll talk about today. From bass to vocals, to drums, acoustic guitar and entire mixes, get my top tips on how to use it well.

I think I may have too many plugins .... And if you're anything like me, YOU probably have too many plugins too! Do you even know if all of them are up to date? I mean, what are you going to do? Open up a jillion different plugins dashboards and websites and check them one by one? Probably not. I have more than 500 plugins installed on my machine at the moment. (When I was mixing, it was probably more like 1,000.) I know I'm not going through all that. Are you? But that changed for me this past week.

Headphone mixing has become increasingly popular over the years. And for good reason! For a lower cost than ever before, you can get startling good frequency response—even low frequency response—out of high quality headphones. Today, there are many cases in which a smaller investment in headphones can outperform a substantially larger investment in speakers and room treatment.

Today, I’m going to help you ask and answer the question of whether you really need a multipolar pattern mic in the studio. If you work in a small or relatively untreated home studio, you might be skeptical of the value of polar patterns like bidirectional and omni—mic patterns patterns which are supposed to pick up more of the room.

Compression can seem complicated. …But it’s not! And I can prove it to you. Ultimately, there are only 4 ways to compress anything. And I can teach you all of them in minutes. And it gets better than that: When you focus in on these 4 ways to compress, and learn to hear the differences between them, it completely UNLOCKS compression in your brain forever. It also makes more advanced concepts and techniques around compression much easier to understand.