5 Things I Wish I Knew About Mixing

0:00 Hey there. This is Scoobert Doobert and welcome back to music 101. In this episode, I want to talk about five things. I wish I knew.

0:12 I'm like, you know, I don't know exactly which I title this five things. I wish I knew as a producer before mixing. There's something.I'll figure out a title later, but anyway, the concept is what are like five things that kind of sucked.

0:28 As I was growing and having to work with mixing engineers, because I didn't always do this. I had to rely on other people, because I really focused on, you know, the music creation part, not the music finishing part and that's changed now and like, I want to impart kind of what I figured out now that I'm on the other side of the glass, so to speak as a mixing engineer to number one.

0:53 You are the pre mixer. As a producer, don't think of yourself as being completely distinct from the mix. You need to go for it. Pick things, make decisions, pick your reverbs, pick your delays, level stuff out, believe it or not. Yes, set some levels and maybe even make some decisions about what you're doing on your master bus and bus compression.

1:20 I know that that sounds like a little bit risky, but if you say, hey, on my master bus, I like tape. I like the sound of tape. You should be recording and producing and listening with tape on the master bus.

1:31 Yeah, you can tell you can tell the mixing engineer to like pick their own settings or pick their own tape plugins or whatever, but I really believe that you should be listening in the environment that it's going to be eventually filtered through. So tape is a great example because tape does a lot of things. It saturates, it creates frequencies. It does all sorts of stuff.

1:53 So if you like the sound of tape, like I do, the majority of my songs go into a master bus with Studer tape on it. It's a UAD based plugin, but there are a ton of tape emulations. You can get stuff on waves, whatever, some cheap ones to get that vibe. If you want that vibe, get that vibe and record to it, produced to it. And hear how going into that changes everything.

2:14 So it doesn't that doesn't mean you have to print the tape on everything unless you love it. But basically what I'm trying to say is if you make a decision that you love. Print it.

2:27 Put it on there. Give it to the mixing engineer like that. Don't make a guess and have to go find it again. If you like certain volumes.Don't go crazy about this. Don't cut everything 30 dB and then give your mixing engineer a super quiet session. But if you like, I like the kick drum to be loud and I like this background vocal to be really quiet, but this background vocal to be really loud, feel free.

2:48 At least is my opinion to indicate that. You don't make that background vocal quieter. Make that background vocal louder louder, print it and give that to the mixing engineer.Think of yourself like that. If you have some panning decisions that you absolutely love, you say, I want to have this helicopter go from my right ear to my left ear. Print it.Just do it. Don't be scared.

3:09 All right, number two, saturate saturate saturate saturate. What is saturation? I keep talking about it. It's like a really hard thing to fully explain. So I'm doing an okay job about it. Maybe at some point I'll do a whole pot on what just saturation can do.

3:26 But basically what that is is it's taking a individual piece of audio and pulling out all of the beautiful harmonic frequencies. Like I say, there's not just one note in the vacuum. There are a whole bunch of notes going on every time you play or say or do anything.

3:41 There's a lot of frequencies that emanate from everything. And that's what gives something its flavor. If every note just sounded the same, then a guitar would sound the same as a saxophone. It's all of these frequencies that come out.

3:53 What saturation does is it pulls out that which makes the thing different. So when you saturate a guitar, it sounds more guitarry. When you saturate a saxophone, it sounds more like a saxophone.It's that sense of like you're saturating something just like like think of it like like a Instagram filter. If you're saturating an image and it's bringing out all these colors highly saturated photo, that's what it's doing.

4:18 So by nature, if you've seen a two saturated photo, the same thing can happen in music. You can be too saturated. But I'd like to caution like don't be scared. Go for it.

4:30 What's the worst thing that will happen? Like it's too cool. It's like too far out. It's like, no, maybe that's like a vibe decision. Maybe that changes the entire course of that song's life if you oversaturated something.

4:42 It's you're more free with saturation and audio than you are in visuals. So try it. There are a bunch of great saturators. My favorite is black box. Also sound toys makes great stuff. There are a lot of them. I use a lot of them.I probably have spent thousands of dollars on a variety of saturation tools because it's that cool. Again, it's making the thing sound more like the thing.

5:07 It's like giving it more of the sense of guitarness. Like how cool is that saturation and distortion slightly different things but related. Same basic idea. Like when you're having a distorted versus a clean guitar, same basic idea.

5:21 Number three, I already talked about this about the premixing but print what you like. If you like something, print it. If you like the reverb, print it, make decisions and give it to the mixing engineer.

5:33 Don't have assets and say, oh, he'll figure out a different or she will figure out a different reverb because she knows better. It's like, maybe she does, but fundamentally these decisions aren't right or wrong. There's genre based decisions. They're vibe based decisions and you as the artist should be making them.So make them. Print them. Give it to them.

5:56 Number four, reference tracks are overrated. They're overrated. If you're going back and forth from a reference track and trying to recreate something, I think you're boring.

6:07 Kind of kind of actually though. I kind of think you're boring. If like have a sense of the vibe, that's cool. If you have a sense of like, this is what I like snares to sound like, that's cool and you go back and forth and you check. Like, is that kind of where I'm hitting.

6:20 But fundamentally, leave the training wheels aside. You're making your own damn song. Make your own damn song. Come on. You're better than that. Don't, don't AB yourself to death because then you're just making cover music and I hear that too much for my personal taste. And so that's why I want to be an advocate for it.

6:38 You hear it and all the time where there's this like crowd mentality where everybody's song just kind of sounds the same. And we have infinite tools to do infinite things now. It's all your fingertips and it doesn't cost that much. You can actually like get a demo and print it. And that's like, it's free. You just use that plugin for free.

6:55 You have all these tools, use them in creative new ways to make your own sound and your own music. Like stop just being part of this herd. Like, this is every song is a delicate, unique little flower. Let it be it.

7:07 So, for instance, you're useful. You saw, I'm not saying that they're the worthless. Stop using them. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying they're overrated and they're overused. So make your own damn song.Number five. And this one kind of sucks. But it's true.You got to do this like a hundred times before you're going to get good.

7:27 Like, I'm sorry. That's a big reason why people hire other people. You know, that's one of the ways that I'm making money is that people don't have the time or patience or whatever to produce something a hundred times because they want their next single to sound good and have people like it like understandably.

7:46 Listen to my back catalog. You're going to hear quite an evolution in terms of mixing and like skill here is because I've released a hundred and 35 songs. I've made even more as Scoobert. This is just this project. Let alone all of the other things I've done in my past and whatever.

8:03 That takes a lot. And I still don't even think I'm great. I think that it's going to take 500 plus before I'm great. I'm close to that. But getting there.Not saying that I'm close to great. I'm saying I'm close to have recorded and at least partially mixed definitely produced 500 songs. So getting there.

8:26 But what I'm trying to say is start now. It's just like one of those things like what is the when is the best day to have started an exercise plan like 10 years ago or today.So start now. Even if you're not releasing that music, I actually think that like this is something I wish I knew.

8:45 I was producing stuff and I wasn't mixing it. I was giving it to a mixing engineer. Probably the best use of my time could have been.I did it to the mixing engineer and mix it myself at the same time. And then hear what they did. And hear what I did and hear how much better they did than I did.

9:01 Like what a awesome learning experience that would be and guess what eventually you might make something that you like better than they made.And then boom, you made it. Now you don't have to pay somebody for that anymore. And you have more of a sale over what your music sounds like and isn't that a good thing is the artist or as the producer.

9:18 You have more of a say over what the thing is that you're releasing. I can't tell you how many times I have produced stuff for an artist.Then they went without my consent or permission or what are the permissions wrong without my like without me being in the loop. They go and get it mixed and then they release it without ever telling me.

9:36 Then I hear and I'm like, why did they make it sound like that? They changed it fundamentally. I would have produced it completely differently if they were going to mix it that way.That's the secret. Like get more involved with the actual music you're making. And then it might not sound quote unquote better, but it's going to sound more like what you want it to sound like.

9:57 And that piggybacks off the reference track and the printing and the saturation all that stuff.You need to make more decisions. Don't let the decisions be for somebody else.It's your music. Make it your music. Let the mixing engineer do what they do. If you don't want to dip into that skills, which is perfectly reasonable because it's freaking hard.

10:18 And I was scared of it from a long time. So I get that. But if you make all of these decisions, if you free yourself a little bit from reference tracks, if you saturate things and make them sound more processed in the way that you want it to be.

10:35 Then the mixing engineer just finalizes stuff. Then they get to do the stuff I was talking about in the last episode of like they actually get to mix the soup rather than making the soup. They don't get that they're not picking spices. All they're doing is they're turning on the heat and making things work.

10:51 That's my recommendation. If you're not going to mix, consider yourself just part of the process and print things. Pick things out.Make decisions because it's your music. And then other things probably give it a shot. Even if you're scared of it, the things that you're scared of are probably the things you should be doing.

11:13 So give it a shot, especially if you're giving giving the mix to somebody else to do it and then see how much better they are than you.They're probably going to be a lot better than you, especially if they've done it 500 times. But they might not be you in the way that you want it to be.

11:31 And so there's there's something there. Get in, get in the weeds, learn about it. And then if nothing else, like for example, I'm not a great drummer.But I learned how to play drums so that I can communicate better with drummers and so that I can program drummers drums better like in computers and stuff.

11:46 Drum machines or whatever, I can think like a drummer. The same thing. It's like if you learn a little bit of mixing, maybe you'll be able to think like a mixing engineer. And then by being able to think like a mixing engineer, you'll be able to give them better usable stuff and make their lives easier.

12:00 And then they'll be able to focus on the goal rather than getting distracted by all this stuff. And the bonus thing, number six, don't change the bass or the kick drum.The love of God, don't have somebody mix up together, change the bass or the kick drum. I've done that to people that feel have done that to me, it is it is terrible karma to be on the other end of that. It sucks.

12:21 It you might as well just paying for a new mix really. So yeah, that's a five plus one things that I wish I knew a long time ago when I was using a mixing engineer as producer.And hopefully that's helpful. I am here to help you or at least share the things that have been helpful for me in a way that I think makes sense to me at least.

12:46 You know, sometimes you have to hear these things in a much different ways for it to really click. And so hopefully going on this whole journey with me will help things to click if not in this podcast somewhere else in your musical life.And also like I know that this was a little bit in the weeds for just general music fans, but I hope that this is fun.

13:03 Like thinking about all these decisions that go into making a song, you know, there are thousands of decisions for every song. How cool is that?Like there's so much more there than just saying like, oh, you you'd lay down the drums all day down the bass. It's like no, like every little thing is scrutinized.

13:22 Even when you're like making a song just kind of off the cuff, you still have to decide what instrument am I using? How am I playing it? What's the cabling?Where is it getting plugged into? What is the preamp? What is the compressor? What digital audio workstation? What are we using? How is that audio being changed in the computer versus before the computer?

13:40 How is it being changed in the mix? How is it being changed in the master, which we'll talk about later, and I'll probably bring a guest on because I'm not very good at it.

13:48 You know, there's like there are just so many steps to this process that of this thing that feels so effortless and natural, I think to a lot of music fans. It's a it's a journey.And I think it's fun to celebrate that journey sometimes just in the same way that it's like fun to watch behind the scenes of Lord of the Rings or whatever.There's there's a magic to seeing how the magic is made.

14:12 If you want to connect, you can find me at scoobertdoobert.pizza.Yes, scoobertdoobert.pizza, you can find all of my links there.And yeah, would love to hear from you. Send me a meme or something.My DMs are open.Link, link. Just kidding. I'm getting married. See you guys. Bye.