A 12-hour mixing course teaching that volume balance, not plugins, carries most of a great mix.
Volume balance carries most of the mixmastering.com argues volume balance alone accounts for 80% of a great mix, so the static mix comes before any plugin.
Fix phase before reaching for pluginsAligning snare samples with the live snare and overheads gave more punch and low end than any plugin would.
Gain stage every track to a healthy levelNormalize region gain to an average of negative 10 to negative 20 dBFS, with occasional peaks no higher than negative 6 dBFS.
Executive SummaryAI
The mastering.com host opens a 12-hour mixing course covering volume balancing, session setup, EQ, compression, reverb and delay, plus saturation, parallel processing and workflow, and points viewers to a free mixing workflow cheat sheet and frequency charts linked in the description.
Dane Holmes places mixing as the second-to-last of five production stages — songwriting and arrangement, recording, production, mixing, mastering — and defines it as blending individual tracks by managing the sonic spectrum (20 hertz to 20 kilohertz), the dynamic spectrum and the spatial dimensions, while stressing that mixing does not fix timing, tuning, a poor performance or a poor recording, an
Session setup runs in five steps — build the session (match sample rate, set project tempo, raise buffer size, import multitracks and references), organize tracks by sorting, renaming, colour coding and grouping, check phase and polarity on multi-mic sources, gate unwanted bleed, and gain stage everything to an average of negative 10 to negative 20 dBFS with peaks no higher than negative 6 dBFS —
Dane argues that volume balance alone accounts for 80% of a great mix, that the static mix must be built with faders before any plugin is added, and demonstrates it at three levels: a two-track plus vocal, a stem mix, and all individual faders brought up from zero starting with the leading roles, vocal and drums.
Section two turns to frequencies and EQ, introducing the mix as a three-dimensional cube — EQ is height, panning is width, dynamics and reverb are depth — then walks the problem ranges: 20 to 60 hertz sub-bass, 60 to 250 hertz mud, 250 to 500 hertz thickness, 500 hertz to 1 kilohertz boxiness, 1 to 3k harshness tied to the Fletcher-Munson curve, and 5 to 10k sibilance and cymbal harshness.
Key Quote
“Remember that in this industry, the technical is there to serve the creative, not the other way around.”
— Dane Holmes
Key Quote
“In fact at mastering.com we argue that volume balance alone accounts for 80% of a great mix.”
— Dane Holmes
Key Quote
“I would bet that a real pro mixer could get a better sounding mix with just volume faders than an amateur that has all of the tools in the world at his or her disposal.”