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<\/a><\/p>\nWhen you’re mixing, you are essentially painting a picture like Bob Ross. If Bob put 20 happy little trees in the center of the painting, that wouldn’t make sense. Likewise, take full advantage of the stereo field and spread elements across to achieve balance. Say in your arrangement, a lead guitar playing 1 part and rhythm guitar or acoustic is strumming away, try hard panning the elements against each other. Same goes with rack and floor toms, overhead mics and background vocals.<\/p>\n
*Pro tip; experiment with high passing these hard panned elements equally up to maybe 150 hz to remove unwanted bass frequencies that might otherwise muddy your mix. Depending on your style of music, you may want to filter even higher to maybe 300-400 hz for a commercial minded mix. Be careful though, filtering to high might remove some of that much-needed natural \u201cwarmth\u201d in your mix.<\/p>\n
In most car stereo systems, it’s hard to tell exactly where every element is coming from. Bass is more so felt than heard and good mixes features vocals that are held together by other instruments. Through headphones or monitors, the stereo effect is a little more obvious but how do you translate that in your car?<\/p>\n Every good barber or hair stylist cuts hair and \u201ccleans you up\u201d. Barbers don\u2019t add hair or that would be weird.<\/p>\n Mixing the low-end (20hz-350hz) of your music is crucial to achieving a good mix. This \u201clow end\u201d most consists of your bass instrument and kick drum. The kick drum usually can be felt\u00a0around 100 Hz where the punch lies. The \u201cclick\u201d or the batter of the kick is usually a bit higher but it’s only a matter of taste and judgement if you want that in your mix. To make room for the kick, consider carving out semi wide cut around 100-150 hz in your bass instrument to make room for you kick to speak.<\/p>\n As a general rule of thumb, cuts or surgically removing resonant frequencies is better than adding bands using EQ.<\/p>\n Depending on your genre of music, you are essentially painting an atmosphere for people to listen to. This is where your wet and dry balance come to play with reverb and delays. In most cases, delays are more handy in glueing together elements together as opposed to drowning things in reverb unless of course you are Sigur Ros. Make sure you use post delay\/reverb EQ on your auxes so you aren\u2019t adding unwanted low-end or too much high-end. This can slowly add up over time and really cloud your mix.<\/p>\n The most spoken of mixing tip of all is referencing. Many mixers swear by it and some brush it aside as being unoriginal. Regardless of good you feel your mixing is, referencing will only elevate your mixes by establishing an objective standard for how a song in your genre should sound like. A\/B your tracks with various tracks that capture the essence of what you\u2019re aiming for. Not only A\/B for certain elements but pay attention to how your mix \u201cfeels\u201d compared to a song mixed by Chris Lord Alge or Andrew Scheps. The bass may hit you a certain way or the mids may feel stereo-ized.<\/p>\n Your mix-bus aka submaster will be your last checkpoint before any post-mix mastering. If your mix up until this point has life to it, this is where you glue everything together with some magic sauce. For starters, use some gentle EQ to clean up places using tight cuts with no more the -2db in gain. After this, you can use some bus compression glue your mix together. Try experimenting with any compressors that offer wet to dry ratio. At this point, you can dare to use some multi-band compression. Be warned though; multi-band compression is not for the faint of heart and can either make or break your mix. If you are sending off to a mastering engineer, you may not even need it but if you are planning on finishing it yourself, consider tightening the low mids (200-500 hz) and mids (1khz-5khz). These are the frequencies where you\u2019ll have to most trouble with in car stereo systems. Evening out these sections with compression without completely scooping them out may help any extraneous resonant notes from spiking through.<\/p>\n So the question remains\u2026does the car test still matter?<\/p>\n And the answer is yes.<\/p>\n At the end of the day, most people are going to listen to your music on car stereos, inexpensive earbuds or even computer speakers. The goal is not to making a perfect mix but to make sure the song speaks regardless of setting.<\/p>\n Mix on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cMy first mix sounds awesome in my car!\u201d Said no producer ever\u2026 Every producer and mixer knows the struggle; the infamous car test. You know the drill. You print a near-perfect mix in your home studio and then bounce it with the label, \u201cFINAL MIX_wav\u201d \u00a0and send it to your phone. You can feel the … <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nEQ like a barber<\/b><\/h2>\n
<\/a>Creating space<\/b><\/h2>\n
<\/a>Referencing<\/b><\/h2>\n
Tieing it all together<\/b><\/h2>\n
Final Thoughts<\/b><\/h2>\n