Arts & Entertainment, Science & Tech, Music

Mixing

Lesson time 20:10 min

Good producers need to know how to write original music and how to mix it to sound great. Here are some important techniques Joel uses to shape his tracks in the mix.

Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars

Topics include: Tracks and Groups • Earballing • EQing for Clarity • Getting Your Leads to Sit in the Track • Shaping Your Bass • LFO Tool vs. Compression • Mixing in Home Studio

Preview

There are basically two things you need to have a professional sounding track. One is the music has to be right. You know, your melody structure has to be on point. And then, on top of that, the engineering side has to be done right. That's kind of something that's like really rare in this industry, to have a guy who can do both. I do it because, you know, I've spent 50% of my time learning how to mix and how to do this and that, to treat audio in such a way to get it print ready. And there are other guys who just didn't bother learning any of that stuff. And there's nothing wrong with that if you're a musician, you know? It's like, I'm a musician, not an audio engineer. But in the case of electronic music, you tend to have to be both. A big, full track with lots of variation I think would probably consist of maybe 60 to 70 individual components, possibly more, sometimes less. But the way that they get routed is like as before. So here, I have a drum group, right? This ultimately only becomes one track. But it's one track that's composed of all these different components, like your kick, your snare, your ride, and this other ride, I don't know what it was. But it all feeds into this one channel. So that could ultimately be one track. But it's actually consisting of all these others. So I generally have drums, bass, and synths, and some other miscellaneous channels. Those are kind of like my groups. And then, those subgroups get all mashed together and then summed and sent to the master channel, which is this guy down here. But on another DAW, it might be another channel strip over here. But it's all the same workflow. Well, mixing is roughly done, as you start, you're mixing, you know. Because if you just start making a melody and you put in a drum kick, you can immediately know if the kick is too loud or too fucking quiet. So you just pull it down a bit. So as you start to add elements, you're mixing right then and there. Because you're like, oh, I put in a shaker, and it's like, ahh! You're like, oh, fuck. You're pulling it down. That's mixing. You know, so you're mixing it in at a comfortable-- you know, you're ear-balling it, as I say, into the level it should be at. And then, keeping an eye on your master before you put any mastering stuff on it to make sure you have enough headroom for that maximization and limiting and EQing and all that stuff. And the general rule of thumb is 6 dB. So don't put a kick drum in, and then turn the kick drum up just so it's like just barely hitting 0. You don't want that you. You want it around negative 6 dB. And then, everything else. Because that's how most of these plugins work is they'll take a maximum audio signal of generally around like a negative 6, and then do what it needs to do. And it'll plus it a bit, you know what I mean? But because you had negative 6 on your master, you have ...

About the Instructor

Before he was deadmau5, all Joel Zimmerman wanted for Christmas was old toasters to take apart. Now, you can watch him take his music apart. In his first-ever online class, Joel teaches you how he approaches melodies, mixing and mastering to make unique sounds you can't find in a cookie cutter sample pack. You'll not only get his lessons, you'll learn how to create your own music without spending money on million dollar gear.

Featured MasterClass Instructor

deadmau5

6 hours of instructions, 23 video lessons, and a downloadable course workbook.

Explore the Class

Claim Offer