How loud should drums be in a mix how to#

You can achieve this through use of acoustic products such as diffusers, absorbers, and bass traps, and you can even use well placed blankets and duvets if money is tight. You can have the latest plugins or most expensive hardware but if youвЂ™re using them in an untreated room then youвЂ™re mixes are always going to struggle. It is not possible to overstate the importance of this.

How loud should drums be in a mix how to#

The second point, however, needs a slightly more complex answerвЂ¦ How to avoid itД«ass frequencies are hard to accurately reproduce in listening environments, and if it was easy to fix then this mistake wouldnвЂ™t be a common one! However, the best thing you can do is ensure that you have the most acoustically neutral mixing environment that you can get. Mixing should be a time to balance levels, sculpt tones and get your music sounding good, not loud. To deal with the first point, if you are making music that will be played in clubs, remember that club sound systems will already be designed and calibrated to make sure that any bass frequencies are amply represented. So why do so many mixes have this issue? When speaking to people who have submitted tracks where the bass has been mixed too loud, the answer is either, вЂњWe wanted the bass to sound really big in the clubвЂќ or вЂњWe didnвЂ™t realise it was so loudвЂќ. Not cool if you want your track to be as loud as the vast majority of commercial releases. This can be a problem especially in progressive house mixing.ДЄt the mastering stage, an overly loud bass can make it very difficult to achieve the holy grail of вЂњLOUDNESSвЂќ as the highs and mids wonвЂ™t get to be that loud before the bass or kick starts clipping or distorting. This is a misguided practice for one main reason вЂ“ overly loud bass eats up headroom and makes it harder to get a loud master. Without doubt the biggest error I see is the low frequencies being pushed to a needlessly loud level. **Francis works for EchoPlex Mastering in the UK.

So letвЂ™s look at some useful music mastering tips and common mixing mistakes to avoid. Think of mastering like holding up a big magnifying glass to your tracksвЂ¦ there is nowhere to hide! What follows is a small list of the most common mix errors I see, how you can avoid them to go your best music mixingВ and give your mastering engineer the best possible chance of creating an awesome final product. Mastering can be the stage where the final layer of magic is applied, but mastering is always the stage where, if you haven't mastered the mix, problems will be ruthlessly exposed. While itвЂ™s now true that anyone can create a good mix with almost any gear, itвЂ™s still easy to mess up a mix and betray the fact that you didnвЂ™t spend thousands at a top studio.ДЇrustratingly, the same errors crop up time and time again, and itвЂ™s these that separate the greats from the not-so-greats. Some are great and some really arenвЂ™t so great. Need somew mixdown tips? As a mastering engineer, I hear a lot of mixes.