Vocals are one of the biggest priorities in your mix. In some genres, vocals are THE centerpiece around everything else in the mix revolves. As such, the vocals aren’t something you can sweep under the rug, they need to sparkle otherwise the mix will suffer. I recently covered my personal vocal chain, sharing both the […]
The Best Free Vocal VST Plugins Read More »
Saturation is a very useful tool in the mixing engineer’s arsenal for addressing all kinds of issues. It adds warmth via overtones, essentially adding frequency information which didn’t exist before to achieve a fuller sound in tracks which need it. When it comes to the most useful, almost Swiss Army Knife-like plugins/effects which I use
The Best Saturator Plugin – Why It’s Decapitator Read More »
Some instruments benefit from an aggressive amount of compression to get them in line, bringing order to extreme dynamics and keeping them more present in your mix. Other instruments benefit from a more conservative approach which instead smooths out those dynamics a bit without crushing them. Acoustic guitar is the latter, so let’s talk the
Compressing Acoustic Guitar – The Best Settings Read More »
Changing different parameters or aspects of your audio, also known as mixing automation, is one of the keys to keeping it sounding alive and evolving. Even after you take the time to compress your audio to reduce its dynamic range, applying volume automation on a number of tracks helps to keep your listener engaged. This
Bass Rider – What It Is, Why Use One, and How to Use One Read More »
There are specific types of tracks in your DAW which are designed to accept audio effects as inserts and allow you to “send” that same effect(s) to multiple tracks in your mix. In many DAWs, these are referred to as Aux tracks. In my Ableton Live, they’re referred to as Return tracks. Regardless, these tracks
How to Use Aux Send Tracks in Your Mix Read More »
