beauaddams
New member
I suck ass at mixing my songs down and I'm tired of fucking them up 
How do you mix down a track
- Thread starter beauaddams
- Start date
krushing
Moderator
The answer to this is a few books' worth of reading and a lifetime of practicing, but basically...
1. Make sure your sounds/recordings are what you want. Don't polish turds, unless that's your thing.
2. Set levels - this might be obvious, but often people don't spend enough time with it. Make sure everything is heard as much as they need to be. One common method is to pull all faders down, then start pushing them back up one by one.
3. Do all the corrective processing - EQing, HPF/LPF unnecessary stuff, compress to even out things that need it
4. Do the creative processing.
5. I'd advise not to master your own stuff and instead go back and fix the mix, but since everybody does it anyway, do it last. I guess one of the main point is that when you're just learning/starting out, it's easy enough to get everything kind of working mixing into a limiter/"mastering" plugin, but that can cover up a lot of mistakes in the mix, and while it's convenient, it also hinders your learning. Put the loud-as-fuck limiter on last if need be.
Now, these are often not as linear as described here and obviously sometimes you need to change the levels after you've added some crazy-ass effect to a sound, and nothing wrong with that. But this is a good way to start. Not the only way, but a rather common one. But as said, there's a lot of literature and a myriad of Youtube videos/series on this subject, and most of this forum is centered on answering that rather innocuous question.
1. Make sure your sounds/recordings are what you want. Don't polish turds, unless that's your thing.
2. Set levels - this might be obvious, but often people don't spend enough time with it. Make sure everything is heard as much as they need to be. One common method is to pull all faders down, then start pushing them back up one by one.
3. Do all the corrective processing - EQing, HPF/LPF unnecessary stuff, compress to even out things that need it
4. Do the creative processing.
5. I'd advise not to master your own stuff and instead go back and fix the mix, but since everybody does it anyway, do it last. I guess one of the main point is that when you're just learning/starting out, it's easy enough to get everything kind of working mixing into a limiter/"mastering" plugin, but that can cover up a lot of mistakes in the mix, and while it's convenient, it also hinders your learning. Put the loud-as-fuck limiter on last if need be.
Now, these are often not as linear as described here and obviously sometimes you need to change the levels after you've added some crazy-ass effect to a sound, and nothing wrong with that. But this is a good way to start. Not the only way, but a rather common one. But as said, there's a lot of literature and a myriad of Youtube videos/series on this subject, and most of this forum is centered on answering that rather innocuous question.