The Equisto naut

Hey tumblrverse, I’m back to write about what I’m learning about mixing music, so listen up! 

a) BF76 is a great plugin (it’s bundled with pro-tools so I’d just written it off…) for that 1176 sound (don’t believe me, check this out: http://bit.ly/1K3Twbx)

b) Mixing with appropriate metering is really important for a clean-sounding mix. I recently went back to remix some tracks that didn’t make the cut for the release of a friend’s album, and was getting ok mixes (better than a few years ago, phew I’m still learning things), but they sounded murky. I’m on the hook for some audiobook recording in the coming weeks, and in my research for what format/standards that requires I discovered some info about metering. I remixed said friend’s track with lower (and more standardized… avg about -18dB, peaking to -12dB using the ‘trim’ plugin) gain going into my plugins (and therefore less ending up in the mix bus) and IMMEDIATELY the mix was clearer-sounding. WHOA. The reason for this, I think, is I’m using a number of analog modeling plugins which create that saturated sound when driven hard. That can be a nice effect when done deliberately, but makes things murky-sounding when used indiscriminately and across-the-board. These plugins (as well as analog outboard gear) are calibrated to look for signals at around -18db and work the most optimally when seeing that at their input stage. So keep this in mind as you put your mixes together!

c) this is a really cool (and affordable) meter that can be used to get your mixes all in the same ballpark and leave enough dynamic range for a mastering engineer: http://www.meterplugs.com/kmeter

4 track album