Lessons
Who I Am
04:13 2Free Preview: Introduction to Mixing
05:42 3The Mixing Toolset
07:39 4Reference Makes Perfect
22:26 5Calibrating Your Room
19:28 6Using a Reference Track
08:37 7Preparing Your Mix
08:50 8Understanding Gain Staging
08:46Analog vs Digital Gain Staging
05:12 10Adding Dynamics to your Mix
11:12 11Getting a Balanced Mix
09:55 12What is Loudness?
14:15 13What Is Compression?
05:06 14Compression Parameters
14:08 15Basic Compression Techniques
19:55 16Multiband, Sidechain and Glue Compression Techniques
15:34 17The Golden Rule of Compression
07:29 18Basics of Equalization
06:07 19High Pass and Low Pass Filters
07:09 20Additive and Subtractive EQ
17:23 21Mid-Side EQ
22:36 22Spatialization and Panning
07:26 23Panning In-Depth in Ableton
14:13 24Using Reverb
28:04 25Mixing Recap
03:44Lesson Info
Preparing Your Mix
track sound better when they're organized. It's true. It's this weird fact. Try it out sometime, it's gonna blow your mind. I'm kidding, but I'm not, but I am. Then you do that through grouping tracks and through coloring tracks. Now you can group tracks within live and color them in a way that it makes it very easy to find what's going on. Let me give you a great example of that. If I come in here, me, too. I'm going to show you the example of unorganized and then an organized. And the reason why is if you sit down to mix your track because we're getting ready to mix right? If Oops one, come on. So if you're sitting down to mix your track and you have 50 tracks and where is that guitar part? Comparatively, to that one base? I don't know. It's over there. Where is it? I can't find it right. We want to avoid that. So this is an unorganized track, like if I played this, there's a guitar part that's too loud. Wait, what guitar part? There's this guitar par. Oh, there's a guitar part over ...
here. I don't know what's going on, right? So just spend 10 minutes organizing. And this This is an unorganized example. No idea what's going on. And here's an organized example again, all these examples come with the class when you get it. But here's a organized example. So much easier, right? I've got Here's my gate part. Here's all my guitar parts. They're in a group. See, they're all right there and so on. So that way I can come in here all my guitars. Easy, so much easier mix. I personally just like to group them. You do that by just right clicking and say group tracks. And then you can create groups and very helpful. Just what advice? Spend a little bit grouping organizing your tracks. I Also there's a pdf that comes with this called sharing tracks, and it has a whole section on how to group tracks and how to prepare them to share with mixing engineers or musicians. Collaborators use that same idea on your own tracks. It's gonna be very helpful. So with organizing our tracks, we have a few things we can do. We can group are tracks like I showed you, you can color our tracks. That's very helpful. I, like have all my melodies, blew all my bass green. I didn't know becoming a musician would make me obsessive compulsive organizer. But it does. And I'm gonna show you even crazier organization. But it helps, uh, naming your track. Obviously, that helps you can When you're out things, you know what they are. Clean, empty tracks. If you ever have CPU problems which happens in mixing, try to bounce it toe audio. Because remember, you're not really changing the parts anymore. So you can bounce that sent, never have anything on the master track except for meters, but don't have limiters and e cues. And you know, we have that reference CQ. But it's not about keeping it on all the time. And we're not gonna have, like, a reverb and all that sort of stuff, because that's that's gonna make it harder to mix. And also, you have your A B reference track in your set ready to go. And I showed you those examples. All right, Awesome. We made it through that whole part. That is probably the most not nerdy, but very just I don't know, dry section We're actually gonna mix. Don't worry. You are mixing engineer and a musician. We will do music, I swear. But now we have everything ready. Great. Do we have questions? Next? Yeah, we have a question from infinite sine wave. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Another person's idea. Cool. Awesome. How much money in terms of budget ratio should you spend on sound treatment? Like in panels versus monitors? 1212 to 1. Like, Where do you want? That's a great question. Yes. Oh, uh, well, let me put it this way. Good speakers can always be resold and you might gain money or lose very little acoustic panels little harder, especially on the type of acoustic panels. They might lose their value. It's just harder to come by them, like on craigslist or whatever if you go that route. So if you're thinking economically, you can always upgrade your speakers and that'll work. But if your room is terrible, it doesn't matter how nicer speakers are. This is This is how I like to look at the whole gear lust thing in general. Right? When you first get started, you don't have to buy a bunch of expensive stuff because if you get really nice focal speakers. You probably can't even hear them properly. It's just you're just not used to it. So get something that's kind of in your budget range and move up as you move is a musician. Now, after you have, like decent speakers, you should look into decent room paneling like maybe like a few panels. But don't get like the $1000 kits yet because that won't matter until you have the $1000 speakers. So in a way to answer that, I have never thought about it that term. So kind of talking as I think. But I would say it's about, ah, you know, 11 50 50 maybe a little more towards speakers just cause it's a better investment. So awesome. Another question. Should I be worried about having my desktop tower to close to my speakers, for instance, my towers 2 to 3 feet away from my right speaker and have a wooden box two feet from my left speaker? Well, depending on your speaker orientation comparatively to where you are if you have it and it's like bouncing, you might get like strange frequency bounce offs and like, especially if you're speakers, air right close to the wall, like in general. What is it like three feet? I think it's three feet from the wall. Ah, so if you're not three feet from the wall, you're really close up to, and there's that. There's, like, a thing right here to your side. You're probably getting all sorts of weird, based, slow in movement. Um, but everything's different. Everything depends on your speakers. You orientation. Just try it out. Like if you can do the test, move it, see what it looks. That just made me think of like the fans, like computer fans like, Is that creating a high frequency? Sort of like, Yeah, well, there's a funny thing about fans, and I'm gonna talk about that later in pic noise. But you ruined the story. But I'll tell it early, uh, you could you could hold out of this feel good story, and we've gone through a lot of like, super esoteric stuff. So, um, the whole reason we figured out or a mixing engineer figured out pink noise as a good reference and stuff is because he noticed his mixes, sounded better in winter and had no idea why it was because of his heater. His heater was slowly pumping out like a pink noise, white noise sound and that general subtle frequency. May his ears mawr aware of that kind of shape. And he found he mixed better. And then he used pink noise to mix the two to realize, Oh, it kind of reminds my ear what a good curve is. So if you're having, like a subtle speaker fan or something like subtle sounds like that in the room, I don't think are that big a deal, honestly, because it's never gonna be a sterile environment. But if is like, I like it that just annoy you. I mean, yeah.
Class Materials
bonus material with purchase
Free Downloads
Ratings and Reviews
Jose Gerardo Rendon Santana
Excellent Course, Isaac Cotec is a great instructor and a great producer. The course is very well organized explaining each important step of the mix. as well as great tips and techniques. He also includes a great deal of support material with the course including an Ableton Live Pack with tons of great presets and tools to put to practice the knowledge acquired in the course.
Ian turner
this is the best thing money can buy in my life. Isaac makes it look easy and the way he teaches makes you understand everything and makes it easy for you as well. its exactly what i wanted to learn in each video! i cant even sleep because another video loads and im like "ohhhh i need it" lol. i thank god for this class being affordable and the real deal.
a Creativelive Student
Isaac covers an amazing amount of material in a clear and concise way. Great intro to mixing with Ableton or review for the intermediate user who wants to solidify their best practices, DAW knowledge as well as gain some production tips.
Student Work
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