It baffles me how You give out gold for free... so sad how I normally will rely on my compressor to keep my level(vocal) on check without minding the sections of the song( how instruments get fuller or less fuller) I wish I could keep clicking the like button on your videos...lots of love from Nigeria💕💕💕
So glad to be useful! Our paid content helps pay for the free content. If you ever want to check out one of our full length courses like Mixing Breakthrough, Compression Breakthroughs or Mastering Demystified, you'll probably get a lot out of them. But if you just want to enjoy the free content, that's OK too! Thanks for joining us. Very best, Justin
I automate a lot as I'm balancing. My reasoning behind it is that I can't tell if I've got an instrument at the right level if one section is way louder than another. I'm never going to get the balance right if the level of a track is all over the place. My other reason is that I want the automation in place when I move on to compression, limiting, etc. I tend to automate using gain rather than volume, so that the level going into my compressor is highly controlled. That way, the compressor has less to do. Sometimes I do automate volume instead of gain, but that's when I have a specific effect in mind and I want it to be unaffected by the compression. If I'm merely automating to control level, it comes at the beginning of the chain. As such, it should be done while I'm doing balances.
As a beginner I had this obsession of trying to make every element in my mix audible at the same level. It was very difficult unlearn this, I even noticed in commercial that the elements that are the focus in verses tend to feel slightly behind in the mix in the choruses, especially in songs with a lot of instruments going on. As a creator of music also, my instrumentals tend to be dense in the chorus section & now when I mix that section i try to focus on the blend & feel of all the sounds rather than trying to make everything the main star of the show. Now I can tell if there's a something missing if mute 1 or 2 sounds even if I can't single it out in the mix. The blend changes without it. Balancing a mix is pretty hard but I can't give up now. I've been learning a lot lately & I'll get better with time 💪
Thanks Justin. Great reminder. I fell into the pit falls of not automating and working from near the beginning. It really amazing how a mix gains life and breath through automation.
I figured out to start balancing in the dense section before too long for the reasons you discussed. Re: automating...perhaps it's just me as a vocalist, but I find frequently the first word or phrase of a verse or chorus can be tricky to discriminate for a listener. I usually end up boosting the vocal there or strategically reducing instrumentation to get good word clarity...or do both. Happens a lot!
This is %1200 TRUTH! Automation is the least talked about part of mixing, and is one of the most vital parts of mixing! It's that thing that takes it from demo to professionally mixed and mastered song/album!
Justin, thank you! Love your interviews! Yes yes yes! "Riding the fader" to enhance individual performances is the inner game of all the top shamans :) Most gifted musicians and singers naturally build in nuanced dynamics, breathing, and a give & take energy into each phrase. But most amateurs cannot do this well, and need TLC (sometimes radical TLC) via automation. Kudos man!
It’s elucidating the way you describe automation here, and has given me a very good sense of what I want to achieve with my mix and how to do it. it builds on other people’s commentaries, revealing essential points that are not always made so clear as you have done here.
Probably a couple months ago I started mixing and setting balances and automation from the densest part of my mixes as my projects got bigger. It's definitely made the mixing process faster in the long run and my overall mixes more cohesive. Wish I would have started doing that sooner.
Future video request (maybe:): There are many good virtual instruments options out there. I don't use live instruments, but only have vst's. Maybe it would be nice to hear your opinion on roland cloud, omisphere or other providers. What are the cool options for those who don't have access to recording studios, and also budget friendly :)
Having the female mix engineer mix the Spanish record with kali speakers was a great video. Please keep that up as we mix engineers can always learn something unique from others.
We have a ton of videos like that one on this channel. Poke around! You might especially like this playlist: ru-vid.com/group/PL3yghKGBjggRbn4ooQ-SFl-4vi_V_zT3g
managing the levels plus the low and top end and being aware to dont lose it, when you are making all the passes thought your mix is vital to be solid; as you go further and in detail. Other real stuff that make a different from my point of view, is to automate also the fx.
I wish i heard this years ago...great advice! I religiously remind myself of this stuff due to having chased my tail in the mix for years undoing/redoing simply because of my lack of understanding balance. A good 3rd would be that people need to remind themselves of thresholds adding to the confusion of "why does this part sound bad" as most beginners overlook them being the culprit when already unaware why the louder parts sound different. So many plugins will add drastic changes to the sound when hitting the threshold harder from compressors to saturation & tape plugins. I would often hear things "getting bad" completely unaware its because things WERE level BEFORE but at louder parts in the vocal they were distorting, choking, or at the very least "sounding different" from hitting the thresholds way harder let alone competing with the other elements in the mix. I wasnt using any automation nor clip gain techniques whatsoever(thinking I would do "all that crazy stuff" last AFTER my mix was 80% done lol). Clip gain is now the hero thought process technique of my mixes & the foundation of my mix strategy as it should be....but it took me years to be like "duh" lol. But hey Im just a hobbyist.
@Scott Snyder Actually its a great question because people use the term too much w/o explaining. Clip gain is when you perfectly gain stage wav files by cutting them into sectioned clips. Its a technique made popular in pro tools when mixing vocals in the box aka in the computer. In the past, the better engineers would ride faders while the artist is even recording & of course there would be many redos & issues & time consumption getting everything right. Today, the great mixers all use this new technique like a cheat code to get things to a basic level super quick by simply cutting clips & individually gain staging that clip to perfection. This makes for a more level signal BEFORE you even use any plugins w/ thresholds & remember the hotter or louder you hit a threshold, itll have a different affect on the end result even when its just a saturation plugin etc which I think people forget about the most(I do at least). The reason the technique is mandatory for vocals is because you cant get a better more controlled vocal sound any other way...its automation on steroids as far as results go yet it takes a fraction of the time. Its the equivalent of having the Matrix film style "bullet time" in a gun fight. Rather than let the song play & ride the faders, you are pausing every few seconds to cut a new clip to perfection. 20-30 minutes later, you have a super duper level signal. The reason it even takes that long is because you are going to want to level the siblance as well which is like a manual de-esser. Every S sound & every plosive can & should be cut into a clip of its own & lowered in volume. The issue w/ this technique is that you might add pop noises into the signal via all the cuts so Pro Tools & other DAWs make it easy by creating interfaces designed for clip gain editing which allow you to fade each clip into each other sort of like how a gate works. In some DAWs, once you are done you should render out that wave & make it a single clip but again, DAWs have upgraded to having interfaces to make it easier so it all depends on what you got. FL Studio's interface for example doesnt make cutting such clips easy so you literally have to pre automate the same way you would clip gain except instead of cutting out clips you are just very precisely drawing in automated level changes using your mouse & slightly editing them to perfection before moving on. Its still the same technique but w/o actually cutting clips. However, when using this technique it is wise to take notes of major changes in per say the vocal performance because if you find any at all, you literally will want to cut out a clip even in FL Studio as to give that section a different bus to process it differently all together. So imagine you are mixing a 5 min song where a guy raps, sings, & then belts in a very high register. You would want to first take note of that & cut the vocal into 3 sections(everything thats rap within the the same range of performance, all the singing in the same range, & then the super belting singing parts that should have their own category) & give them buses of their own because mixing the low pitched monotone rap part the same way you would the high range belting part would sound horrible & work against each other as both need different treatment to sound good. Thats how the pros do it more or less but the method in how they get it done has changed since the analog era til this digital era so clip gain is basically when you get all this stuff done AT THE BEGINNING of the mix before you slap on EQs, compression, saturation, parallel this/that etc. Youll have less you need to compress & when you do, itll compress more level & musically. You still will need to ride the faders to perfection to mix the whole song but youll save what use to take hours or even days of time & get it done in 20-30 minutes which will make things sound amazing before you ever touch your first plugin. Youll need less de-esser so no fear of choking your vocal nor hurting people's ears because you didnt use enough. All the parallel signals you create from a clip gain signal will hit their thresholds better too & sound better for it(especially parallel compression which otherwise can sound horrible & choked at the louder parts of the performance). W/o having a mind to think like this, its easy to work against yourself w/o noticing it...like chasing your own tail & wondering why you cant catch it. Correcting one section might make the other section you just corrected now sound off, then switching things back to fix that part undos what you just attempted to do to fix the other section. However, when they are different clips of the same performance, you can send them to different buses & mix them differently & all the more when each clip section has been edited inch by inch to lower or boost things a few db every time something sounds like its too high/low & will mess up the threshold based plugins or hardware you plan on sending the signal too. The analog era saturation inside of the hardware was more forgiving when the signal came in a bit too loud at times & may even sound better for it but the digital era analog emulated saturation can sound trash when you go even 3 db above what you intended when you set the threshold. Thats all the more reason to get things super level & there is no other way than to manually do it to taste hence clip gain staging or one could call it clip gain automating w/o riding the fader. Whats important to also note is that no matter what DAW you do this in, clip gain is not the same as riding the faders on your mix bus though its similar. Your bus faders should be thought of as what you do AFTER the plugins are set because it wont change the relationship between them but clip gain is done SPECIFICALLY BEFORE your signal hits the bus so that you can prevent the issues that can come up within the chain of your plugins. So even if you are using FL Studio where its not convenient to cut 100s of clips out of a vocal to edit it(because the interface isnt made for that & makes it take way longer & it gets super messy), you just need to know that the alternative is to automate the INPUT GAIN knob & draw the volume edits into that automation clip & save any automating of the faders for AFTER you have most your plugins on. You still want to go through the trouble of cutting the very few huge clips out of the vocal as to section them & give them buses of their own but you dont want to try to cut 100s of individual clips in FL Studio because the interface hasnt been updated to my knowledge to embrace clip gain style mixing short of their prescribed method of automating the INPUT GAIN volume knob in the way you would do clip gain via drawing in the edits w/ your mouse. If youre still confused, just watch more people make such edits in the DAW you are using & youre mind will see the many ways the technique can be done...no matter how you do it, its the same technique if you are leveling a signal to near perfection BEFORE you send the signal to a bus. Again, you arent leveling the signal to fit into the song perfectly like when juggling the faders to perfection, you are rather leveling the signal to remove any glaring level flaws & ultimately have a standardized level to send to your threshold based gear which pretty much means you have more precision & less errors to worry about which makes mixing w/ plugins/gear 100x more fun & better sounding w/ less negative consequence should you overlook something. Either way, the listener of the finished song will not perceive all the cut/paste work you did as the end result will sound seamlessly perfect(where as if you dont use these techniques, ironically they are more inclined to notice odd imbalances that make no sense to their ears just like the faulty mix techniques should make no sense to the mixer's mind that understands the need for signals to be cut into clips to sound more level when mixing in this digital era, especially if not only for vocals). Now youll never forget lol. Youre welcome.
This is a great channel! I just found it today. To gve you an idea of my level of mixing (well you can watch my videos, I'm not great), I don't use automation, in fact the word means nothing to me :(( I will however, try starting at a different part of the song! That makes a lot of sense! Cheers!
I actually started off automating wayyyy before I understood how to use a compressor. I had levels all over the place and I thought the easiest way would just to be to manually set them by ear, because I didn't even get how other tools could do that for me. Obviously those mixes sucked but the automating was something that I just did intuitively.
Hi Justin, thanks for sharing. Something I have been curious to know is whether "professional" mix engineers start by setting the desired output level of one of the key elements in the mix, and then mix the other elements accordingly? For example, does anyone set the level of the kick drums so it hits the master bus at say -6db, and then mix the other elements around that. Another way to ask this question is whether professional mix engineers aim for specific target levels for certain components in the mix - like the kick drum or bass guitar should always be sitting around -8db to -4db??
