Learn Music Production at Home from Scratch: Stage V

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Mixing fundamentals and hearing training

Hi! I'm Sebastian. Welcome to the course! If you've been following the previous courses you already know me. If you don't I strongly suggest you take a look at those courses first. In those courses we lay the foundations for everything else. You can read the preview articles in order to check what we've been doing and where you're supposed to be at the start of this project. Basically, you have a considerable amount of theoretical knowledge on sound, physics, hardware analysis and have already recorded and rough mixed a project. This is where we'll start working, so let's take a close look at the situation.

You, as previously stated, know a lot of stuff. You know about signals, sound waves, acoustics, recording techniques and much more. Great! But now it's time to start mixing seriously. This means not randomly throwing whatever plugin you have to see what works best, far from it. The objective here is not only learning what to use where, but also knowing beforehand what parameters you need to set by just listening to the track. It goes something like this:

You hear something, you think  "ok, 20 ms pre-delay and about 1.5 s tail'', you set those parameters in your plugin and presto! Everything fits! Sounds incredible, right? But it's actually what a seasoned producer/audio engineer does. I promise you're going to be pretty close to that, with enough practice of the assignments given, when you finish with this course.

We're going to metodically learn in-depth about four major types of processors: reverb, equalizers, filters and delay. Each of this umbrella terms are divided in many subcategories, so we'll be analysing, understanding and working with a lot of different processors and theoretical concepts. To name a few topics:  

• Convolution reverb

• Multi-tap delay

• Mono vs. Stereo plugins, usage

• Band-pass filters

• Bandwidth

• Diffusion

• Pre-delay

• Q

• Shelving EQ

• Slapback

• Tape delay

• Size

• Dry/wet signal

• IR

• and much more

  
  

As usual, we'll start with the physics of each, then usage examples, and then something new that will occur in this and the following courses: you're going to train your hearing with these FX. As you'll see, this will make you progress leaps and bounds because for the first time you will acoustically understand what each parameter does, developing this as a new skill. This alone could be the topic of several seminars but it's all part of this course.
Finally, we'll continue with our two projects (one in Reaper, the other one in Studio One but you can use any DAW) and use all the necessary concepts learned to advance in the mixing process. By the end, we're going to be roughly halfway in the mixing process. After this, you'll have all the necessary training and knowledge to keep learning things on your own, or continue with our following course (at the time of this writing not yet available on Udemy) where we'll work with more advanced mixing concepts such as compression, tonal correction, advanced modulation FX and more to wrap things up and get everything ready for mastering.

It's going to take a lot from you (some assignments last more than six hours!) but the effort will be the most valuable investment you'll ever make in your music production career. This will be the cornerstone for developing the mindset of a skilled mixing engineer. So let's stop wasting time and let's get to work! :)

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