The Mixing Magician: Adding Subtleties Without the Audience Noticing – Audio Premium

In this week’s Audio Premium content, Björgvin Benediktsson teaches you how to use effects to enhance the music rather than obviously draw attention to themselves. If you’re aiming to be an audio wizard, this tut has a lot to teach you.

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Mixing isn’t about cramming as many plug-ins into a mix as possible. It’s not about showing off all the effects you have in your arsenal and putting a different setting on each track. Mixing, in the end, is always about the song. As a mixing engineer it is your job to take the song that was recorded and make it into an even shinier production. You want the band to really shine and be happy with the end result. You don’t want the reaction to be: “Wow, he sure piled on the effects didn’t he?” You want each instrument to sound great in its own right but not dominating the rest of the mix.

The trick is to be able to use any effect you want to get the job done, but without anybody noticing. You want that guitar to sound absolutely amazing but when you turn off all the processors and effects that are making that part sound so good, suddenly it sounds weak and dull. Mixing music is an art, and you should be able to use any tool at your disposal to sculpt the work of art a musician has given you.

In the following Premium tutorial I’ll be going into some subtle uses of modulation effects, using EQ to create pseudo stereo as well as some other assorted mixing tricks.

Table of Contents

  • The Most Commonly Used Effects
  • Using Groups with Compression
  • Subtle A.D.T. With Stereo
  • Blending In With Modulation
  • Subtle Distortion
  • Shelved Reverbs
  • Let the Light Shine on the Simple Vocal
  • Conclusion

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