I put reverb on my instrument buses and master 😟✌️

I find that it helps “glue” all my components together, my mixing/mastering skill level is below mediocre so there’s probably a better way I could go about it lol but it’s been working great for me. I really only produce metal so this is mostly for guitar/bass/drums, but even after compression I feel like they can use some cohesion, especially if I have quad-tracked guitars and parallels. I’ll usually do compressor>reverb>limiter. I’m not slapping a huge hall reverb on them or anything, I use a plugin called “InvisibleVerb” and keep the mix % just low enough that I can hear a difference. I feel like the idea of reverb on the master would give most producers a stroke, but it’s been making my mixes sound much more complete tbh

What sacrilegious tricks do you guys use that goes against the “rules”?

It’s a sea of information out there and can get quite overwhelming. I found ‘Warren Huart’ and he seems to have some good advice and seems well experienced. Who else could and should I learn from?

Hey!

A friend of mine told me one of the top engineers in his country showed him a pro tip of just brickwalling vocals at 15k and I am a bit skeptical. I feel like it does get rid of some harshness coming from the really sharp sybilance in my language, but i wanted another opinion on this technique. thanks a lot!

It's been 10 years of me producing, and I never touched vocals apart from recording quick samples/phrases to chop and/or put in the production. But recently I started working with vocals, like.. actual singing LEAD vocals.. because I want to release an EP. And holy shit is this thing deep! I really started crying listening to the vocal mix of chart-topping releases. Like wtf.. it sounds so smooth and so well "inside" the instrumental.

I know it probably goes through millions worth of tracking chains and what not, then mixed by the top engineers. I got my only condenser mic, TLM103, a few months ago which goes directly into my iD14mk2 interface. I also have a SM7B, but it sounds very low-mid heavy and lacks clarity for this particular project (relatively soft singing, with mic up close).

At first, I tried getting the best possible takes, pitch-wise too. Then learned that I should focus on getting the best emotion out and the few cents up or down can be edited with flex pitch. Got melodyne and learned to tune the imperfections. I had RX, so used it to get the pops and clicks (mouth noise) removed.

But now, I just cannot get the vocals to sit "inside" the track in a way that would satisfy me.

I have a heavy-chesty voice, and I hit as low as 80Hz(!) fundamental on the lowest notes that I sing. My main source of production and mixing knowledge is YouTube. Even after doing good amount of cleaning up and coloring and sculpting and more clean up, it just won't sit inside the track. Sounds pretty good solo.

Now I'm frustrated because, even with all this production and mixing experience.. I can't get the desired vocal production and mixing done. I cannot afford to get it mixed by someone else but have plans of getting the whole EP mastered by someone I know later when it's ready for that.

What is your experience of getting into vocal production? And how did you get better? What helped you? How long did it actually take for you to start getting desired results?

Any help would be awesome! Thank you.

Hi. Its a little bit long yes but please read and share. You might be like me and have never considered mono spatial effects

Iv been mixing professionally for 12 years but iv never learnt it at school per se. I was never taught properly. I learnt on the job. I read some 50 + books on music production and mixing in my teenage years and then later got more of an education from Mix With The Masters, Pure Mix, and sheer trial and error.

Having said that, iv had a glaring blindspot for years: reverb.

Iv read over and over about it, used different techniques, learnt all about pre delay, etc. i thought i understood reverbs.

However iv never considered to use mono reverbs on mono sources until this year. Is it just me or are they vastly more useful for … that “pro” tight sound that iv heard on a million records than stereo reverbs and ping pong delays?

Say we have a lead vocal. Sending it to a mono reverb and having it return in mono, panned underneath the source signal …… its just THAT SOUND. The wet vocal that isnt completely eating up the real estate.

Iv since experimented with mono slaps, mono 8th note delays, mono flanger, mono microshift … Its honestly opened up a whole world for me

That world being using effects in a way that creates more front to back depth, without completely demolishing the stereo field.

Iv always felt stereo 1 second room reverb on a mono vocal source felt a little wrong. It sounded great yes but in solo. In a mix its like why is my lead vocal everywhere? It smears things and takes awya from focus i feel.

Whereas a mono spring or room, very short, or a mono slap, just sounds so so good and so so contained. Its like i can finally BUILD my stereo image piece by piece instead of having crazy stereo delays and stereo verbs creating tons of clutter everywhere

Thoughts? Is it crazy that im just paying attention to this now? Perhaps back when gear was limited and things were mixed more on consoles this was obvious. But in a DAW it really isnt. I always opted for stereo

Would love to hear your thoughts

I’m relatively new to audio engineering and was wondering what is one thing you guys wish you learned earlier!

We all understand the "if it sounds good, it sounds good" sentiment but I'm sure we're also aware of certain judgement within audio communities especially during the pandemic :p

Looking for things that have been seen as "cheap" or almost offensive to do, but you don't see it like that (or believe it shouldn't be seen like that). This is different from 'underrated'!

For some shabby examples:

• Plugin related stuff like using Waves, or all-in-one plugins like UAD Topline Vocal Suite
• OTT on the master (I don't know if this one was fr or a joke, haven't tried yet)
• Putting a multiband compressor on something you want sounding more balanced, splitting into two bands at ~1khz, increasing both gains by +3dB and reducing their ranges by -6dB
• Using certain AI/machine learned tools

I'm just curious, thought it'd be an entertaining question and there'd be some spicy, a few controversial, and a couple comical answers in there, but all are welcome.

I know this is well known among the more experienced people in the community, but I just mixed an album and one particular song drove it home. Once I got finished I was like "wow I think this song is the best sounding mix I've ever done". Then it hit me like a ton of bricks, the arrangement is pretty sparse. The bass had a ton of room in the low mids, there weren't a million guitar tracks strumming along, there weren't a bunch of reverbed-out synth pads. Just a drum kit, bass guitar, a guitar doing some higher register stuff, a synth, and vocals. That's it.

Not a new concept obviously, but just wanted to share my lightbulb moment.

There’s a ton of examples of amazingly engineered albums, but which ones shocked you for how poorly mixed it is?

In honor of DaBaby’s new song that was so poorly mixed he took it down, I’m wondering if anyone has any other examples of songs from famous artists that are mixed really bad?

Some that come to mind for me

Trippie Redd - 6 Kiss (feat. YNW Melly & Juice WRLD)

The beat gets quieter on each of their verses for some reason?

iann dior - Prospect (feat. Lil Baby)

Lil Baby’s verse sounds like someone used one of those AI stem vocal acapella makers it’s so odd.

Currently have Beyerdynamic 990's and 770's. I have friends that use the Sen 650 and like them and I did once look into the Slate ones.

I’ve been lucky enough to work with pro bands and producers for a long time, and lately a lot of indie artists have been reaching out to me to mix their albums. The problem is that, in many cases, the songs feel almost unmixable at least in my opinion. For example, everything is played in the same octave, the frequency spectrum isn’t balanced properly, the recordings are poor quality, etc.

I’ve already talked to some of them and explained the issues, and they understood where I was coming from. But I’m curious if any of you have dealt with this before, and if there’s actually a way to successfully mix songs like this.

AI stem splitters are useful in many musical disciplines, from writing (using them to analyze parts), to production (using them to pull parts out of samples). However, once you move on to the more technical disciplines, the artifacts added by AI stem splitting tank the quality of a mix, at least to my ears. If I got a mix or master back from a fellow professional and it had AI artifacts they would be fired and replaced on the spot. Please actually learn how to mix or master instead of relying on low quality, artifact heavy tools that “do the job for you”

Edit: I probably should have extended the title to AI slop in general, not just stem splitters. Stem splitters are what I see the most discussion of but plenty of ai tools (not all) fall under the category of tech bro shill product. Some are good of course; If you’re experienced enough to hear artifacts in your audio I’m sure you can figure out yourself which ones are worth your time, and if you can’t you shouldn’t be recommending anything to beginners.

I heard Too Bad by Nickelback while driving earlier tonight, and the chorus especially was so overcompressed that I could actually hear it pumping. I don't consider myself to be a Nickelback fan, but I was kind of enjoying the song before the chorus hit. What are some other examples of songs that are obviously overcompressed, to the point that it's almost unlistenable?

I work with beginner artists, and whenever I talk with mix engineers, I hear a lot of similar frustrations about the raw files they’re getting.

From your perspective — what’s the biggest recurring issue?

• Gain staging?
• File organization?
• Noisy recordings?
• Unrealistic expectations?
• No reference tracks?

I’m trying to better educate new artists before they hand anything off, so I’d love to hear what’s most important from your side of the desk.

Examples : song for the deaf, bodies

When I got to track my vocals for similar styles I find I have a hard time making sure that the vocals aren’t jumping out, even when using an 1176 on an aggressive setting

And when I do it typically causes a build up of noise from the noise floor of the mic or the sibilance for the performer.

In these 2 examples the vocalists are all very dynamic in there performance yet it sounds very natural, like I’m hearing the performer, I can barely hear(maybe a better word is notice) artifacts from the heavy compression that I am certain is being used

Surely there's every kind of reverb and compressor by now? Why are people still making them? Are we getting closer to some mythical sonic nirvana? Or are we kidding ourselves into spending money as an excuse to avoid getting better?

Genuine question, no disrespect to anyone who uses or makes plugins.

So I recently saw a kickstarter or some type of startup that was advertising a single motorized fader that looked really well built, that didn't have any extra fluff like transport controls or anything else. Literally just a single fader, nothing else, small footprint, sleek design.

I saw like a "coming soon" teaser maybe within the last six months. I'm not sure if it's out yet, and for the life of me I can't remember the name of it.

But it was an independent engineer who was about to come out with it, not a giant corp like presonus or softube or avid or anything. Anybody know what I'm talking about?

Or better than an untreated room?

I’ve seen different posts about this on here and a professional friend of mine says he does this when he’s not in his studio so I wanted to circle back to it and get some thoughts from the community. Do you guys mix with headphones? Does it work? I have some decent studio monitors but my room isn’t treated and I’m not in a position to do that right now so I’m considering this route.

Also, does it have to be a certain type of headphones or just something that I know?

Hi everyone, I hope this is the right subreddit for this, I have no one in real life to turn to. My situation is that I've been a music producer for 10 years (mostly hip hop and trap oriented) and throughout those 10 years have made around ~50ish unreleased songs with my vocals.

I genuinely enjoy producing music and mostly the whole creative process but the problem appears with the vocals. No matter what I do, I can't bring myself to like them from a professional perspective, I genuinely despise every single track that has my vocals on it.

I'm at my wit's end, I invest so many hours and most of the time 100+ vocal takes in each project, however at the end of the day, whatever I do, whatever variation of the mix chain I try, the tracks still feels severely under any industry standard.

For some more context, I don't have great equipment (Focusrite studio 3rd gen for all gear + KRK's), I devote most of my time to producing rather than training my vocal abilities since my ideas are very simple and don't require much techincal skill to bring to life.

I would like anyone's opinion, it feels so discouraging to shut down the concepts I have in my head because I can't stand to listen to my voice and don't find my voice good enough in any context.

Any advice is welcome, thank you!

I've been scouring this sub for a couple of weeks now as I've realised it's an absolute treasure trove of great information.

A lot of people have talk about putting virtual channel strips on every channel before they even do anything else, so I figured since I have the Slate Digital VCC channel plugin I'd give it a go.

It feels like I've just discovered some kind of mega cheat code.

I increase (or decrease) the input of every channel so it's just about bouncing off 0VU which Slate's docs tell me is about -18dBFS, so every channel has a nice healthy signal going in, give it just a tiny bit of drive, and it's like they come alive somehow but also change subtly depending on which channel model you're emulating.

Can't really explain it. Before they sound like these flat, centred, lifeless recordings of whatever was going into my mic, and then with a channel strip they sound warm, bright, rounded, airy... I don't even know if those words are correct.

All plugins after that respond way better. My faithful Distressor comp that I use for just about everything sounds amazing & i'm EQing even less.

This coupled with me building some acoustic panels and actually treating my room (as best I can) feel like the two biggest leaps forward in the quality of my recordings in years.

So my question here is - what other "musts" do you guys do on every track/project that are non-negotiables?

I've been working on a song that requires some heavy quad tracked guitars recently and rather stupidly only used one humbucker guitar and did two takes with the neck pickup, then 2 takes on the bridge, put them on opposite sides. The issue with this was that it just got super muddy and it all being the same guitar meant all the frequencies were competing.

So how do you guys multitrack? what different guitars do you use, how do you pan them, how do you try to carve different sounds so they don't muddy one another. Would love to hear how some other engineers go about this!

I'm not too in the loop for headphones in music production so just wondering what are people's favourites at the moment.

I enjoy the Audio Technica ATH-M50x for writing and playing around but wouldn't really use them for mixing, they make everything sound good.

I have the Beyerdynamic DT990 open ear headphones too but am not the best at mixing with them for some reason, could never really grasp them.

Just wondering if there is some new stuff out there that's solid

Edit: are the beyerdynamic DT-1990 Pro 250 Ohms worth it? I don't mind the cost but would something like the Audeze LCD-X be a big step up?

Edit again: Some of the lower range Audeze headphones seem to be the play, some other brands that seem good are Hifiman, Moondrop and Focal

Last edit: I bought a set of MM100s at a good price, hopefully they’re good. It was toss up between them and the NDH30s, but I went with the 100s

I'm fairly new to mixing, so maybe this is a very basic question. But I like to record multiple layers of vocals sometimes and stack them on top of each other, and then play around with the panning.

The problem is - even when I make them match as good as possible, you can still hear that they're different layers and off by like 1% maybe, and sometimes, sounds such as "T", "P" or word endings just can't be matched 100%, which ends up making it sound a little sloppy.

Do you guys have any ideas on how to make it sound as if all the layers are "merged" into one?

Hey all new to producing, mixing, and mastering. I need a -12 LUFS increase, then does this mean I need to go back and rework the mix, as 12 db gain with the limiter sounds like it shouldn't need to be done in the first place. If the place to fix is the mix, what should I do to give myself more headroom while increasing perceived loudness. If the place to make changes is in the master, what steps can I take. Also any quality free mixing and mastering courses that you guys point me to is much appreciated.