How do you mix lots of instruments? Do you balance them all out so you can hear every single one that’s playing? Then this one is probably for you!
In this video, Gregory goes into why you should prioritize a couple of melodic instruments in a mix and also how to think about mixing with the listener in mind.
Personally, it’s been very helpful for me to formalize what I was already feeling. Sometimes I make a track with a focus on a couple of instruments and sometimes I try to balance everything out. Whenever I balance I feel like the track becomes too overwhelming to listen to and I was tearing my head apart as to why it happens on certain tracks and not the others. Now I know why, and I hope this video helps you on your journey too!
Related to this, a good friend of mine is the engineer for a very well-known dub producer, and last time I saw him I ran through a live set I’ve been working on for a few months - (I make jungle/breakbeat/IDM stuff). He gave me two great tips - one of which I can’t be bothered to explain here as it’ll take me to long to type out, but the other was basically saying the same thing as this - make some elements really jump out of the mix, make stuff BANG and it’ll make the audience respond so much better than having everything sit nicely and politely throughout the whole set.
(Just want to mention that this is the first time I’ve commented on Lemmy and I’m not sure how the whole crossposting thing across instances works. I’ve left the same comment on the article at music.productiom - hope that’s okay! Just want to try to spark discussion and realised this is posted to two different places where I have an account 😊)
That’s really cool! Since I’ve made this post I’ve applied this advice to a production with balanced volumes. It got so much better, it’s silly to think that’s how I used to produce half the time (glad I wasn’t releasing those, lol). You can make that first tip into a post if you find the time, really curious to find out what it is!
On the communities and instances, my bad. I’m also quite new to Lemmy and still figuring stuff out. I made the community on sh.itjust.works and only after realized that the point of Lemmy is to keep such communities in their own instances. I’m trying to bring some quality content to attract music makers so I decided to cross-post to music instances to make it more easily discoverable, but now I’m thinking that I’m going to settle on waveform as being the main instance for now.
The thing is, it is in the lemmy pipeline to be able to link posts and accounts from different communities, but that’s gonna be very far into the future according to the devs. For now, just pick the instance you really like and comment there. I recommend either waveform.social or lemmy.studio (though it is kinda my rival now, lol). Waveform.social (and sh.itjust.works) music production is ran by me, lemmy.studio music production and the whole instance is run by [email protected]. I’m considering locking all comments on sh.itjust.works to forward discussion to waveform and L.S, I guess I’ll have to make a post about the change and see if that’s something worth doing until lemmy gets linking features.
I think I’ve got my head around the whole instances thing now - although I’ve accidentally posted elsewhere on a different user account to this one without realising it. I’ve accidentally set up three or four accounts, all with the same name, on different instances. Oops 😬. Going to try to stick to using this one now I’ve noticed!
Anyway, the other bit of advice was basically just “playing live should be fun or why would anyone want to do it? Keep it simple.or you’ll just get stressed out and it’ll be obvious”. This was after he watched me jump around a set with about 90 channels for half an hour. What really clicked for me was when I worked out how to take his method of dub performance (effectively using a reel-to-reel as an instrument) and translate it to a Launchpad performance, but keep the flexibility of having each of the 90-odd channels independently tweakable without the whole thing being overwhelming.
I’ll try to work out how to make a post on what I’ve done when I get time - hopefully it’s interesting enough to warrant one!
