Not to say that there aren’t records that are great that aren’t particularly wide and don’t have much front to back depth, but generally these things will create a bigger sound. All you need is one sound that sounds far away, one sound on the left, one sound on the right-and not even at the same time necessarily-and suddenly your world is huge. If everything is forward, dry, and center, you’re living in a small world. Assign an Imageĭon’t just think of your record as a piece of music. Not to say there aren’t ways to process 808s, but if the 808 isn’t good to begin with, you are seriously barking up the wrong tree. Here’s the secret: If you turn your 808 up and it doesn’t sound good, then it’s either not tuned right or it’s the wrong 808 sound to begin with. The key here-that I think most producers stumble with-is that you want to think in terms of subtraction. It’s all about where things function best for the song. If that’s the case, you can use the EQ to say: ok, piano, back off your upper-midrange and give the snare some room to cut through. Maybe the snap of the snare is more important than the plink of the piano in this track? Maybe the piano really functions best as something that fills out the lower midrange and provides fullness to the track. When this happens (and only when it happens), the referee steps in to decide who belongs where. You might love the sound of your piano, but when you pull the piano up, you suddenly don’t hear the snare so well. It’s the Referee.Īny decent sound sample should sound good on it’s own.ĮQ comes into play when you hear the sounds in context of the other sounds. If you feel like you need a ton of stuff to make your drums hit, your synths growl, or your bass move, you might need to go back to the drawing board and find some better sounds. But let’s suppose you have strong sounds on deck and you just need them to fit together.

Ideally, the perfect arrangement and sound selection will need very little processing. If you’re a beatmaker looking to improve your own mixing, this article is for you. Until then, this article should do well to get the Hip-Hop producer on the right track.

Well, there’s a distinct possibility that may happen. I’m already receiving emails and tweets asking me to do a similar video on how to mix beats. It’s been less than a week since my tutorial on mixing rap vocals came out.

Mixing vocals over instrumentals