YT: Clark Kent Mixing Tutorial

[Clark Kent]

Hey homies! I've been thinking about doing this for a long time so I finally did it and I hope you find it useful. There is no "one right way" to mix things. Sadly the way I mix demands proper ears and finding volume levels that blend etc. so those are things that I can't teach. You simply have to train your ears by comparing to professional mixes. I did fail though... I used mono compressors for stereo kick and snare tracks <3 but luckily the gclip balanced them so it doesn't matter much.

I hope you find some useful tips in this tutorial. All I can say is "less is more" unlike Yngwie suggests. Enjoy!

 

[XxSicRokerxX]

Great tutorial. Very general. I think this is how a lot of us do these around here, at least I do. Neat trick on finding those ugly low mid frequencies, i usually jump on a multiband compressor. Is there a reason why you use IXL Spectrum Analyzer over VOXENGO SPAN? Just curious thats all. Also, I understand the idea of mixing at -18 DB RMS. Is that why you have so much headroom?

 

[Clark Kent]

Thanks man! I can't point enough that what I do in this video is very tiny bit of sculpting the almost ready tones. Good sound in leads to good sound out.

I use the IXL just because I've always been using it. It's what my eyes are used to. It does what I need it to do. It's fast and offers the third octave analyzer which to me is the best analyzer there is because I rely on that one. I've tried other analyzers but I always come back to the IXL.

The -18dB mixing is actually something I don't really think about since I have a separate volume control for my speakers here that I constantly tweak so that my mix sounds huge on both low and high volumes. I tweak the level of volume that goes into the glue compressor with the master EQ plugin. I think I boosted it like 9dB or something.

 

[Nimvi]

Thanks for the vid Clark, I always enjoy seeing fellow members doing their thing. You never know when you will pick something up that you either didn't know, or approached from a very different perspective.

Oh, and I very much agree with the "close your eyes and set it so it sounds good" comment. As simple and obvious as that concept may seem, it's incredible how easy it is to get lost in making it LOOK good. Especially for the compulsive crowd... (that would be me)

On a sidenote, judging from your previous reply, I think you've mixed up -18dbfs mixing with 85spl mixing. -18dbfs mixing isn't about your reference levels, but about the levels your plugins/hardware send and receive within your project to make most things work at their optimal level. There was a pretty big thread on that in this forum recently, so if you are bored, enjoy the read!

 

[Butt Nekkid]

Nice one!

 

[reconoid]

Very nice.
But why are you using Cubase 5, not 6?