Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio - Additional Resources

Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio

Chapter 5: Essential Groundwork

Table of Contents

Workflow Demonstration Video

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Audio Files

(To download all WAV examples at once: 59MB ZIP)

  • Unmixed Multitracks For Practice Purposes: If you’re looking for something to use for practicing your mixing, check out the 'Mixing Secrets' Free Multitrack Download Library, which contains more than 500 projects in a variety of different musical styles. These are free to download for educational purposes, and can easily be imported into any DAW by copying all the WAVs to the same point in the time-line.

  • Vocal Multing Examples: For the majority of the mixes I do, I end up multing the lead vocal part so that I can alter its processing to match changes in the song’s arrangement, and there’s a good example in Mix Rescue February 2009. First compare the two vocal sounds: verse Ex05.01: WAV/MP3play_arrow and chorus Ex05.02: WAV/MP3play_arrow. Then listen to how their processing and effects differences make sense within the context of the remix Ex05.03: WAV/MP3play_arrow. Another example can be heard in Mix Rescue March 2010. Again, here are the verse Ex05.04: WAV/MP3play_arrow and chorus Ex05.05: WAV/MP3play_arrow vocal sounds, as well as a section of the remix Ex05.06: WAV/MP3play_arrow to show how they contribute to the production as a whole. And a final example comes from Mix Rescue November 2008, where the verse vocal Ex05.07: WAV/MP3play_arrow and chorus vocal Ex05.08: WAV/MP3play_arrow are deliberately contrasted for more artistic effect, as you can hear within the context of the full remix Ex05.09: WAV/MP3play_arrow.

Further Reading

  • Multing In Practice: Here are a few Mix Rescue projects which illustrate a variety of different uses for multing. In this article I ended up multing a large number of parts (including the drums, guitars, and vocals) to reflect arrangement changes between sections, whereas in this article I used more ‘micro level’ multing, slicing up drum loops into individual hits for separate processing. For this article (from which the screenshot in Figure 5.5 was taken), it was impossible to make any sense of the complex outro vocal arrangement without first multing all the lead and backing vocals into appropriate functional groups.