# Mixing and mastering



## jumanji79 (Aug 17, 2021)

when people go from beginner to pro in a pro studio , im not sure they sit there trial and error using there ears for years , its frustrating and gives you a headache , they must have a secret sauce that they tweak and move to sweet spots , or they see where presets do and then roughly copy that idea and move it to the sweet spot is that a more logical analasis of use your ears , i dont reckon pro studios that are doing well give away these things but i reckon they hand down some faster learning methods , you see so many courses pretending they are gonna give you this then want hundreds , ive never paid is there actually anything they give you or do you just get frustrated and use your ears ? cheers guys


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## mybadmemory (Aug 17, 2021)

Obviously people don’t just turn knobs at random and learn everything by trial and error, but there are so many great learning recourses available for everything. I don’t think there ever are any magical ingredients or shortcuts to learning to master a craft. Simply dedication, effort, and perseverance.


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## HM_Music (Aug 17, 2021)

50\50
On the one hand, you can learn something from the courses, copying some of the patterns.
On the other hand, in fact, all this training gives very little, because you need to learn from your own material.
No matter how they equalize or compress the strings, these settings will not work well in your material.
I buy courses, but I know beforehand that I shouldn't expect miracles, maybe I'll find a couple of little things for myself.

In the studio, I think the training is much easier and better, unfortunately I do not have the opportunity to learn in studio.

And in general, I think there are people who are easier to give it, they listen to the sound, much faster and more accurately determine how best to turn the knobs.


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## Henu (Aug 17, 2021)

jumanji79 said:


> is there actually anything they give you


Like in any courses (paid or unpaid), you may or may not get some good tips and tricks. The more you already understand on the subject, the more you can benefit from the teachings.



jumanji79 said:


> do you just get frustrated and use your ears


Yes, years after years. At some point you get less frustrated all the time, though.


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## thorwald (Aug 17, 2021)

There are a couple things to this:

Unless you mix/master the same instruments that have been recorded via the exact same equipment in the exact same room (if room mics are used), exact patterns will be hard to reuse. This is like saying that writing poetry is easy, because you already know what rhymes with what, so you just follow the same rhyme scheme and you are good. Nope, because a poem is very much dependent on your emotions, and what you wish to convey. The same goes for music, tracks and even the entire album as a whole, need custom treatment 99.99% of the time.

There are generic patterns, of course, and tricks depending on what you are mastering for. Without calling names, there is an infamous professional album, for example, which had been mastered for lower quality equipment (to the dismay of many). A lot of times, low frequencies need treatment (generally either by reducing, or duplicating them for speakers unable to reproduce low frequencies), etc.

All this smalltalk is basically to say that yes, you do need your ears ☺️, and mixing and mastering is definitely time consuming. On the other end of the spectrum, there are tools that can automate three quarters of this process, which for mastering I don't necessarily mind, but of course I want to be sure that I have a signature sound that sounds good to me, hence the three quarters.

Edit: Forgot to add that studio time is great to have for experiencing diverse mixes and learning to apply various techniques, hopefully with the help of a professional, but it is not a must. They use their ears just as much, if not more, and yes, they do have ear fatigue as well ☺️ Due to this diversity, however, they have more readily-available solutions for issues, and they might listen out for something that might not be obvious without some experience.
This is not to say that they don't develop their own habits, have their favorite plugins or techniques, but that's just something that comes with experience, so is less frustration eventually.

This is from an impatient composer who'd rather make music than spend hours mastering, but still wants great results 😀 (aka. I'm not a pro mixing/mastering engineer), just someone who finds sounds doubly as important.


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## jumanji79 (Aug 18, 2021)

the reason i ask is because ive met a few guys who mix bands live and in studios who say they have certain mixing templates and they tweak them


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## mybadmemory (Aug 18, 2021)

Templates are there to save time, almost regardless of profession. As soon as you become professional and deadlines are a thing, you often don’t have time to start from scratch or to experiment. You want a setup that you know works, where much of the repetitive labour is already setup at least to a degree where only tweaks are necessary. What this template include is no industry secret or magical shortcut but rather just “what you yourself would usually do anyway”. What that is is of course highly individual and something you find out with learning, time and experience.


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## thorwald (Aug 18, 2021)

jumanji79 said:


> the reason i ask is because ive met a few guys who mix bands live and in studios who say they have certain mixing templates and they tweak them


That's perfectly valid, if you use certain plugin chains, or you know that you will always treat certain frequency ranges, or even if you just have various EQ plugins where you can tweak bands as needed, templates can speed up things, the same way composer templates do, by having preloaded instruments organized, colored, with your added favorite effects, etc. Basically, the more constant things you have, the easier it gets next time.

The problem is that things are always in motion. Sometimes you add one or more instruments, so you need to make sure that they don't fight for space, sometimes you have different equipment (when you're live or in a studio, recording various artists), sometimes you're just simply after a different sound. Then, things like discovering a shiny new plugin can add more complexity too.


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## Dietz (Aug 18, 2021)

"Templates" for mixing can be helpful as long as they are understood as sketches that need to be refined and reconstructed (at least in parts, sometimes as a whole). As soon as they are seen as "finished products" and one-size-fits-all solutions, the mixes will certainly never meet the needs of the music or the expectations of the artist and the audience.

Another typical misconception is the notion of the "perfect mix" in the sense of a static setting from start to finish. A good mix is as much about interaction with the music as conducting. In music there is not something like a "single moment of everything", but it's always about changes over time. I.e.: Automation is the key to any emotionally (and technically!) satisfying mix. ... nothing that can be stored in "templates" ...


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## lux (Aug 18, 2021)

I would add that there are topics that you can hardly learn by just moving knobs and stuff, expecially when it comes to mixing and mastering. Compressors, preamps, limiters, chorus, delay, saturation need to be deepened to get a good final result, mostly because the final mix and master are the result of very subtle manouvres, colors and things that you need to be trained to get with your ears, as they're not there to be easily heard or understood.


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