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It's not really hyperbole. No, you can't expect to just throw the faders up and have the best mix ever with nothing else. For many genres, the mix wouldn't even be average. But you should expect to just throw the faders up and have a mix that works. Nothing about the mix should sound wrong...

Mixerman, you give some great advise and I have learned much from your writing, but I can't agree with this one. *You should want to rip somebody's head off with a rock chorus. It's insane that aggressive music bends over backwards to not shock people. *The bit about losing the music in the...

You don't need any compression or EQ to fit a vocal into a mix. You need to record parts that fit in the first place. Scratch tracks can help enormously. When you lay down your final guitar part, have a scratch vocal already in place. If the guitar buries the vocal, change the performance...

A loop can be one instrument or an entire drum beat or an entire mix. Say you've got a bass guitar and full drum kit groovin' along for exactly one measure and you can loop it seamlessly. That's a loop. It can come from a real instrument. It can come from a synthesizer. The point is that it...

What problems are you running into with the bleed?

If the dynamics are a problem on the voice and not piano, then apply dynamic control to the voice and leave the piano and mix buss alone. Never do something unless you hear a reason to do it. I'd pull the tracks up, listen for what they need, and then do that. Typically... None. I wouldn't...

That "primitive" method is pretty much how most people record most guitars. Here is where you are getting it wrong: Yes, you capture "all the sound" from the amp. The thing is, you don't EQ it into what you want it to be during mixing. You set the amp, choose the mic, choose the guitar, and...

Post a rough cut of the song. It will give us something to go on.

I know, right? ... HEY YOU KIDS, GET OFF MY LAWN! ...Damn.

Tape. Mixing boards. Hardware effects units. If you ran out of tracks you brought in a second tape machine and ran both of them in sync. If you wanted to make an edit (move a sound back and forth), you cut the tape with a razor blade and then stuck it back together after removing or adding the...

It depends on what you like to do. I love adding compression and EQ while recording. It "locks in" the sound, guides the production down a defined path, and gives me a better idea of what is needed when overdubbing future tracks. Some people don't like to do it because they want all of the...

You can get a megaphone for, like, $30. It really is the easiest way to record a megaphone sound.

I would be shocked if it were anything other than this.

Agreed. To add to that: Before moving on to another method, check that the drums actually are good. This takes 5 minutes and really helps. Put a single mic in the room 10 feet away from the kit. Drum and record. Listen to that one mic. Does it sound good, mixed, and EQed properly with the...

I my experience the order of the three biggest culprits is: Drummer can't play Bad tuning Bad mic placement But regardless of order I think we can all agree that these are the top 3. Remember, playing drums is so much more than striking the right surfaces at the right time. Strike a single...

Cut the low EQ, crank the hell out of 400-800, and add distortion. Or hell, get a megaphone and hold it in front of a speaker playing the recording. In the future just use a megaphone. That's always how I've seen it done.

Bluegrass is a funny genre... Yeah, the drums raise eyebrows. Hell, I've run into diehards that won't call it Bluegrass if more than one mic is used! Just crowd around the mic stand and play. Anyway, you're heading down the wrong path as soon as you talk about scratch tracks and overdubs...

1. A copy of a track panned hard left and right will sound exactly the same as the single track panned center and boosted a bit in volume. We determine left/right relationships through differences in phase, amplitude, etc. There are no differences in an exact copy, so we will hear one sound...

It could be any type of MIDI instrument. It could be a keyboard. It could be a rack-mount synth unit. It could be a soft synth. It could be the sample bank on an internal sound card. It is a "temporary conversion" to audio in the following sense: A clarinet player has sheet music in...

This is just a guess: You listen to music in your daily life with "Hip Hop" EQ engaged on your playback device. You listen frequently enough that this EQ seems "normal". Then you go and make your own hip hop song. You make what you think is "normal"...so you essentially make something that...