Did you know that the mixing engineer behind Kendrick Lamar’s breakout album, Derek Ali, mixes in mono for the first 80% of his process? Today we’re going to discuss what pros and cons of this approach.  Why mix in mono? 1. Because it’s better for achieving the right EQ balance When you mix in stereo, you have some elements coming from the sides, some coming from the center. That may fool you into thinking that your frequencies are not clashing, when in fact they are. When you mono your track it’s easier to spot the mistake because you don’t have...

EQ Eight is one of the most important production tools in Ableton Live. Today I’m going to show you when and how to use it. What is the frequency spectrum? To understand what EQ does you need to get a sense of what the frequency spectrum is. Make sure to wear headphones or listen on good speakers with a lot of low frequencies. Here is a fragment of a track of mine with no EQ applied. Here’s what this situation looks like on the EQ8 display: Now listen to the same clip without high frequencies. Notice that you can now...

  In this 3 part mini series, @nuckychulo shares his vocal mixing techniques on a nice Hip Hop Ableton project. Contents of this series: Gate and EQ EQ8 and Compression Reverb and Delay + Bonus tricks  Pick up the effect chain rack for this vocal mixing tutorial from our freebies section.   5h+ Course: Mixing A Track From Scratch in Ableton (with stock effects)     Keywords: mixing vocals like drake, vocal mixing like post malone, hip hop vocal mixing, vocal mixing in ableton   Check out other content on Hip Hop / Trap: How to Make a Trap Beat? Top 5 Elements Trap...

At PML, we love sharing our production tips with you. Today we've prepared for you 8 tips we found useful. 1. Making bass cut through To make your bass cut through better, split it into two tracks. Use one track to play sub frequencies (lowpass everything below 60 Hz with EQ8) and another one to play harmonics (highpass at 60 Hz). Then make sure your sub frequencies are mono and stereo enhance the harmonics. 2. Jazz up your chords To give your chords a more jazzy feel, try these techniques: - Extend them into 7th, 9th, 11th or 13th chords for that...

  Matching EQ allows you to sort of "clone" the frequency spectrum of another track. EQs like the Fab Filter Pro-Q2 offer such a function. You basically create two audio tracks and let the EQ calculate the differences between the frequency spectrum of your work and the one of the other (eg. commercial) track. Then, these differences get sort of "added in" or "taken out" of your track, resulting in an overall appearence closer to the reference track, depending on your instrumentation.    Learn more about EQing and how to deal with it when mixing: NEW PML 5h+ Course: Mixing A Track From Scratch...

We had a lot of questions on how the compressor actually works, so we decided to make a small series of videos covering the functionalities from the perspective of the Ableton Live built-in compressor.     Learn more about compression in the mixing stage: NEW PML 5h+ Course: Mixing A Track From Scratch in Ableton (with stock effects)     Keywords: mixing, compressor, how to use a compressor, how does a compressor work

A lot of the subtractive vs additive EQ debate stems from the analogue times when recordings still contained a lot of noise. Boosting through additive EQ increased the loudness of such noise and was - simply put - therefore to be avoided.  Another argument against additive EQ that still holds nowadays is the "louder sounds better" trap. If you have two instruments occupying the same frequency band, boosting one to make it "cut through" will easily trick your ears into believing the overall mix sounds better - when it actually results in setting off the balance of your mix. Reading...

Lets quickly address a psychological phenomenon called "frequency masking". It occurs when we are listening to a mix of instruments playing together at the same time and affects our perception.  Lets say our frequency spectrum above 5kHz gets filled up with a loud playing cymbal sound. If we have a vocal part playing along, we will perceive it a lot less well around that frequency range since above 5kHz, the cymbal is "masking" other elements. That happens even if the vocals themselves sound nicely bright in solo mode.  So in order to deal with this effect, we now have to boost the...

  We find this image to be really useful. It's an infographic showing you what is where in the audio spectrum and providing a lot of useful hints on how to eq the different elements in your mix. Advice: print it out and put it up on your wall! Large version here   NEW PML 5h+ Course: Mixing A Track From Scratch in Ableton (with stock effects)     Watch our free tutorial series on EQing on youtube:       keywords: how to eq, parallel eq, sidechain eq, eq basics ableton, free eq tutorial, dynamic eq ableton, mixing a track from start to...