$19.09

The Blueprint for Mixing

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The Blueprint for Mixing

$19.09

Includes the Technical Support bonus❗️More details down below.


The Blueprint represents the essence of accumulated experience after over a decade of turning every stone in audio, mixing hundreds of songs, learning and, more importantly, unlearning a ton, failing more times than I can count, and discovering golden nuggets during the process.

From songwriting to mastering, we face thousands of decisions. The mixing stage especially - where technique meets emotion - can quickly lead to overwhelm and spinning in circles, draining our energy in the process.

"A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved."

While accumulating techniques answers "How to use a tool?", there are two equally important questions: "When and why to use a tool?". The Blueprint is designed as a system to help you answer these. It's not a shortcut, nor a hack. It's a decision-making framework that tries to put some order into the big chaos that is making music.

What is this about?
Like the "top-down mixing" technique, I think is better if I’m going to start with the end. The best way to explain it is to reveal its conclusion:

The Blueprint for Mixing: Outro

We have a story to tell (vision). We use plot twists to enhance it (intention). We use the required tools by vision and intention, to make the story come to life (technique). This is how we tell our story. This is how technique and plugins assist us in telling the story, instead of the other way around.

Overall, there must be a balance in terms of developing all components of the creative process

  • taste: ability to detect the smallest nuances related to the process of music making
  • technique: to know how various classes of plugins sound, so we can quickly select the best tool for expressing the intention
  • intention: to know what tool to use to create the desired effect on the listener
  • vision: to manipulate emotions throughout the song, and create captivating arrangements

Every weak link will have specific consequences

Without taste, there is no target to aspire to. So we can’t improve our technique. We can only improve what we can hear.

Without technique, we can’t fulfill the requirements of our vision and intention.

Without intention, we just try out random techniques, until something kind of works. But the results are often far from our vision.

Without vision there’s also no intention. What’s left is even more aimless and random experimentation, and the process of making music is profoundly unpleasant, boring, and prone to procrastination.

If you prioritize asking yourselfwhen” and “why” (vision and intention) during music-making sessions, the “how” (technique to use) will reveal itself naturally. But you also need to spend time learning technique.

If you only focus on learning more and more techniques (“how”), you will create aimlessly due to a lack of vision, mostly by random experimentation and influenced by the latest plugin reviews, making it nearly impossible to become a better storyteller.

Pause for a moment, do a reality check, and focus on strengthening the weakest links.

And, very important, trust yourself. Blindly. Most of the time you won’t see immediate results, and it’s hard to keep going. That’s your sign to keep going. Because all of a sudden, after many months of daily practice, your productions will suddenly sound radically better. Just blindly trust that the effort will eventually pay off, because it does.



Not a technical guide

This is not a guide about the best EQ, the optimal compressor settings, how to set up reverbs, or any other technical aspects.

This is all about the strategy of mixing.

A practical philosophy. Philosophy, because it's a "from above" kind of view. Practical, because it's also a hands-on guide. It's advanced, though. We deal with concepts first and specific techniques afterward.

It applies to everyone, from beginners to advanced. It doesn't matter if you're using stock plugins or if you have thousands others. It doesn't matter if you are familiar or not with all the basic audio processing. These aspects (what I call the technique category) are just a slice of the big pie that is mixing music.


The main purpose of this guide is to remove overwhelm and overthinking

and to save you time by showing you how to make intentional decisions instead of randomly trying things out.

How many times have you sat with a track, asking yourself:

does it need EQ? what kind of EQ? analog? what emulation? maybe compression? what compressor? opto? 1176? what attack? what release? maybe just more level? how much? maybe saturation? which one of those 30 I have? maybe reverb? maybe just chorus?

...and then done the same for the next track, and the next...

You try all the techniques you know, maybe search YouTube for more. And in the end, it may very well not turn out the way you'd like.

This guide provides a clear strategy on how to assess the six key qualities of a sound: tonal balance, clarity, definition, texture, dimension, and depth.

Looking at the forest from above, with a drone. Then zooming in and inspect each tree in detail.

Always just six questions to ask for each track - not an endless stream. You'll get six answers, and chances are you won't need to act on all of them. The qualities you do need to act on will reveal a shortlist of techniques. A manageable and actionable list. That's how you translate the vision in your head into the mix in front of you.


Vision, intention, technique - the Holy Trinity of mixing and music production

There are 6 chapters in this guide.

We start with the importance of taste and how to cultivate it. We can't cook a delicious meal without having great taste, can we?

Next, we cover how to approach a mix to avoid falling into the rabbit hole of endlessly revisiting and readjusting elements that were already adjusted.

Then we talk about the six qualities of a sound: tonal balance, clarity, definition, texture, dimension, depth. This makes assessing a sound simple (no pun intended) and efficient.

After that, we move on to the actual approach: how to select the proper tool for the job based on the qualities you want to change.

Finally, we talk about vision, intention, and technique. How these three are interconnected, how vision dictates your intention, and how intention reveals the techniques to use.

You see, technique is important, but it's ultimately just a third of the entire process behind mixing. Yet, the entire internet seems to focus only on technique. No matter how much of it you learn, you might still feel you're not advancing at the pace you'd like. Sound familiar?


That's what this guide is about.

Be the creator of your music, instead of your music being just the side-effect of whatever techniques worked "slightly better than how it was before".


Bonus: Technical Support

Practical knowledge that extends the system presented in The Blueprint for Mixing. A growing collection of good practices, curated techniques, common mixing issues and solutions. The topics covered so far:

Room and monitoring
Referencing and listening levels
Metering

Common mixing issues
- Excessive low end
- Too much reverb
- Mono-compatibility issues
- Frequency buildups or resonant frequencies
- Combined negative characteristics
- Dips in the spectrum
- Harshness
- Unbalanced levels for instruments in the same class
- Over-compression due to chasing loudness

Defining mix translation

General mix considerations
- Tonal balance and texture
- Clarity and definition
- Dimension and depth
- Emotion

Mixing decisions
- Source sounds and arrangement
- Gain staging
- Levels
- Identifying resonances
-- The low mids
- The low end and mixing bass
-- The low end hierarchy

Mixing vocals
- Processing the vocals
- Preparing the lead vocals
- Preparing the backing vocals
- Vocal de-essing philosophy
- Time-based effects

Dimension and Depth
- Stereo optimization
- The 3D virtual stage

Saturation

Compression
- Compression and psychoacoustics (masking)
- Parallel compression
- Upward compression
- Multiband dynamics

Limiting

The master bus chain
- Why use a chain on the mix bus
- Using the same, mostly “set it and forget it”, master bus chain
- Building the master bus chain from the end to the beginning

Good practice
- File management
- Exporting the project - pre-roll and fade-out
- Sample rate
- Bit depth
- Dither
- Audio file formats


When writing this guide, I posted a few snippets online, and this is what people had to say



And here's more unsolicited feedback...


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The Blueprint for Mixing
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