Article Advise

submitted: Oct 7th 2008 | by: SFXsource | Total views: 1 | Word Count: 347 | |

The difference between a fantastic piece of music and a mediocre one often has nothing to do with the actual melody or music itself. Often, one music tracks sounds much better than another simply because it has a professional final mix while the other has been sloppily recorded and thrown together without skill or experience. Creating a great mix is simply a matter of knowing what to do and the following tips will assist.

1. Use the most professional sounding recordings and samples to build your track in the first place. Bad audio recordings is the surest way to have a terrible sounding track.

2. Use EQ to cull out spaces for each instrument. For example, cut the bass drum at 80Hz so that it doesn't interfere with the bass guitar and cut cymbals around 1KHz to keep their noise from interfering with lower instruments.

3. Use at least some panning for most of the instruments to create a nice stereo field. Cymbals, percussion, and strings sound great panned though the bass drum and bass guitar and usually kept center field.

4. Understand and use compression to give clout to presence to each instrument. Tracks sound weak and lame without compression and is often a main difference between professional and amateur sounding tracks.

5. Compare the overall sound of your track next to favorite CDs in the same genre before you master. Make sure your track sounds as close to possible as the professionally made track and if it doesn't, then figure out why and correct.

6. During mastering, or the final mix, use a limiter to crunch down the highest peaks of the recording, allowing you to bring up the level of the entire mix without distorting.

When all is said and done, put your mix onto a CD or into your .mp3 player and listen to it in a variety of speaker systems such as in your car or a friends living room to make sure it sounds as good as possible in as many places as possible.

About the Author

In addition to publishing articles, SFXsource also offers vast amounts of royalty free production music which can be heard at Royalty Free Tracks and hosts an sfx library at Sound Effects

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