Mix with your ears not your eyes, goes the old saying. While a non‑professional like myself is in no position to disagree with such sage advice, my ears need all the help they can get, and the modern DAW provides help by the bucket load.
Let’s start with the raw material of music production — the sounds. Maybe a motley selection of sampled snippets or (shock horror) the output of a real instrument. Tradition dictates that these elements should be in tune, so we grab our first trusty tool: the aptly named tuner plug‑in. This usually shows a ‘big dial’ visualisation, which makes it easy to hit the correct pitch.
Sometimes the sound source is so ‘organic’ that the poor tuner goes on strike. Or it could be you’ve forgotten which key your epic modular synth drone was played in (if there even was a key). Here we first meet our friend the spectrum analyser. This will show you the peaks and troughs in your sound as a moving graph of frequency versus level — and with any luck, the peaks will coincide with musical notes, which are easy to read from the pitch scale.
Skipping past the terrifying process of actually writing some music, we get to mixing. Opinions vary, but to save a multi‑month YouTube tutorial wormhole, let’s just agree that nothing should clash and nothing should poke out too harshly. But how on Earth are we going to check all that on a pair of headphones, or on speakers without upsetting the neighbours? Hello again, Mr Spectrum Analyser. We can easily check the vital low octave for bass/kick clashes and ensure they’re both peaking at the correct level.
Usefully, most equaliser devices now also include an analyser display behind the EQ curve, so it’s easy to locate and tame those horrible sticky‑out frequencies in the midrange. If anything needs further cajoling into the mix we can add a compressor or 10. Even these humble devices have visual readouts showing signal level and gain reduction, thus ending the age old ‘is it actually doing anything?’ conundrum.
Now comes the harsh reality of comparing our mix to a favourite song. It’s an easy task to drag that song into the DAW timeline and flick between the two comparing by ear. It’s only slightly more difficult to use our old pal the spectrum analyser to compare the songs’ frequency distributions. Some analyser plug‑ins even allow you to do this on the same display simultaneously.
But how far should we push it? Too much would be as bad as too little.
More mixing and matching ensues and our song is almost there, but it needs to be louder. But it won’t go louder without bumping its head on the inviolable 0dBFS line. Impatience and lack of funds mean sending the track to a real mastering engineer is out of the question and besides, setting up a chain of multiband compression, clipping and limiting is easy enough. But how far should we push it? Too much would be as bad as too little. This is where we grab a loudness meter to ensure the mix is hitting that sweet, sweet ‑9 LUFS spot (please don’t judge me).
So finally we’re done, the song sounds great at home, it thumps in the car and it doesn’t take anyone’s head off when played on a PA system. Friends may even make sceptical comments about it sounding ‘quite professional’ — but we know the secret. Oh and did I forget to mention, all these metering tools are either included in your DAW of choice, or available as freeware? What a time to be an amateur!