How To Start Mixing and Mastering: Plugins
AN EASY GUIDED TUTORIAL ON WHICH PLUGINS TO USE AND HOW TO USE THEM
As a beginner, mixing and mastering can seem like all-encompassing challenges. Aren’t those two tasks, after all, almost the entirety of what a producer does?
While that isn’t necessarily true (just ask The Recording Connection if you don’t believe us) it is safe to say that mixing and mastering are indeed foundational aspects of music production. This holds true whether your dream is to be a full-time engineer or you’re an independent artist working on demos.
If you’re serious about working in the music industry in 2020, you need to know the basics of mixing and mastering.
So, where to start?
In the age of unlimited information, tutorials are as ubiquitous as they are contradictory and confusing. A newbie looking for “Music Production 101” may find dozens of tutorials for hyper-specific solutions on Youtube or Reddit, but struggle to find firm footing on the big-picture questions of where to start and what to focus on.
In our experience, plugins are perhaps most perplexing of all. Sweetwater currently offers a whopping 176 different EQ plugins alone, and by the time you read this, that number may have already changed. This massive availability is a wonderful thing; but it can also be a very paralyzing thing.
Thus, we’ve done our best to whittle it all down: here are our top 4 suggestions for beginners when it comes to plugins.
1. Don’t buy any…yet.
Whatever DAW you’re using has free stock plugins in it. Most of the time, they are perfectly decent, usable plugins that cover all your basic needs (we’ll get to those needs in a moment). We’re rabid high-end plugin aficionados as much as anyone else, but just like it wouldn’t be wise to loan a Ducati to someone still learning to ride, it is generally unwise for beginners to start mixing and mastering with expensive third-party plugins.
Not only are stock plugins free, they also tend to be rudimentary and user-friendly. That makes them excellent for learning and practicing.
That being said, there are some notable companies like Waves and Plugin Alliance who offer some unique free software/downloadable content worth checking out as a beginner.
2. Compressors and limiters are the most important
If we were stranded on a desert island with only one mixing and mastering tool to carry a project from start to finish, it would be a compressor. What compression is and how compressor plugins work is, in our view, the first thing to understand about mixing and mastering. LANDR has the best online tutorial we’ve seen on this subject and it’s less than 5 minutes long.
What is the difference between a compressor and a limiter? Think of a compressor as two slices of bread squishing a sandwich together. Now think of a limiter as a syringe pushing fluid up into the top of the tube. See the difference?
Both are squishing the sound together and reducing dynamic range, but limiters instead put a solid lid on volume (at, for instance, -0.1 dB) and then push the sound up denser and denser into that lid.
This is useful for a variety of purposes, but the most important are to prevent clipping and to use in mastering. Pushing your entire mix up into the top of that syringe is largely what creates “loudness” and makes your finished tracks the same general volume as what’s in your library.
Audio Theory’s video tutorial on the basic function of a limiter and its distinction from a regular compressor is comprehensive and barely longer than 1 minute.
3. EQ as little as possible.
Equalization in music production is like salt in cooking. It’s just like Tony Lip says over a salty diner meal in The Green Book. “Salt’s cheating. Any cook can make things salty. To make it taste good without the salt, with just the other flavors, that’s the trick.” He’s right.
The best way to make mixing and mastering too “salty” is by over-processing your tracks with wild EQ moves. Before you use an EQ on anything, first pause and ask yourself this golden question: does this actually need EQ at all?
If the answer is “yes,” you will immediately zero in on exactly why. Maybe there is too much low end. Maybe the midrange is too boxy. Maybe something is slightly muddy in the 250 – 300 Hz range.
In any case, this sets you up to use EQ the right way: as a tool for smoothing subtle imperfections. Don’t just whip out the salt and start pouring it all over every ingredient in your dish. Identify precisely what is lacking in the sound, and try to remedy it with as few knobs as possible.
4. Reverb is essential, but easy to approach wrong.
It doesn’t matter what genre you’re working in: you have to use reverb. This can be one of the most intimidating tools when you first start mixing and mastering, because the actual impacts it is having on your mix can be hard to recognize right away.
One of the main things you’re likely to notice when you start messing around with reverb is that it sounds really different when isolated vs. when in the mix.
For instance, a soloed lead vocal track can sound like it’s coming from the back of a cathedral, but once un-soloed, can suddenly sound like there is barely any reverb at all.
There is a crucial lesson in this. Don’t apply reverb settings to soloed tracks. Nobody is going to be listening to that track soloed; they’re going to be listening to the mix! Therefore, your focus should be on how the reverb sounds in the full mix.
Alternate between reverb on, reverb off, with the mix constant. Don’t alternative between mix on, mix off, with the reverb constant. This alone will teach you a wealth of beginner’s knowledge about what reverb actually does in full sonic context.
Conclusion
That, we believe, is all there really is to it. Music production is an intricate craft with unlimited potential, and many spend their entire lives learning and getting better. You will eventually find your favorite go-to reverb, your preferred compressors and EQ’s, a whole world of special processors, and much more – all in due time.
If you are serious about mixing and mastering, start with this basic roadmap. Conquer the fundamentals and see how far it takes you!
