Tips on mixing cinematic, orchestral music for film with Brian Losch

Guest post by John Hull. This article originally appeared on Soundfly’s Flypaper

Mixing Tips for Cinematic Orchestral Music with Brian Losch [Video]

When it comes to mixing cinematic, orchestral pieces — whether written to score film, TV, and other media or just for the sake of writing ambitious, epic ensemble music — there’s no doubt that each piece comes with its own set of idiomatic peculiarities. Certainly there are norms and expectations when it comes to prepping a mix in this style, but as always, exciting things can happen when you break the rules too.

That said, one thing you’re always shooting to achieve in cinema music and audio is a sense of immersive bigness. And that can come in many forms. So we talked to Brian Losch, a pro engineer with a Grammy Award to his name and a heck of a lot more accolades than that, about how he typically sets up his mixes, what he listens for, and how he tempers the storm of a (typically) enormous amount of stems.

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How Working In Surround Sound Affected My Stereo Mixes

Guest post by Stephen Bartlett. This article originally appeared on Soundfly’s Flypaper

We all know the saying: “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

For me, when I’m mixing a track or an album, I feel like I’m painting a three-dimensional picture. Using panning, frequency sculpting, and volume adjustments as my tools, I’m creating something that will transport the listener somewhere else in space and time (which is why I love music so much). So surely, this three-dimensional, transformative picture is worth like ten thousand words!

Of all the memorable lessons I’ve been taught over the last 15 years, I think learning to mix in surround sound has helped me paint that picture as vividly as possible, each and every time. Here’s why.

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How To Find The Right Online Mixing Engineer For Your Project?

Imagine you have been writing and producing your songs for hours and managed to record in a recording studio. Now what? Your songs need to be mixed and mastered!

You could mix the song by yourself but you need a lot of experience, analog equipment and good studio acoustics to get in the ball park of a professional mix.

It doesn’t make much sense to rush things and to release a track with mediocre audio quality after spending much time and energy while recording. Another option is to hire a professional mixing engineer with experience, album credits and equipment.

Nowadays a lot of music is produced via the internet. With strict deadlines time is limited and artists can’t spend days in the studio along with the engineer. You can find suitable engineers and mixing services online world wide. With Skype, Email and other services its easy to work together and a lot of time is saved over attended sessions. 

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10 Great Mobile Apps That Allow Me (And You) To Create Awesome Music From Scratch

Guest post by Evan Zwisler of Soundfly’s Flypaper

For such a long time, I resisted using apps to make music. I thought they must just be crappy, tiny versions of what they’re attempting to emulate (soft synthesizers, DAWs, digital instruments), or lame tools for musicians younger than I. Well, turns out I was wrong.

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7 Weird Mixing Terms And What They Mean

Guest post by Michael Hahn. This article originally appeared on Soundfly’s Flypaper

Engineers can get pretty fired up when they’re talking about mixing music. Your sound is a difficult thing to describe — throw in a layer of technical jargon and it can be downright frustrating just to talk about your tracks.

Fortunately, there are some common terms engineers use to help communicate mix issues and the qualities of sound. I’ll go through seven of the most common “odd” mixing terms, what they mean, and how to deal with the elements of your mix they refer to.

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Master The Fundamentals Of Mixing With Top Sound Engineers

The Soundfly team is really excited to announce the arrival of our most ambitious course to date: Faders Up: Modern Mix Techniques. This course features interviews with nine of the top sound engineers working today, teaching the ins and outs of creating top-quality DIY mixes of your music — engineers who’ve worked with the likes of Beyoncé, D’Angelo, Solange, Sia, Mark Ronson, the New York Philharmonic, the Dirty Projectors, and tons more!

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Music mixing tips

Mixing is where it all comes together whether you are a band or electronic musician it is an important stage. As a band you you might mix during a separate session with some other band members or as an electronic musician you may well mix as you produce a track. In any event some useful tips follow for getting an improved mix down.

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Learn How To Mix In 3D: Steve Hillier Tips on Mastering Reverb

Master the use of reverb and your lifeless, two-dimensional mix will become a three dimensional panorama, says Steve Hillier.

Things that people do wrong with their music:

1. Write a composition starting with the drums. This is madness. Can you imagine Lennon and McCartney waiting for Ringo to set up his drum kit before writing their next Beatles smash? Obviously not.

2. Compress everything. At least twice. Anyone doing this in their mixes should stop now. Modern DAWs have an internal dynamic range that’s comparable to a pin dropping versus the sound of the big bang. Try using it, rather than squashing your music to the flatness of a pancake being sucked into a black hole . Compressors are like guns…only the sane should ever pick one up.

3. Use reverb badly, or not at all… Unlike compression, everyone likes reverb. How can I say this with such confidence? Because nearly everything you’ve ever heard has been covered with reverb. Everything. Reverberation is what you hear when the sound from an event, such as a gun shot, bounces off a reflective surface, such as a wall, and then into our ears. It’s a fundamental attribute of how we experience sound, and our brains have evolved to use the information contained in reverb to help us survive in our everyday lives. If we’re hearing lots of sounds with long reverb tails on them, that suggests we’re in a large room, such as a church. Lots of short ‘early reflections’, we’re probably in a small room. Everything we hear has some reverberation on it before it ends up in our ears (we’ll ignore scientists who work in anechoic chambers for today).

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A Mastering Engineer's Guide to Final Mixdown

“Garbage in, garbage out” is a common saying among mastering engineers. The quality of the source material limits the quality of the final product. Most of my clients have no problem following my simple preparation instructions, but they stop there.

They figure once each mix sounds as good as they can get it, they’re done. In fact, there’s a higher level of refinement that pays huge dividends. I’ll break it down in this mastering engineer’s guide to final mixdown (which I promised in an interview back in January - sorry for the delay!).

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10 Key To Do’s For A Successful CD Release Party

You just left the studio and recorded the final notes for your album.  There’s the mixing and mastering process for your producer to take care of and the artwork for your album and any merchandise to do—but the real deal is when all of this comes together and you officially release your album at a CD release party.  A lot goes into making a CD release party a successful one and it rests entirely on how well you prepare.

There are many key areas that make it successful that I will discuss below, but to keep it short and sweet I would say the most important things are: be in tip-top shape and form musically when you perform, give lots of lead time to get it ready, have your album ready in CD and digital form on the day of your show, and ask for help when you need it.

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