whatever you do you’ll never stop learning. even when you’re only reminded of something you have learned before. that happened to me during last week’s audio editing sessions.
on the internet you can find a whole lot of tutorials concerning mixing, mastering and audio production in general. that is fantastic and i’m kind of a fan of such tuts. however, there are some strings attached to those things which i want to point out once more.
in most tutorials you’ll find the note ‘this is not a general rule’ in one form or another. that seems quite obvious and right but if you are looking for information, you tend to overread or forget that.
now here comes the point: you shall not forget this!!!
there are tons of different styles of music and all of them have different needs, soundwise … actually every song has it’s own needs. what works for one does not necessarily work for others. and most importantly, your songs are your songs. which is why you know how they need to sound and no one else! one of the best sentences concerning this matter is by joe gilder. in his video tutorial on EQ (which is great and really worth watching, btw) he said: “… we’re doing audio. so there is no rules per se. … just let your ears tell you what to do.”
this really helped me out last week as i felt like reaching a dead end during my work on the new tracks. nothing seemed to sound just right at all. and why was that? well, i read some tutorials and sticked to what they suggested … too closely as it turned out … i learned that lesson the hard way
however, as i’m writing this, i have a bunch of final mixdowns on my harddrive. and they sound just as i want them to … all according to the plan!

january is almost gone and the deadline for the final mix of this years ep is coming to an end. and as i promised before, here is an update on how things develop.
i’ve been working for the last 7 hours non stop on the new tracks now and it’s funny how certain effects keep coming back during the process. for example, the use of reverb to get certain instruments in a distance or to give them some space in the mix. especially if the unit offers the possibility to apply the effect on certain frequencies. i have never been a big fan of reverb but as it turns out it’s a pretty handy device once you got the hang of it. it does take some time though and some reading, if you prefer the academic type of learning or some experimenting, if you prefer learning by doing.

another thing i started doing today is preparing an info-sheet for each track and its parts. i figured this could come in handy for quickly taking notes of things that still need to be done/ changed. i used to do this before but the notes were completely random and there was no real system to it. this ended up in loads of notes scattered allover the place …