The 4 Fundamentals of a Good Mix (with Dan Worrall)

Thanks for having me Kyle, and I hope people find this useful.

The idea of pulling the sounds towards you, rather than just raising volume, is a useful concept I'll try to keep in my head

I think we'd all be interested in a complete, structured mixing/mastering course by Dan. Make it and we pay.

It took me about ten years to find out all of the info Dan gives in this video by myself. This video should be THE very first thing a person wanting to learn to mix watches. It doesn't bedazzle you with plug in features and things that are useless until you know what the fundamental things a mix should be trying to achieve are, and how to approach them. This video somehow condenses "what is a mix" into less than 30 mins. A job well done I say!

MY NOTES: BEDA: Balance - EQ - Dynamics -Ambience Most important factor of mixing = volume faders. Controls front-and-back depth. Common beginner mistakes: vocals & drums too quiet while bass too loud. EQ: corrects mistakes made while recording, shapes tone of part to your liking, controls balance of each frequency band of mix independently. Takes ear training and practice to get right. EQ helps prevent frequency masking. Instruments that poke out in the mix more = more emphasis. Dynamics: Macro: difference between loud vs quiet. Volume automation in the mix. Done throughout the arrangement in a storytelling way. Micro: high peak to average ratio where transients are very prominent. Main tool to control this is compression. Gives the listener the subliminal feeling of having drums pop in your face. Ambience: all the reverb and delay effects in the mix, especially the ones that are subliminal where you don't notice until it's missing.

20 minutes of Dan Worrall talking about mixing, doesn't get any better than that

At sound school they made us submit our first mix using only faders and eq (and panning which is also a fader). I feel as we as engineers advance with daws, vsts, production etc, we forget how powerful are these tools and how everything builds on top of them :)

I see Dan Worrall in the title, I click. It’s that simple.

This is single-handedly the most important mixing video I’ve watched in 4 years of making music. Thank you

Great video! These fundamentals don’t sit as top-of-mind for me as they should 😅 The latest “soundgoodizer” plugins on the other hand… (Wavesfactory has a new one out today and this video made me think twice about it lol)

VOLUMES: - Balance front-to-back depth based on the importance of each element at every stage of the song to direct the focus of the listener. EQ: - Can be used to clean and shape tones - Make sure FQ aren't masking eachother (esp. low end) - Have a Kick poke through the mix at 50Hz and 5kHz to sound huge while dipping the intermediate FQ a bit. Have the bass fundamental at 100Hz to hear it clearly - Each FQ range has a certain quality (warmth, boxy, precence, aggresive, air...). Poke the elements out where you need that quality to shine. - Train your ears to recognise different FQs COMPRESSION: - Macrodynamics: changes in volume at different parts of the song - Microdynamics: changes in volume within one element Ambience: - Our brain substracts the room to hear the sounds clearly - In modern pop the lead vocal sounds dry but it still has early reflections

I felt compelled to respond by two personal experiences. First, as an engineer at MCI 1975-76, I worked on three custom consoles - JH500 series - that we built for Atlantic Records’ recording studios in NYC for which inverted faders were specified. It wasn’t nearly as simple as we hoped as the faders mounting points did not permit a simple flip. Instead the fader’s mechanical mounting was retained but the resistive track element inside was inverted. Even that required some drilling and some amount of time to confirm. Second, I enjoyed a friendship with Tom Dowd and later his wonderful daughter, Dana, who generously shared her experiences with Dad. Tom had an office right at the front door of Criteria Studios, just 10 steps from Studio D where he made a home for awhile. I grew to know him just from walking through the front door, as he seemed to prefer the social construct over any quiet space and was a great conversationalist. That is very much missed. Tom and I did a remote recording for an artist in which we both shared an interest. He produced, I engineered; the irony did not escape me. He was the perfect collaborator in a musical project, with a keen ear, an open mind, and an always ready good idea. I wish we could have done more. It seems everyone I still regularly see from those days has a beautiful story to relate about Tom. That, more than anything else, is a legacy I want to leave when it’s time for me.

Great video as usual from Dan Worrall! By far the best audio teacher on YouTube. No name dropping, deep philosophical 'get in the head' of an engineer reasoning, examples to show benefits, reasons WHY things are helpful and HOW they can be used, etc. No one compares. And best of all, no name dropping and filling up time with bs and beating around the bush.

I’m a simple producer, I see Daddy Dan, I click 🤷‍♂️ 😅

You got to respect a man who won the loudness war ;) =] In all seriousness, I've come to define mixing as "bringing together the separate elements in order to form a cohesive whole". You have a solid composition/song, a solid arrangement, and a solid set of recordings, then the mixing is really about making sure they "get along together". If you can achieve this with just the faders and pan pots, you are most of the way there. Additional processing - especially EQ and compression - should be used either to address technical issues (frequency masking, addressing tonal balance) or for creative purposes.

Great video. Love your channel and love for the recording arts.

this is actually the best introduction to mixing I have ever seen, accessible, clear, precise and exhaustive. That's very hard to do with a subject as dispersive as mixing. Worrall is great.

After so many years of mixing by ear and playing with so many different plug ins, I’ve found that doing the least possible gives the best results. Just having a solid sound to start with and small adjustments go such a long way

I tend to be quite skeptical of youtube audio people, but featuring Dan Worrall on this channel may have been the biggest thing you could do to persuade me of your legitimacy. I've seen a lot of people be like "tips and tricks won't help you, you just need this mindset" and while I definitely agree that tips and tricks won't help if you've got the wrong mindset (and also a great deal of tips and tricks videos are useless), Dan's tips and tricks have probably done more for my mixes than any of those guys' videos except for the one that outlined the principles in this video.

When Dan speaks - you better listen. Looking forward to this!