
Is the kick too loud? Are the vocals too bright?
#Tonal balance control plugin and sonar full
Monitor the full mix, but try to listen to how the individual elements are balanced in the context of the other instruments. Now loop the chorus of the track you’re working on and hear how it compares to your existing songs by clicking the central Original/Reference button. It might sound simple, but the loudness of the kick, snare, vocals, synths, etc in the context of the whole mix is the foundation of consistency (and geat sounding mixes!).įire up an instance of the REFERENCE plugin by Mastering The Mix, load up your three of your best sounding previous releases, set the mode to ‘FREE’, and loop the choruses of your reference tracks by clicking and dragging on the waveform, then Control+Click on the loop to select it. Using your best sounding previous releases as reference tracks is a great way to set the balance between the various elements in your mix. Use Your Previous Releases As Reference Tracks This allows me to make subjectively good mixing decisions that I can trust. I use Sonarworks Reference 4 to give me a neutral listening experience in my studio in order to minimize the difference in sound between my various playback systems.

When you play the track in the car, the mix will feel weak.Įstablish a consistent playback environment when you’re making music and understand how your mix will translate when heard on different systems. If your monitors and studio space are bass-heavy, you might dial back the bass in your mix or master too much to compensate. You’ll experience your songs differently through monitors, through headphones, in the car, and in a club. Getting to know the quirks of your monitoring system is crucial to effective decision making. In this post, I’ll explain a bulletproof way of maintaining consistency between your releases. It’s great to have elements of variation in your productions, but glaring changes can throw your listener off. This can be particularly difficult when you’re using different recording spaces/equipment, different synth patches, different vocalists, etc. But, to achieve a distinctive sound that characterizes your productions, there needs to be a level of consistency. This is the moment where you can make a new fan fall in love with your sound. They get pulled in by one of your awesome songs and decide to check out more of your material. Picture a new fan who finds your music on Spotify.


#Tonal balance control plugin and sonar how to
Let’s let Tom explain how to take advantage of these powerful mixing tools. Over the years, I have built up a pretty effective arsenal of tools and methods to provide similar analysis, but Mastering the Mix has boiled these cumbersome methods down to a pair of ingenious plugins. MIXROOM compares individual tracks, subgroups, or stems to reference tracks to see how you may better treat elements inside your mix.

REFERENCE is a sophisticated plugin that allows you to compare your full mix to other reference mixes, comparing loudness, eq, and dynamics throughout the mix or in specific frequency bands. In this guest blog, Tom Frampton, from Mastering the Mix, explains two plugins that he has developed which assist you in maintaining consistency and analyzing your mixes, masters, and raw tracks. We never want a client to say “Your last mix was great, but this one doesn’t feel as good.” It may be easy to tell them that their previous production was better/different/whatever and this new mix came out great, despite their ‘challenged’ production, but we can do better! We all strive for not only great sounding mixes, but also consistency among our work.
