Pro Tools Fast Start — Chapter 6: Mixing Fundamentals

[Music] hi everyone it's tj from avid and welcome back to the final section of pro tools fast start now up until now we've created a pretty cool track but today we're going to talk about mixing now here's a little disclaimer for you before we start mixing is a massive topic you could spend years studying mixing and still only scratch the surface of what is possible so unfortunately we can't learn to mix start to finish in the short time that we have today but what i can do is give you all the tools that you need

on your mixing journey in pro tools or at least the tools to get you started so let's get into pro tools and let's talk about some of the things that pro tools offers as you start to learn how to mix your music so when you're setting up a mix for your song a good place to start is in a section of your song where all the instruments are playing this way you can hear how everything sits in the mix together so for our purposes today i'm going to select this chorus right here all of our

instruments are playing my vocals are in and this part is going to loop over and over again and give us a really solid foundation on where we start adjusting things in our mix everything is playing at once let's hear what this sounds like [Music] awesome now let's start adjusting things in our mix up until this point we have been working in our edit window in pro tools but there's another window that you do need to know about and that is the mix window we can access our mix window by clicking on window here and going

down to mix or there's a key command that's really important that you pick up it's command equals or control equals if you're on a windows machine and that toggles back and forth between our mix window and our edit window now in our mix window the most obvious thing that you're probably going to see are these faders now the faders are somewhat self-explanatory by clicking and dragging you can move volumes up or down you can do this in real time as your track is playing or while the track is paused let's take a second to listen

to the mix in our chorus and see if there are any levels that we want to adjust faders on [Music] so to my ear the vocal octave part or the backup vocal part is a little loud it's kind of competing with the main vocal simple i just click here and drag my fader down i can even do it while i listen to the track to find the proper place for it [Music] i like that right there it's a small difference it's subtle but working together changing these faders will make a huge difference in your track

now the next thing that you might notice in our mix window are these knobs above our faders these are pan knobs now what panning does is it takes your instrument and it moves it either to the left or to the right in our stereo field when you're listening to a stereo mix and everything is coming at you right in the center it can sound a little congested it can be a little clogged therefore we can use panning to just give things some space and really widen out our stereo fields let me show you what that

sounds like when i move my kalimba track all the way to the left or all the way to the right [Music] you can hear how my track moves from the left and to the right and i can use pans to kind of arrange things in my stereo field let me keep my kalimba panned to the right and i'm gonna also come over here and pan my guitar to the left to give us some more space in our mix let's hear what that sounds like [Music] solo'd it's an even more dramatic difference you can hear how

they're really spaced out now that brings us to the next thing in our mix window that we can take advantage of solo and mute this s button right here stands for solo and the m right here stands for mute i can solo multiple tracks at a time to play things in group to hear how they're sitting together or i can mute tracks to pull things out of our mix and listen without them let's hear what our track sounds like without guitar [Music] another way to quickly access the solo or mute function is by clicking on

your track and pressing shift m or shift s now let's talk a little bit about eqs and compressors you may have heard about these before and they are extremely important when it comes to mixing we're going to start with a compressor i'm going to show you how it works so let's solo our vocal track and use this as an example of what a compressor does now our vocalist was very dynamic awesome singer i loved how some parts were quieter some parts were louder to give energy or to build suspense but sometimes in your mix if

something is a little too quiet or a little too loud you can lose it or it can overpower that's where a compressor comes in handy now compressors are complicated and they do a lot but simply put a compressor really squeezes your audio signal so that the quieter parts get a little louder the louder parts get a little quieter and everything is a little more consistent let's hear what it does on our vocal track i can add a compressor by clicking our insert here going to plug-in going to dynamics and adding this compressor right here that

comes with pro tools and again i'm going to use a preset this time i'm going to use vocal comp so here's what our vocal sounds like with a compressor on i wanna know if it's and here's what it sounds like with the compressor off i wanna know if it's grooving baby now that's again a really subtle difference but that's what mixing is it's a lot of very small very subtle differences that add up to a big change in your track so compressors are going to be your best friend when you're mixing you're going to use

them a lot and they're very very powerful i'm going to un-bypass this compressor because i like the way that it sounds on our vocal and i'm going to leave it right there now when we recorded our vocal track we bust it to our reverb send and if we want to add reverb to any of our other instruments we don't have to set up another send and another bus and we don't have to add another reverb plugin directly to the track we can actually bust them to that very same reverb send that way we can bust

as many things as we want and pro tools will still only have to run one reverb plug-in in that send so for example let's say that we want to add some reverb to our electric piano let's un-solo our vocals and let's solo our electric piano and here's what it sounds like right now [Music] now i'm going to click on our reverb send here i'm going to play our electric piano and i'm going to move the fader up so you can hear what it sounds like as i send more and more to our reaver [Music] now

again we can send as many things we want to this reverb plugin and it's a really really nice thing for our cpu because it doesn't have to run reverbs on every track let's move on to the next topic here which is our mix bus now our mix bus track is right here and if you're wondering what it does essentially all of our audio in our entire session is running into this mix bus and what we're hearing out of our speakers back to us is all of our tracks combined coming through the mix bus everything has

an in and everything has an out and right now all of our tracks as you can see are running to our mix bus you'll hear what i'm talking about if i play our track and move my mix bus fader up or down [Music] you can hear how what i do affects our entire song i'm going to put our fader back to zero by holding option and clicking to bring it back to zero and if you want to make big macro changes to your track as a whole you can do that by adding plugins to your

mix bus now you don't want to over depend on your mix bus your mix should sound pretty good without a ton of plug-ins on your mixbus but you can change things all at once utilizing the mixbus let me show you how i do that with eq now in this template there's already this channel strip plugin on our mixbus and essentially the channel strip plugin is an eq and a compressor combined let me play our track and i'm going to manipulate the eq and you can hear what it does [Music] now those are really big really

dramatic changes you probably don't want to do that to your actual mix but you get the point an eq helps us to boost or cut certain frequencies that may be problematic in your mix they might not be pronounced enough and we can really fine-tune and sculpt our sound there's so much to know about eqs and you're going to find a lot on your journey that has to do with eq'ing and mixing but for now that's the basics of how an eq works and it can be very helpful on our mix bus i'm going to zero

out our eq again by holding option and clicking to bring things back to where they were close out of here command equals to get back to our edit window and that brings us to the last mixing tool that i'm going to show you today that is automation so we've set our levels we've moved faders we've moved pan knobs we've added plugins reverbs eq compressor but sometimes we want those things to change we want those values to change as a song plays sometimes you want certain parts to be quieter or certain parts to be louder more

compressed less compressed more reverb less reverb now we can do that using automation and only editing specific parts if i play our track from the beginning of the chorus and let's say a part of this vocal octave track is a little too loud for my taste say about right here [Music] if i want to edit that phrase without changing anything else in our track because everything else is right where i want it i can do that with automation so first what i'm going to do is i'm going to come over to our vocal octave track

and where it says waveform on our track view selector i'm going to click and change over to volume now we see this little line appear and this shows us where the volume is at for this track throughout our song and if i want to automate or change a particular part i simply click and drag to highlight where i want to change with my cursor i utilize my smart tool by moving my mouse up to the top of the clip and getting this icon clicking and dragging down now let me back up to the beginning of

our chorus and i'll show you what our fader does when our automation is in play [Music] you can see that our vocal octave fader jumped down and then jumped back up when it was time for it to come back in therefore just minimizing that little tiny part that i thought was too loud automation is extremely powerful and it's not just volume you can automate a whole host of things in pro tools so that's going to be a big tool on your mixing journey as well now the last thing i'm going to touch on the thing

that i want to leave you with is to watch out for peaking on your mix bus just like when we plug instruments into our audio interface and turn our gain up and down sometimes if we get a little too crazy with plugins or faders our whole track can start to get a little too loud and our mix bus peaks meaning it comes out of that green area and starts hitting the yellow and red and we encounter peaking on our mix bus so keep a close eye on that make sure that you have a healthy consistent

level throughout your track and that you're nowhere close to peaking as you change values parameters and volumes and with that we have concluded our pro tools fast start series you now have all the tools you need to go ahead and start making your own music and pro tools and we certainly look forward to hearing your next big hit thank you so so much for spending time with us we know you'll have so much fun in your journey with pro tools and you'll be so creative we can't wait to hear what you do thanks again for

hanging out with us we can't wait to see you in the next video series you