Last time we talked about "one-minute mastering" and it was a very popular article. Either people don't have a lot of time on their hands, or they were looking for something that breaks mastering down into some simple steps.This month I wanted to give a quick and dirty one-minute mixing session. We'll have to keep it simple. But say you are an acoustic guitar player and singer and are just cutting some demos. You have your three tracks: 1 vocal and 2 mono left/right microphones on the acoustic guitar. You don't have much time but you want it to sound okay. Quick! Time is wasting! Do these steps!
Start playing the song.
Vocal:
1. Add a compressor to the insert channel of the vocal. Try 4:1 ratio and bring down the threshold until it starts to engage. There should be a make-up knob as well, so increase it to make the vocal nice and strong but without clipping the master fader (10 seconds)
2. EQ the vocal to drop out anything under 100 Hz, unless you are a low bass singer (This is called a high-pass filter). While you are there maybe boost just a little at 3 kHz to help the words pop out (10 seconds)
Guitar:
3. Create a bus or group track in your software (you may need to look that one up). Hard pan Left and Right the two guitar microphone tracks and route them into the new group track you created. Adjust the volume level of the group to sit just under the vocals. (15 seconds)
4. If the guitar is a little boomy use the EQ to take out some lower mids (250-400 Hz). That is usually the first place to cut. Boost at the very top end of the EQ 10 kHz + to add a little sparkle. (10 seconds)
Reverb:
5. Create a send effect or "effects channel" with a nice reverb - maybe a plate or a hall you like. (10 seconds)
6. Go to your mixer window and send a little of the vocal and a little of the guitar group to the reverb. (5 seconds)
You're finished! Export your one-minute masterpiece. Doing it in this amount of time will take some familiarity with your software, but it can be done and it's not a bad place to start. Here's a way to do it even faster the second and third time: Make a template out of your final mixed project by making a backup copy first and then using whatever "make template" selection your software has (it's a little different in each one so check the manual). Then you a have a pre-mixed, blank template you can record into. That's even quicker than one-minute!
