It has been a long while since I updated this page, but I thought I would add something I have been working on and share some things I have learnt. Feast or a famine, this is 3 blog posts in one!
Despite me gaining a Masters in Audio Production I am still new/inexperienced to a lot of things in audio production and I am trying to find time to develop the learning I did on my course.
In a way the MSc was a springboard for me into something I have always been interested in. As well as learning a lot of things about stuff I knew little about, I learnt a lot of things about things I knew nothing about.
One of my first modules I worked on was Audio Production which involved recording, mixing and mastering a song. Fortunately the song I worked on got lost in a hard drive accident. I don’t particularly have dreams of being a record producer; there are much more experienced and talented people out there than me doing it.
I do however enjoy learning as much as I can and I have been trying to at least up skill and develop in this field more as an interest than a career goal.
During my dinner breaks at work I scour the internet, YouTube and blogs finding things to read up on and try. During one such time I came across “In The Mix“; the page is run by Michael Wynn whose website you can find here.
I really like his teaching style and approach, even though I don’t use the DAW he uses in his videos what is really good is that not only is it transferable to your own software, you don’t have to fork out large sums of money for the latest or greatest plug-ins.
He uses free to download ones which in some cases have become some of my favourite ones to use (looking at you TDR NOVA).
Anyway back to the main point of this post, one of the techniques he demonstrates for mixing is the idea of top-down mixing. An approach I had not heard of but one that instantly made a lot of sense to me.
The idea of top down mixing is to look at the song as a whole not as individual parts so you would process all the main parts of the song (vocals, guitars, bass, drums etc.) into their respective busses before making adjustments on individual tracks where needed. In Michael’s video he runs through the set up, processes and edits he makes for a track. This is a topic that has been discussed in loads of posts online which I will add at the bottom of this post.
For me it just worked really well for getting my head around a mix, when working with multiple stems and tracks I always found it really daunting as someone inexperienced in this. Top down mixing just gave me a better understanding and approach to working on mixes.
I decided to give it a go, this is where Isolate/Create came in handy for me to practice this techniques.
Isolate/Create was brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic and the requirement to stay at home during government imposed lockdowns. I/C has a a number of audio resources from different bands for you to download and use to create new things, practice and do whatever you want. All they ask is you support the contributing artists and using the hashtag #isolatecreate when publishing your finished products.
I decided to have a go at mixing the Converge track “Aimless Arrow” using the top down approach (a ridiculous thing to do because well Kurt Ballou!) The stems provided were as you would expect the best quality and I had a lot of fun playing with this.
Hopefully I won’t neglect this blog again and can come back with some more stuff in the future. Comments, critiques and general chit chat always welcome.
Links and info from the blog:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIcCXe3iWo6lq-iWKV40Oug
https://www.isolatecreate.com/
Maddison AV 
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