How to Mix a Demo Tape

Video Transcript

"Hey! My name is Jerimae Yoder and I am with Expert Village. So you have recorded all of your instruments and you've got them at a place and your vocals and you've got them at a place where you are pretty comfortable with the input that you've gotten from your vocals or from your instruments. You have a bunch of tracks now that are either in your hard disc recorder or in your software. The next step is to mix those down and to get them at levels where they are sounding all good together. Generally what I start with our guitar and drums. One of the other things that you want to have obviously in recording is to have a good pair of headphones. A good pair of Sony headphones or something where you can get a really good feel what that sounding like in your recording device but not only that when you are mixing down, you really don't want to mix down or master with just headphones, you want to have a decent pair of speakers to actually hear what you are doing. I have these little pair of Edirol that do just fine and I also get a great base sound out of them so I have to kind of compensate for that knowing I'm not going to get a great base sound but I had a couple of hundred bucks and I got these and they worked just fine. So you can find a decent pair of referenced monitors at your local guitar store, your local pro-audio store. Sometimes what can happen in drum recording is one of the drums is way more predominant than the other drums. You want to make sure that all the sounds when you come through each specific instrument is about the same. You know if you have a song and you want the snare to come out, you are going to have to turn the other instruments down a little bit to get that snare to pop out or maybe use a little EQ on that snare to really bring out that crack or the pop you want from the snare. Also, you want to get your vocals up front. So after you have mixed down your drums, after you have mixed down your guitars at the tone that you want from your guitar and the drums and they are sounding good together. Put in your vocals, always bring the vocals a little bit higher than you should. As a guitar player, we always want to have our guitars hear; the number one thing to hear. We always want to have those things way hot in the mix but the truth is what people want to hear are the vocals. "