Mixing A Five-Piece Band. Part 1: Drums, bass and guitar

There’s no ‘right’ approach, but here Mark Cousins offers a few options to help you deal with common elements within a mix.

We’ve all been there at some point – you’ve 30 or 40 tracks of well recorded instrumentation, a killer vocal and enough plug-ins to fill a virtual rack twice your height, but how do you go about turning all these separate elements into a coherent, balanced music entity? Get the balance right, and you can easily transform the life and energy of a song far beyond the sum of its parts, as well as allowing the listener to hear your artistic vision in the clearest possible light. Top-flight mix engineers certainly know a thing or two about this most creative part of the ‘technical’ process of recording, but what are the steps you can take to produce a more professional-sounding mix?

This feature first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 36
Filed under General Features, Guitar Tech

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