Mixing, Mastering and music production is not a skill one can be able to master in a minute or day, its something that requires you to invest your mind, heart, soul and time. One of the mistakes most of the self taught mixing or mastering engineers do is focus their energy and time investing in YouTube videos or tutorials.
I don't wanna lie, YouTube videos are best when it comes to giving you a basic understanding of how things are done in the mixing and mastering field, but the truth is that everyone got his or her way of approaching things and focusing in YouTube videos alone will not solve anything. But if you take your time to do things your way by focusing in fusing your knowledge and all the techniques you have learnt watching videos, that alone can be one big achievement for a day.
Below are some tips in how to use an EQ mixing and mastering your track or music, this doesn't mean or guarantee you that after reading all that is below you will be a best mixing engineer, but if you take your time and put each and every process into practice, you will have a life time skill no body can take away from you.
Top 6 Amazing Tips for a Professional Mix
01 - Sub-Bass (20-60Hz)
The first area we’re going to focus on is sub-bass.
Everything below 60Hz is sub-bass, so generally you need a subwoofer or a good pair of headphones (open-back headphones, for example) to hear that.
You should be able to hear it a little bit if you’re on monitors or headphones. But if you’re listening on a laptop or a phone, there’s no way you will hear that.
02 - Bass (60-200Hz)
After that, we get into what I would call bass. For me, this is everything between 60 and 200 hertz.
In this area, we’ve got lots of bass guitar. Lots of the low-end vocals as well, because male vocals are going to have the fundamental below 200Hz in most cases.
03 - Low Mids (200-600Hz)
Next up, if you go from 200 up to 600 hertz, this is what I would call low mids, and this is a really important area for mixing.
Now, this area is crucial for home recording, because this is where you get a lot of buildup with guitars, vocals, even the top end of the bass guitar especially.
This is an area that’s really guilty for adding mud to a mix.
04 - Mids (600Hz-3kHz)
The human hearing focuses mostly on this frequency range…
So it’s crucial to get this range right. You want the main focus of the track (e.g. vocals) to have lots of room in this range.
Be aware that this is also where you can start to get into harshness and aggressive tones.
05 - Upper Mids (3-8kHz)
Then we’ve got upper mids between 3 and 8 kilohertz, and this is where things really start to get harsh. This is where we have brittleness a lot of the time.
It’s also an important range for clarity and aggression, especially in vocals.
06 - Highs (8kHz+)
After that we get to treble, or the highs. This is everything above 8 kilohertz. This is where we have air.
You could split this even further into 8-12kHz, and that’s what I would call treble, and then 12kHz+ is what I would call air.
But for now, we’re just going to leave this as the highs, and this is everything above 8kHz.
