The MOST Overrated Skills in Mixing

[@SonicScoop]

What do you think are the most overrated mixing skills and tips? Courses: ►🎚Mixing Breakthroughs: mixingbreakthroughs.com ►🎛Compression Breakthroughs: compressionbreakthroughs.com ►🎧 EQ Breakthroughs: EQBreakthroughs.com ►🔊Mastering Demystified: MasteringDemystified.com

[@sarpozdemiroglu]

Tip no 3 is gold. As a mixing engineer we are like doctors fixated on curing cancer on a patient rather than thinking about the overall health of the patient. The doctor feels successful when the patient is cured but the expanse of decreased overall health leading to death.

[@jloiben12]

The most overrated skill is “technical competence.” Knowing how to work an EQ or a reverb pales in comparison to having good tastes. You only need a fairly low minimum knowledge set of the technical side.

[@GeorgeAmodei21]

Great to hear this! Thx you 🎚🎧

[@SidBar0ne]

Grrreat Work JC...Thank You!

[@JorgeEgrejasFrancisco]

Thank you for your thoughts and great advice, Justin. It is always a pleasure and really useful to listen to you. It is wise and push us to reflect on our choices. In this video I was particularly impressed 😂 by the “mixes too impressive” overrated skill; I’ve never thought in that perspective, that making some tracks worse than what it is possible can make a song better. Great 👍🎶

[@Carlwatkins1984]

Yes, I saw Dan's video. With the very steep filters, you can get some bizarre side FX like big notches. The curves with parallel eq sometimes look a bit like a pultec curve. Everybody loves the pultec curves.

[@SonicScoop]

Yep, but I would only clarify that it’s not so much “big notches”… in practice, it is usually more like one modest bell filter cut right around the corner frequency. So, if you were looking to cut everything below 100hz with a steep slope, you might end up ALSO having a subtractive bell shaped filter at 100hz. But it’s not a steep “notch”, which suggests a complete elimination of that frequency. Rather, it’s usually much more subtle than that, often similar to making a simple cut at 100 Hz in the range of a few dB, depending on how steep the filter is, and how otherwise similar the two audio signals are. At least, that’s what I remember off the top of my head, but I’m pretty sure it’s right. Other filters like bells and shelfs were even less significant than that. (Granted, the effect could be more substantial if the two signals were otherwise identical in EQ, compression, saturation, effects and level, but that’s not how we do parallel processing in practice :-) Long story short, when you are processing in parallel, your low cut filters might cut even more lows than you were expecting, so you just have to adjust them accordingly by ear. Not really a big deal IMHO!

[@alban6101]

Yes !!! It is one of my best videoS. Surely ! And i have several of its, of course in some of my playlists, .... Great to fell where we are with our skills and needs to understand all these concepts ... Thanks !

[@jloiben12]

If everything is important than nothing is important. If everything is huge then nothing is huge. If everything is wide then nothing is wide. If everything is loud then nothing is loud

[@SonicScoop]

Exactly.

[@AngelAngelesIII]

Regarding reverb sends, it’s just most probably a DAW workflow problem. I find PT to be generally slow when it comes to workflow. Simple tasks need a lot of clicks. Compared to Studio One, putting a reverb sends is just as easy as putting it in the insert: just drag and drop the plugin to the send of a channel and S1 will create a bus for that plugin and send the channel to it at the same time. Also double clicking the send will open the first plugin of the bus that it’s being sent to so you can open the reverb directly from the channel that sends it. For that reason, I almost exclusively send all my reverbs except for some specific cases because I can do it just as quick if I would put the reverb as an insert.

[@mcadder]

Yes, PT got a really clunky interface. Since I changed to Reaper I've actually gotten much more productive and creative.

[@Anton-Levy]

I don’t think that 4 to 5 clicks will slow down your workflow

[@isaacnewtech]

I agree. I was watching that and feeling happy I'm in ableton and not Pro tools. I feel like ableton is very user friendly and easy. This looks pretty complicated and cluttered. Setting up a reverb send in ableton is very easy and very clear. I do it all the time

[@AngelAngelesIII]

@@Anton-Levy you don’t know until you do it everyday. Justin here thinks that making a bus is already overrated because he needs to click more than needed.

[@gparkerarkerdoo]

Great Overall Sweep (pun intended) with this video! As a singer songwriter doing my stuff DIY and genre hopping I’m diggin it ☮️💟 #godvious

[@EmperorKamikaze]

Overrated skills in mixing: getting your monitors perfect, hipassing too many sounds, and making it max loudness. Stopit.

[@Dekutard]

i hope YT fixes the audio so i can come back and listen

[@SonicScoop]

It seems fixed now. Please try refreshing and let me know if it’s good on your side!

[@Dekutard]

@@SonicScoopyes! i’ve never seen that happen. its good to go now. thanks.

[@isaacnewtech]

I am on tip nr. 1 and I am just happy I am not using pro tools, but ableton. Probably just because I'm used to it, PT is undoubtedly great software. But it looks so complicated and cluttered to me, with all this really small text. I could be wrong, but to me ableton just seems easier and more usable. I could set up a reverb aux in a lot less steps for sure, it would not at all feel like breaking my creative mode or my listening mode

[@SonicScoop]

The text size probably has more to do with my screen resolution while streaming. I find the fonts pretty comparable between Pro Tools and Ableton. There are pros and cons to both for sure. But a lot of it also comes down to familiarity. When I first started learning Ableton it was incredibly confusing. But once I got the hang of it, I found it just as easy as Pro Tools-smoother in some areas and clunkier in others. Regardless of the DAW, I still recommend organizing the effects, routing and session in advance if getting into creative mixing mode. It’s definitely a big help.

[@isaacnewtech]

@@SonicScoop And first and foremost, thank you for another great video!

[@शिव_सागर]

👌💛🙏

[@markphillips5398]

I honestly don't like templates, they feel constraining and keep me from coming at each song as its' own thing. Do stuff enough times and you don't have to think about it. YMMV.

[@Anton-Levy]

You can come to each song as its own thing, even with template. My template is just routing and one metering plugin

[@SonicScoop]

I find it’s the other way around: The more you have your technical infrastructure in place before you start, the more free you are to experiment creatively during the mix. Trying to play in a sandbox is a real drag if you have to build the sandbox while you’re playing. Better to build the sandbox first, then play around as creatively as you’d like, without constantly stopping to think about whether you have enough nails and boards to continue playing.

[@user-yk4gd1fl4z]

Nothing o we rated about correct monitoring setup squire.

[@thelinguistshow]

I’m experiencing the cutting in and out too; I’d certainly like to hear what you have to share

[@SonicScoop]

It may be a caching issue in your browser. If you try refreshing, clearing your cache or a different browser, it should work!

[@EmperorKamikaze]

Quantization (timing) and tuning are overrated and overused

[@andore8639]

Unless it’s a guitar, they usually sound like crap if not tuned properly lol

[@itsyoshman]

Is it just me or are cutting in and out ?

[@SonicScoop]

This appears to be a KZbin problem. My local recording is fine. I'll reach out to them right now.

[@SonicScoop]

Apologies, there were some glitches on the livestream on KZbin's end, but they are working on fixing it. If you fastforward on the video it should sync back up for the remainder of the episode.

[@liamhogquist6478]

The most overrated tool is compression

[@EmperorKamikaze]

You mean CLA? 🤡

[@liamhogquist6478]

@ maybe

[@zaphod-x]

Yeah, I hate when people use that.

[@liamhogquist6478]

@@zaphod-x yes

[@itsyoshman]

Might be my internet

[@SonicScoop]

KZbin messed up, but they are trying to fix it. Will follow up shortly!

[@itsyoshman]

Or are you cutting out

[@SonicScoop]

This was a glitch on KZbin's side. I'm asking them to fix it now.