[MUSIC] So once you've completely produced your track, it's time to start getting some balance and focus on mixing. 80% of your mix is with volume and panning. So that's usually where we start to get a nice balance that showcases all of your parts and all of your instruments. So we have the track that we started working on in earlier lessons. And everything that we've added including audio and software instruments, has been brought to unity, which is basically zero on all the faders. All of the pan pots, or left to right, are also going to be brought to unity, so everything is center. If we play back the mix when it's like this. [MUSIC] Not only does it sound unbalanced, but it's also peaking on your master fader. And when something is peaking, it brings up these little red dots at the top of the meters. And what that does is it creates digital distortion, and that's going to make your mixes sound crunchy and not as clear. You definitely don't want to see that on any of your tracks, so if that's happening, we need to re-address the balance of everything. To get rid of the red dots, you just click them and then you start building a balance. The way that I start doing that is I start with the kick drum and then I work my way through the mix. So I'll solo the kick first, and then start adding the other parts as I go. Building a balance as I build the arrangement around the kick drum. So if I solo my kick drum first I'm going to go back to my edit window. And I'm just going to click and drag with my multi tool in the timeline to create a loop playback. In order to activate a loop playback, right-click on your play button and choose Loop. That's going to loop that section over and over again so we can start building the arrangement and we don't have to start and stop a bunch of times. Cmd or Ctrl+= will bring you back to your mix window, and this is usually where I do my balance. A good way to start this is to solo it, and turn it down. This is going to avoid any sort of peaking on the master fader, and it's going to allow us to actually hear how out of balance some of the instruments are based on our now quieter kick drum. So let's start balancing it. [MUSIC] Just needs to be a little bit louder. [MUSIC] So all I've done there is I started just with the kick drum and soloed my way along to make sure that everything sounds balanced in comparison with the other. For some of the instruments that you might not hear when you have the loop playback on, just go back into your timeline and go to a spot where they do come in. For example, my arp, or arpeggiator, wasn't heard in the loop that I selected. So, I'm just going to find it, press play, and then adjust it accordingly. [MUSIC] I also didn't include those additions that we did with the audio and the audio section from last lesson so I'm going to go back into my timeline, find them, and then adjust them accordingly. [MUSIC] And this is going to bring us most of the balance that we need in our mix. A good rule for this type of music is that you want your kick drum and your snare to be really, really present. And also your vocals should always be heard above the rest of the mix. So make sure that you get that balance, and then we can move on to panning. Once everything has been soloed, a good short cut to get rid of all the solos is to Option or Alt-click on one of them. And it will get rid of all of them. Now we can move on to panning. And when we use the pan pots, we want to take advantage of left to right as much as we can. What that does is fill out the mix and it creates a better balance with the rest of your instruments. So, in order to demonstrate what this sounds like, I have all of my backing vocals panned center which means the left and right speaker are getting the same amount of signal. Put some headphones on and listen to this so you can hear what they sound like all center and then you'll hear what it sounds like as we pan them out. Here are the backing vocals panned center. [MUSIC] So instead of just keeping them all center, I'm actually going to pan them out left and right and put them in different places in the stereo spectrum. Starting with the first one, I'm going to pan it all the way to the left. And the second vocal I'm going to pan all the way to the right to balance it out. The next ones I'm going to put somewhere in between all the way left and center and all the way right and center. This fifth backing vocal is actually doing the exact same thing as three and four. So to balance those out, I'm going to keep that one center. The last two, which are six and seven, these are going to be the higher backing vocals that you hear at the intro. And I'm going to bring those in a little bit closer and again keep that balance. So we have two of them 100% left and right, two that are half way between center and left and right, one that is completely center. And then, two that are really close to center, but just a little bit off set. Let's listen to hear what that sounds like with the headphones on. [MUSIC] And that definitely takes up more of the stereo field and just sounds so much better when the whole mix is together, so let's listen to that. [MUSIC] As a general rule, you always want to keep your lead vocals center, your bass center, and your kick and your snare center. You can experiment with any combination of left and right with your other instruments. But those are the big ones you really want to keep in the middle to keep in the focus. [MUSIC]
