Learn about the music production process—including recording, editing, and mixing—and the tools available to you to create contemporary music on your computer. With the recent introduction of high-quality-low-cost software and hardware, the tools of music production are now available to the masses. Albums are made in bedrooms as well as studios. On the surface this is liberating. Anyone can make an album for the low cost of a couple pieces of gear and a software package. But, if you dig deeper, you will find that it is not so easy. Producing music requires knowledge, dedication, and creativity. Knowledge is where this course comes in. No matter what kind of music you are making, there is a large set of tools that you will need to use. Each lesson of this course will demonstrate a different set of music production tools, loosely following along the music production process of recording, editing, and mixing. We will start with some background on the nature of sound and how we perceive it. We will then examine the components necessary to record audio into a computer, so that you understand the devices that sound must travel through in a music production process. Once recorded, sound must be organized along a timeline, a process known as editing. It allows us to give the impression of perfect performances and create many of the sounds we hear in contemporary music. The contemporary editing tool is the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), a piece of software that stores and organizes all the assets of a musical project. We will focus on the editing tools that are essential in contemporary music production and that all DAWs provide. After editing, sounds must be combined or mixed together, so we look to the mixing board—a very creative place if you know how to use it. We will explore the basic functionality of both hardware and software mixing boards, including volume, pan, mute, solo, busses, inserts, sends, and submixes. The mixing process, however, includes more tools than the mixing board provides on its own. Sound must also be processed, modified from its recorded state to fit the context of the music. We will look at compression, equalization, and delay, and examine the many audio effects that are offshoots of these devices and how they are used in a musical context. In the end, the music production process relies on your creativity. Creativity is a product of the mind and will stay there, unexpressed, until the right tools are used in the right way to share it with the world. If you have an idea in your head, it will take numerous steps, each with an important tool, to reach your audience. You bring the dedication and creativity, and this course will bring you the knowledge to make that happen.
The Channel Strip
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From the course by Berklee College of Music
The Technology of Music Production
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From the lesson
The Mixer
We will explore the basic functionality of both hardware and software mixing boards, including volume, pan, mute, solo, busses, inserts, sends, and submixes.
Meet the Instructors
Loudon StearnsAssistant Professor
Contemporary Writing & Production
When you first look at a mixing board it can be quite intimidating.
So many knobs, and buttons, and faders. But the truth is, it's modular.
And if you learn one channel strip, it just repeats over and over again.
So the goal of this lesson is to go down one channel strip on a small mixing
board. And then we'll translate that knowledge
into the DAW. Where it gets a little more complicated.
But really, it's based on the same idea. So when we look at a channel strip and
you see that the mixing board is based in a, a set of vertical strips, when you
look at a channel strip, the general idea is sound moves from the top to the
bottom. In that we have our input section in the
very top, and we have the output section in the very bottom with our fader.
Now, it's not exactly that way, though. And that's the problem is that we, we get
that concept, and we just assume it's right.
But there are some places where the signal flow isn't quite top to bottom.
We'll talk about them as we get there. So, in a mixing board, at the very top of
the channel strip you have your input section.
And this is very much like what we saw in the audio interface.
We have an XLR input for mic input, and we have a line input for a line level
source. And, luckily on this mixing board, it
does say that it's balanced or unbalanced.
So it could take a TRS or a TS cable. Following that, we have our input trim
control. And this is going to be our input level.
Now you're not going to see this in most DAW's, because in most DAW's, the sound
is already at line level when it gets there.
But a mixing board like this starts with a microphone preamp, which is this
section right here. And we can use this to set levels, just
like you do on your audio interface when recording.
After the mic pre section, we have another section of the mixing board we
can't see from the top, and that's the insert section.
And the insert section allows us to add external devices into the signal flow, so
we might want to use this mike pre to bring the level up to line level, then
send the signal out of the device to another effect like a compressor EQ, and
then bring it back into the channel strip.
To do this, we use a special kind of cable called an insert cable.
And though we're seeing three things, this is actually showing one side and the
other side of the cable. In that, the first side of the cable is a
TRS cable. which we saw earlier was a tip, ring, and
sleeve cable. And this plugs into the mixing board in
the back, into the insert section. The sound goes out one side of the cable,
and comes back in on another. So it's like you have the TRS that splits
out in the two TS's. And it's designed to create kind of a
loop that can go out of your computer, or, I'm sorry, out of the mixer into a
device and then back in, effectively allowing you to insert a third barty, a
third party piece of gear, like a compressor EQ, into the mixing board.
And we'll see inserts will play a major role within our DAW later as well.
After the insert, we move onto this series of knobs.
Going down we see the aux sends. Now this is one of those places where
it's kind of out of order. In that these aux sends aren't
necessarily here. But an aux send is a separate output for
the track. We typically think of a track having an
output on the very bottom. Maybe going to your headphones.
But very often, you'd like a track to go to two places.
And the aux sends, which stands for auxiliary sends, or additional sends,
allow you to route a track to more than one place.
And if you look at a row of aux sends, it functions kind of like a secondary mix.
In that we have one mix, that's the faders at the bottom.
But another mix, that's the row of aux sends.
And another mix, that's the second row of aux sends.
Very useful, and we'll look later in this week, at a couple different uses for
auxilliary sends. On this mixing board we have an EQ
section next, which allows us some general, kind of spectral manipulation of
the track. Now this does not always exist on a DAW
mixing board, in that a DAW mixing board would rely on inserts for all of those
sorts of controls. After that we have a pan knob, and again,
this is a place where the mixing board top to bottom signal flow is a little bit
out of order, and that the pan knob is actually coming after the fader, but
doesn't really matter. And the pan knob, all it really does is
change the level between the two channels.
So what we have here is actually a mono channel strip.
In that there's a single input to the channel strip, but the output of the
channel strip is stereo. And that's very common and really is
anytime you have a mono-track, the input is mono but the output will always be
stereo. And all this pan knob is doing is
controlling the relative levels. If I pan it to the right we're going to,
we're going to hear the sound out of the right speaker, and not hear it in the
left speaker at all. If I pan it to the left, we'll hear it
out of the left speaker, and not in the right speaker at all.
So all it's really doing is adjusting two levels.
It's as if you had two faders, one for the right channel and one for the left.
Before we go on I'd like to talk a little bit more about panning.
So we've looked at it on a mono channel strip, but panning becomes much more
complicated on a stereo channel strip which is what you have in the DAW often.
And the thing to remember about a pan knob is it doesn't take information from
one side and move it to the other side. All it does is reduce two levels.
So if you have a track that's already stereo and you pan to the right it's
never going to take the left information and move it to the right.
It'll just reduce the left side or reduce the information that's in the left hand
side. We'll talk about that a little more
later. After the pan knob, we have our mute
buttons, which just turn off the sound of that track.
and then, our solo, which isolates that track by itself, muting all the other
tracks. Now, this is where your DAW might
function a little different from someone else's in that how the solo buttons
react. Sometimes, in a DAW, you turn one solo
button on and all the others automatically turn off.
And some DAW's are like this mixing board in which you can have multiple solo
buttons selected at once kind of creating a you know, just a set of mutes for the
mixing board. So it's something you might want to
investigate in your DAW and just see exactly how those solo buttons work.
After the solo buttons, we really have the most important part of our mixing
board, which is our volume faders, our main, our main faders.
And these on an analog mixing board will often have a U or unity gain section
which will not amplify or attenuate the signal.
It's as if the, what's coming in to it is going out of it.
And again, we want to keep things at unity kind of as much as possible.
Now, we'll see that this channel strip repeats over and over.
It's the same thing so all the things we just learned on that channel strip apply
all the way across the mixing board, and you have a set of faders that really does
create your, your whole mix. That set of faders, gets combined the
output of all those tracks get combined on our master bus, which is right here.
Now the idea of a bus is hugely important, and we're going to explore
that more throughout the DAW. But we have our main master bus.
Right here. and you really can call this our master
section in the, in the DAW it would be the master fader track would supply most
of the functionality of this section. luckily we have a row of LED's above this
which will give us our level setting feedback, in that, as I'm setting the
trim for all my tracks, I can set them based on this, and I can also see the
level of the entire mix. And again, remember to keep things in the
green, peaking in the yellow, and never touching the red.
Right? Red means stop.
It should be pretty self-explanatory there.
All right. Now that we, now that we've seen what a
mixing board looks like in the analog domain, in the real world here, we're
going to start taking this information and applying it into the DAW.
It's largely the same, but there are some differences.
Now we'll move into our DAW, and start examining a channels trip there.
And just figure out the main components of a channels trip, like we did in the
analog domain. We'll now try to apply that information
into your DAW. I'd like you to have your piece of
software open and running alongside this video, so you can find these pieces and
kind of follow along in your piece of software.
The first thing we need to do is locate the track inputs and outputs or the
channel strip's inputs and outputs. You'll, we largely configure our signal
flow by choosing drop-down menus. We'll choose what the track is listening
to or where it's getting its signal from and where the signal is going to.
On the same step, I'd like you to locate the track name.
Can you name a track and how do we see it here in your DAW?
The next thing we want to be aware of is where can a track send its information
to? So in that case, we'll look at the track
outputs. Now typically there are two possible
kinds of outputs. We can route the sound from the track,
down to hardware outputs, so we can hear them in our headphones or on our main
speakers, or we could route sounds. Up to buses.
And a bus is a place to, kind of collect and route sound within the computer, and
we'll be talking more about that during this week.
The next thing we want to consider is the direction of the signal flow.
So we can see that the sound will go out outputs, and will enter, through, inputs.
We want to start really considering kind of getting a mental model of the
mixing board, and how the signal is flowing through it, even though we don't
have cables to plug in like we do in the analog domain.
The next thing we'll find in our channel strip are going to be the inserts.
And the inserts are a collection of places that we can add effects, like
gates, compressors, EQ's, that sort of thing.
The next thing we'll find in our signal flow are our sends, and this is going to
be the tricky part of the signal flow in that any particular send can exist in two
places, before the fader or after the fader pre-fader or post fader, and we'll
talk about that in great detail this week.
We just want to know that we have a send section in our mixing board.
It will always have a send destination, where we're sending that information to.
That will usually be a bus or hardware output.
We'll have a send level how much signal is going to that output, and usually
there'll be a button for pre or post, which controls where that send lives
inside of the signal flow. From there, you're going to have your
volume and pan. Your pan knob controls the output of the
signal in the left or the right channel, and the volume controls the main output
volume of the channel. That is the basic signal flow through
DAW. I hope you were able to find all these
individual components in your DAW. If you weren't able to find every one of
these specifics in your piece of software, I would suggest moving to the
forums, or doing some searching going through the manual.
Locating all these pieces you'll need to know how to manipulate these parts of the
channel strip in your DAW.
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