Customer Reviews

Mixing & Mastering Tutorial

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Before I got this video I had read the Mixing Engineer's Handbook by Bobby Owsinski and Mastering Audio Bob Katz. Both of those books seem to be pretty well known and are standards the field. However, both of them are oriented towards hardware analog mixing. Now I guess you can argue that the principles of mixing and mastering are the same no matter what tools you're using. However, if you want to do mixing and mastering in software, that is the focus of Mixing & Mastering - Know It All! As the author says, the video is not about a particular software product. However, he does manage to use a lot of the best known products--Pro Tools, Cubase, and Sonar for mixing as well as Sound Forge, Audition, and Ozone for mastering. The course is organized in a framework that seems kind of simple at first. However, within that simple framework there is a lot of sophistication. For me one of the best examples was the use of dynamics. The example starts with creating a percussion submix and applying compression. Then it expands into showing how to do New York compression. The next step is to add a side chain. Finally, the CamelSpace plug-in is added to show just how wild you can make a simple drum mix. I thought I knew a fair amount about the subject before I bought the video, but I learned a lot.

This DVD would be good for anyone new to the art of mixing and mastering. In the mixing section, it gives a fairly good description of some of the techniques used. However, in the mastering section, it only focuses on describing plug-ins used in mastering. If you are looking for something on mastering, this is not for you. It seems as though they were advertising the plug-ins and forgot about describing techniques. But as I said, this is for anyone with no prior knowledge of the artform.