Mixing Demystified

Does the mixing process seem like a 'dark art'? Does it seem overwhelming? Or, if you're already a competent recording engineer or mixer, are you looking for some user friendly resources to use with your students to help them learn how to mix?

This high school classrom resoruce might be just what you're looking for.

Duncan Ferguson has over 20 years of experience teaching mixing to students and his classes regularly create their own albums. Check out their playlist of original compositions on Spotify. And if you like what you hear, this resource will help your students produce music to the same level!

Topics covered:

• Setting up a DAW
• Balancing tracks using a reference track
• Equalisation
• Compression
• Reverb & Delay
• When to use 'bus' and 'aux' sends
• Different approaches to mixing such as 'top down' mixing
• Mixing with a 'live' mixing desk.

Each chapter in the book has a demonstration video, as well student tasks and revision exercises to 'make it stick'. Included are multi-track audio files of a high school band recording at St Andrew's College.

All the mixing demonstrations are made using Reaper. This is software that works on Mac & Windows, and students can download and start using instantly without the need for serial numbers or codes. Therefore, this resource works in a BYOD or school computer lab scenario. However, all the mix concepts are generic and not specific to Reaper, so you are able to use other DAW's such as Logic, Ableton Live, Studio One, Cubase, FL Studio and Pro Tools.

This resource is most suitable for senior high school students, but more advanced junior students are also able to use it.

The book is supplied as a digital pdf for you to pass on to students via your school's 'intranet' or cloud system such as OneNote, Teams, Google Classroom, etc. All the videos are supplied as YouTube links. This means the resource is perfect for a 'Flipped Classroom' scenario, lockdown learning or for students to catch up on the work if they are away from class due to sickness or other reasons.

After completing this course of work students will have all the skills and knowledge to mix their own compositions and band recordings to a really high level!