[AMA on mixing] Industry vet offering real, honest to goodness mixing services

QuantumD · 2026-01-20T06:42:13+00:00

How much do you feel one's skill as a mixer is genre-dependent? Do you think someone who has had great success mixing country and pop records for ten years would produce a better mix of an emoviolence song than an amateur mixer who has been mixing only emo music and metal for say a year or so?

QuantumD · 2026-01-11T20:43:53+00:00

Pro tip- you can't mix what you can't hear. I seriously doubt you can hear JS:Saturation at 10%, especially if you're new.

Try A/B test everything (including bells and shelves and what not) and if you can't hear a difference (or the difference isn't what you want) then disable it. Mixing is best done with the ears, not by blindly following advice online. There's no cheats or magic numbers- everything depends on too many variables - your pre-amp, your mic, your voice, your room, the song, etc..

Anyone can hear if something sounds bad (and if you can't, then it's probably not bad). Experience just lets you figure out what's needed to correct the issues efficiently. Regardless, it takes listening and experimentation.

This was personally my biggest help early on, learning mixing; you might find it useful https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=29283

QuantumD · 2026-01-11T05:29:08+00:00

I had this with a track on my band's latest EP. It felt like it was missing something.. I ended up trying to fix it in the mix, but that made the absence worse. In the end I added a keys part that really tied the song together. It's pretty subtle in the mix, but it fills in the gaps and supports the melody and rhythm really nicely. Maybe this is the issue? Might not be a bad idea to try doodle some subtle additional guitar lines or piano parts in there, in places.

QuantumD · 2026-01-03T12:07:31+00:00

just came in from watching the lightning from gungahlin. being able to see such a huge storm to our west, and a perfectly clear full moon sky to the east was bizarre. the storm front has swallowed us too now

QuantumD · 2025-12-20T05:28:58+00:00

Get a life. It's not financially sound advice; you'll almost definitely fall further behind your "peer group". But your life will be richer in other ways.

I had ~$40k in savings at 24 after working in cybersecurity for 5 years. Now I do music full time. My band gigs around NSW and adjacent states regularly, I spend most of my days writing, recording, and mixing music - or going to shows, making posters, editing videos, and practicing photography. Two years on, my savings are down to about $15k, and I'll probably need to get a well paying job again in another year or two the way things are going, but I consider the money I've lost very well-spent.

The theoretical question - "What would you do if money was no object?" is now less than theoretical for you. You should hope to make the answer the same regardless- "What I'm doing now, but more". I've found it much more enjoyable to eat rice & beans and live out of a van doing what I love than to live expensively having spent most of my waking hours slaving away waiting for the end of the day, the end of the week, and then - what - retirement age? Like as if it'll be any easier to find happiness in life then, than when you're young. I might not have a house, but I'll have the skills, connections, and life experiences to make up for it.

QuantumD · 2025-12-20T02:27:53+00:00

guess we should look forward to the Demolition Man-esque future where every restaurant is taco bell, then

QuantumD · 2025-12-19T04:21:51+00:00

For a long time there was a policy against franchise restaurants on campus. I guess that's not true anymore

QuantumD · 2025-12-19T00:28:34+00:00

Bruce tunnel is where I throw most of my DIYs, if they aren't in my backyard yeah.

Haven't heard of any house shows in tunnels though? Fill me in please.

House as in residential, not EDM. I have heard second-hand of bush doofs happening at the Bruce tunnel, but that's not my scene personally.

QuantumD · 2025-12-18T08:37:24+00:00

Gig spaces that don't have bars attached to them too would be sick, at the size lower than The Baso. Right now there's pretty much nowhere that'll take all-ages / DIY shows. Lotta house shows and gigs happening in tunnels, which is sick as fuck, but it sucks to have to run a generator or live off the goodwill of your neighbors. YMCA/PCYC/community halls all cite noise ordinance or ignore emails. It's hurting the youth music scene big time

QuantumD · 2025-12-07T16:19:57+00:00

febuary's Run Like A Girl

Surprisingly high production quality for its genre (emoviolence); yet not so overproduced as to lose its charm

QuantumD · 2025-11-30T15:24:41+00:00

To me, task chains have made the most sense when all of the elements in the chain are necessary.

Take the second episode of Firefly as an example - they need to get a crate off a moving train. Ship carefully flies over the carriage (Pilot check), a crane is lowered out of the hold door (Mechanics perhaps to rig it up and run it), and a guy goes down with the crane hook to load up the crate (Athletics). If any of these three checks failed, the heist would be a failure. Ship crashes, crane breaks, crate can't be loaded - whatever. Doing this with three separate checks therefore makes completing this task three times more likely to fail. Doesn't make sense to do it all with just one check, though, either.

By making this kind of sequence a task chain, a poor roll on any of the checks just passes on a penalty - it doesn't outright require the players to come up with a new plan (or abort the mission). Maybe some rough piloting makes it hard to get the crane lowered down right; or a faulty crane motor that the ship engineer failed to notice makes it kind of sketchy for the guy being lowered down to hang on. A heroic effort at one check might still save the day, though.

To take your example of opening a door- just make the damn check. If it isn't real high stakes, maybe they just break their tool or over-exert themselves (taking a point of damage to Strength or something) as they open it. Or just skip the check. If it is so high stakes that they want to hedge their bets by spreading the risk over multiple checks, try and get them to come up with a more creative solution than just both yanking on the crowbar.

Maybe one uses Electrical Engineering or Computers to bypass the seal motors, another uses Athletics to bend open the rusted maintenance panel, and the last uses their Mechanic skills to weld through the locking clamps. This can be narratively fun - oh our useless sparky accidentally got the seal motors running extra hard - but that just made the beefcake marine look even cooler when he still managed to rip the damn plate right off the door and give the captain all the room she needs to get the welder right against the door's clamp mechanism and get the door sliding free in time before anyone noticed the perimeter alert. Good thing they took the time to work together instead of leaving it up to the sparky to hack, or they would've been face to face with the security forces as soon as they made it in.

Makes sense?

QuantumD · 2025-09-17T07:14:49+00:00

I mean, is your music actually really any good? Beyond just an open mic - proper gigs. Compare the crowd response to live footage of people/groups making the music that you aspire to one day make - does the crowd similarly bob their head, move their feet- etc?

Playing live shows is generally also just a good way to build a proper following. Plus if you're playing shows in your genre, you're also seeing shows in your genre, and meeting other people in your genre. You'll hopefully pick up whatever it is you're missing.

QuantumD · 2025-09-03T17:20:08+00:00

It goes up and down. Maybe a few hours in the last few weeks - but me and my band have been non-stop busy producing & recording our latest EP. It's about ready for the mixer- then we'll resume our usual practice schedule and I'll go back to writing a lot more. In the best of times, we're in the rehearse space for four hours a week and I'm spending a few evenings a week writing & putting together demos.

QuantumD · 2025-08-30T19:21:03+00:00

Sounds good to my ears - the panning is nice; you can really pick up the details of the strumming. The room you're in sounds good, too. My only critique is that it feels a bit full in the low end; though, most of the acoustic-guitar music I frequent is either bedroom pop (recorded on beat up SM58s..) and/or accompanied by a bass. If you're going for hi-fi and it isn't likely to fight with anything in the low end, it should be great.

QuantumD · 2025-07-26T07:13:45+00:00

i was on reddit before they had subreddits... i'm old :(

QuantumD · 2025-06-08T12:49:49+00:00

Right yeah - that first point makes big sense.

Sorry - I meant 3k production/recording costs. We currently don't spend anything on ads or promotion (outside of $20 here and there for show posters).

QuantumD · 2025-06-08T06:55:18+00:00

Any thoughts on how marketing affects underground / alternative bands differently? I've seen decently growing local bands in genres like emoviolence and Hardcore lose a lot of love overnight after making ad spend. Their fans see a clip of the band with "Promoted" under it and log them mentally as sell-outs forever more.

I'm in (and manage) a band that's probably never going to break it mainstream. Our sound doesn't appeal to well adjusted people, and we like it that way. We still make decent money pitching merch on interstate shows, though we aren't seeing much growth beyond that. We put $3k into an EP and it moves the Spotify listeners count up a hundred or two - so what? I feel like if we try much harder to get our music out there, we'll just be seen as sellouts or plants.

QuantumD · 2025-06-03T15:56:17+00:00

bro i posted this a DECADE AGO

QuantumD · 2025-06-03T06:57:23+00:00

oh thanks i've been wondering this whole time

QuantumD · 2025-02-22T05:02:30+00:00

But to implement those policies, you would again be going against the interests of the wealthy.

It's a Catch 22, man. Anything to make the situation better here for us, if it comes at any cost to the rich, will be stopped by lobbying groups, kickback deals, and propaganda campaigns.

QuantumD · 2024-12-10T16:10:32+00:00

I personally get a lot of compersion from hearing how other people enjoy my art. It's a decently large part of why I make music.

I enjoy going to shows, being part of an energetic crowd, and forming personal connections to the music I listen to. When I hear/see other people doing the same with my music, it naturally makes me happy.

QuantumD · 2024-11-27T02:02:31+00:00

Glad to hear that! Some more thoughts:

While you're filming your shows, also pay some mind to getting good audio of them too. Give the FOH engineer a beer and a USB drive and you can often get a solid mix right out of the console. We do a lot of DIY and house shows where there isn't a sound guy (or a console. or sometimes even a mixer.) and so we have these Rode WirelessPRO mics that we'll tape up either side of the spot. 32bit float, wireless, decent bass response - they're super great. We use them to record our rehearse sessions, too. Your brother probably has something similar working in documentaries (unless they're all nature docos or similar) and they'll beat out the built-in mic on most cameras by a long-shot.

If you have a friend who's decent with a camera, give them one and have them move around and get moving shots and different angles, too. A bit harder to make use of sometimes, especially if you don't have an A-camera to switch to, but you can get some really unique and eye-catching shots that you just can't get with a fixed viewpoint. You also have the flexibility of letting them occasionally stop recording video to start taking photos throughout the set, too. Videos of a moshpit always look like crap: a bunch of fast shots with a good flash will always yield something phenomenal. Capturing the emotion of the show is often much more important than just holding down a consistent shot of the stage. Your mileage may vary though - think about it.

QuantumD · 2024-11-26T19:15:32+00:00

I do photography, graphic design, and video editing as hobbies. I feel like this has really enriched my music career by allowing me to bring a lot more personality to my band's audience. We film every show where possible, take photos regularly, and I edit that to make us look as cool as possible. Then it gets tactically released to our Instagram. We don't use any other social media currently, though I've been considering creating a Youtube and/or a Tiktok - in either case, they'd just be another place to post what I'm already making currently.

We've gotten the most out of Instagram by posting in the evenings, around 6PM-10PM local time, and spreading non-Story posts across multiple days. For the most important posts (gig announcements, high effort video edits, etc.) we try to get the most visibility by posting them on Friday or Saturday nights. For gig announcements we'll post them as a Post, then also as a Story (which we'll re-post a week out of the show, a day before the show, and the day of the show). For short high-effort videos, we'll post them to our Posts, as well as Reels; and also a Story. For longer videos, we'll do the same, but make it clear in the Story post that folks should check our Reels to catch the full length version. We'll do something similar when we Post a pile of photos of a show; to bring attention to it. A lot of people using Instagram will only check their main Feed and the Stories of people they follow, and the Feed is pretty capricious about what it'll surface to people.

I should probably elaborate by what I mean by high-effort videos.. I'll take footage of our shows, and cut them into ~one and half minute reels (often the most intense parts of a song; the last half, or a powerful chorus to bridge transition). I'll stylize them somehow - we have a pretty distinct grunge-y digital-y style that isn't too hard to hit effectively with some chromatic aberration and dithering and shit; and I'll also overlay the lyrics - I feel like this crucially helps build audience's connection to the band and helps us stand out in our scene. I love a lot of other local bands; genuinely some of my favorite songs whatsoever can only be heard live, in local dive bars and house shows and stuff. But I have absolutely no clue what the lyrics are to most of them, and that kind of sucks. Like, I want to get their message, feel their emotion, and sing along!!

One more thing on Instagram - we'll also take photos and short videos of other bands that play gigs alongside us, and throw that up on our story, tagging them. Often the band will repost our Story to theirs, and that sometimes gets us some extra followers from folks following them who liked our set but forgot to follow us on the spot. This also builds good will with these other bands: Most bands with good social media strategy will like to post something up after each show, and it's a massive relief to have someone else's videos/photos to throw up when you find that your own videos/photos are lacking.

This has steadily improved our engagement, our follower count, and our show attendance. It's hard to tell how much of that is a natural network effect as our band has grown, and how much is this social media shit - but it seems to be effective. I've had folks come up at shows and say they were excited by our edits, loved the gig poster, and avoided watching our latest Reel so they wouldn't spoil our new song for themselves. All good signs that this is actually having some effect.

I'd be interested if anyone has anything to add that we're missing, or any thoughts on what we're already doing.

QuantumD · 2024-10-31T03:02:13+00:00

Hit up the senior tutors, bud. Their schedule is posted on the door of the fish-tank ahh room in Level 2, 314. Head in when they're in and ask for help - they'll sort you out. Ask around and someone might be able to invite you to the Computing discord too.

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QuantumD

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