I’m not what you might call a Rennaissance Man, but I do a great number of different things within music creation, probably to the point of trying to do too much. But one thing I’ve always left to the professionals is mixing – the final, crucial step in the process.
Recently, though, I’ve been interested in dipping my toes into the art of mixing songs, mainly so that I can become better at doing all the production aspects that happen before the mix. Understanding what kinds of sounds are going to work in a mix will inform the kinds of sounds you capture in the production stage, so I want to get just a little bit of the perspective that comes with learning that. So to that end, I’ve started to learn some mixing techniques here and there, one of which my friend and musical conspirator Alex Nasla was kind enough to show me – gating drums.
This is actually something I have done before, but in a totally different and way more labor-intensive way. Alex showed me a cool new way using the new AixDSP Multi-Band Gate plugin, which will save me hours and tons of annoyance. You don’t need that specific plugin to gate drums, the basic principles you’ll learn in the video above apply to pretty much any gate, but I was pretty impressed.
You can learn this technique and others in Alex’s complete mixing and mastering course that includes multitracks for a full metal album and everything you need to learn how to take an album from start to finish – I’m gonna be spending some time with it to hone my skills, you should too!
