Music 1770: Intro to Music Technology

Introduction to Mixing

in-class files

You Won’t See Me (MIDI)
You Won’t See Me (original recording)

Step 1: Overview

1. Read this one-page overview of the mixing process.

2. (optional but highly recommended!)
For a more thorough intro to mixing, this primer published by iZotope is a great place to start. It is well organized with a good balance of concepts/definitions and practical examples.

They want you to buy their mixing plug-ins, but they are polite and unobtrusive about it, and the information applies whatever products you use. If you feel experienced in some areas but have questions about a specific topic like EQ or compression, you can jump to the relevant section.

Step 2: Tutorial

Work through this Logic mixing tutorial.

Here is the Logic demo file for the tutorial. (856 MB, may take a while to download)

This will take 1-3 hours to complete: on the lower end if you are already familiar with reverb, EQ, and compression, longer if these are new to you. Take the time to really digest the discussion of each of these parameters.

TIP: You should be following along and performing all the actions as they are described in the reading. If you have a very large screen, or two screens, it is easy to have both the tutorial and Logic open at user-friendly window size. Butif you have a smaller screen:

  1. When you don’t need a large Logic window, zoom and size the tutorial and Logic windows so both are fully visible.
  2. When you need more room for Logic: on Macs, Command-Tab cycles between open applications. This allows you to easily cycle back and forth between the tutorial text and Logic.

    This is a really usefule keyboard shortcut! Another is Option-` (the key to the left of the number 1 on most keyboards) which cycles between all open documents within the currently active application.

Step 3: Response

After you have completed the reading and tutorial:
  1. Put both your .logicx file and an .mp3 bounce of your mix into a single folder named with your Firstname_Lastname, and upload it to the Logic 3 folder on Teams.
  2. Complete the form below.