How can I mix songs for free?

Mixing is a crucial step in creating a high-quality song. It involves taking all the individual tracks that were recorded—such as the vocals, guitars, drums, bass, and more—and blending them together into a cohesive whole. The goal of mixing is to achieve a balanced, polished sound where all the parts can be clearly heard in the context of the full song. Proper mixing enhances the emotional impact of the song, creates space for each instrument to breathe, and produces an engaging listening experience. Though subtle, great mixing takes recordings from sounding amateur to professional. While musicians can release songs without mixing, this overlooks a vital creative process. Mixing allows artists to hone the tone and feel of their music. Without it, songs never reach their full potential.

Free Digital Audio Workstations

When getting started with mixing your own music, the first step is choosing a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). A DAW is the software you use to record, edit, and mix audio. There are many great free options available to get you mixing without spending any money.

Some of the most popular free DAWs include:

• Audacity – An open source DAW available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Audacity has basic editing and mixing features.
• GarageBand – Apple’s free DAW that comes pre-installed on Mac computers. GarageBand provides a full-featured mixing environment.
• LMMS – An open source DAW for Windows and Linux. LMMS focuses more on MIDI composition but can still be used for basic audio editing and mixing.

Any of these free programs will give you the tools to get started mixing your music. As a beginner, it’s best to choose one and thoroughly learn it rather than jumping between different DAWs. With patience and practice, you’ll be mixing tracks in no time without spending any money.

Essential Mixing Plugins

As a beginner music producer starting out, building your plugin arsenal doesn’t have to break the bank. There are many high quality free VST plugins available that cover common mixing tasks like compression, EQ, and adding reverb effects.

One of the best free compressor plugins is TT Dynamic Range Meter by Tokyo Dawn Labs. TT DR is a versatile compressor and limiter that helps you control dynamics on individual tracks and mix buses. It offers multiple compression modes to suit different sources, lookahead limiting, and visual waveform feedback.

For equalization, check out TDR Nova by Tokyo Dawn Labs. It’s an intuitive 4-band parametric EQ plugin with optional dynamic EQ modes and an analyzer to see problem frequencies. Great for general tone shaping across your mix.

On the reverb front, one can’t go wrong with ValhallaFreqEcho. It delivers top quality reverb algorithms like hall, room and plate reverbs. The interface is simple yet powerful with control over decay, mixing and modulation effects.

Setting Up Your Mix Session

Setting up your mix session properly is crucial for an efficient workflow. First, organize your tracks in your DAW by instrument type or frequency range, keeping linked tracks from an individual instrument together. Group drums, lead vocals, background vocals, bass, guitars, keyboards, etc. Create various subfolders for verse, chorus or other song sections when applicable. Color code your tracks and route them to the appropriate channels on your mixer. Pan hard left/right as desired and set track levels.

Next, create necessary aux tracks for reverb and delay effects. Route each instrument track to the aux tracks at varying send levels for your desired amount of effects. You’ll add the actual effects plugins later. Create a master fader and connect all instrument tracks and aux tracks to it to easily control the final mix level. Add subgroup busses as needed to control groups of instruments together by type. Now your session is neatly organized and routed for flawless workflow as you start mixing.

For more tips, check out these resources:
How To Set Up Your Mixing Sessions Like A Pro

Leveling and Gain Staging

Proper gain staging is crucial for achieving a clean, balanced mix. Gain staging refers to managing signal levels at each stage of the mixing process to optimize signal flow and minimize noise. Setting proper gain structure starts when recording, ensuring tracks are captured at optimal levels without clipping or distorting. During mixing, the goal is to achieve sufficient signal levels without overloading your DAW channels and plugins.

Start by setting your tracks to a consistent level, around -18 to -12 dB peak. This leaves plenty of headroom and prevents channels from overpowering others. Use your DAW’s clip gain feature to adjust track levels individually. Get your kick and snare peaks hitting around -10 dB, and vocals around -8 dB or louder. Quieter elements like pads and percussion can sit around -18 dB.

Next insert gain plugins like VU meters on your master bus and key channels. Monitor levels as you build your mix to avoid clipping or distorting plugins. Set your master bus limiter to cap peaks around -6 dB. Proper gain staging results in a mix with clarity, punch, and enough headroom for mastering. It takes patience but pays off with professional sounding results.

Equalization

Equalization (EQ) is one of the most important tools for mixing. EQ refers to boosting or cutting specific frequencies to shape the tone and timbre of tracks. When EQing instruments in a mix, the goal is to carve out space so every element can be heard clearly. This ensures no frequencies clash or mask each other.

It’s important to EQ each instrument to only take up its specific frequency range in the overall spectrum. For example, according to EQ Tips For Mixing Better Tracks, you’d typically cut low mids around 240 Hz on guitars so the bass and kick drum can handle those frequencies. On acoustic guitars, you’d cut some “honkiness” around 2-4 kHz to prevent clashing with cymbals or vocals.

On lead vocals, boost a gentle high shelf around 12 kHz to add air and clarity, while cutting muddy low-mids between 200-500 Hz. This allows maximum audibility of the vocals. Likewise for backing vocals, a high pass filter up to 200 Hz removes sub frequencies not needed in the higher register. These techniques create space in the sonic range for each element.

Compression

Compression is a key mixing technique that can help take your mixes to the next level. In simple terms, compression reduces the dynamic range of the audio signal, bringing quiet sounds up in volume and loud sounds down, allowing you to achieve a more balanced and controlled mix.

There are several ways to utilize compression in your mixes:

• Compression on individual tracks – Use compression on instruments like vocals, drums, bass, guitars to shape their sound, control dynamics, and make them sit better in the mix.
• Compression on subgroups – Route similar instruments like all drum tracks or all guitar tracks to a subgroup and compress them, helping blend and glue them together.
• Compression on master bus – Add master bus compression to control the overall dynamics of the full mix and give it extra punch and cohesion.

In terms of settings, the most important ones to understand are Ratio – how much compression is applied, Threshold – the volume level above which compression kicks in, Attack and Release – how quickly or slowly compression is applied and reduced.

Taking the time to properly set up and utilize compression on individual tracks, groups, and full mix will give your DIY mixes clarity, tightness, and professional polish.

Reverb and Delay

Reverb and delay are time-based effects that can greatly enhance the depth and space of a mix when used properly. Reverb simulates the sound of an audio signal bouncing around in a physical space, while delay creates repeats of the signal over time. Using tasteful amounts of these effects is key – too little and your mix will sound flat and lifeless, while too much can make things sound unnatural or wash out the clarity of the mix.

According to this article, a useful technique is to send the delay itself through a lush reverb like a plate to blend the echoes smoothly together. Picking two complementary delay times, like a short slap delay and a longer delay, also increases options for layering these effects.

When applying reverb and delay, it helps to think about what type of space you want to place the different elements in. For example, vocals and guitars often sound best with hall and plate type reverbs, while drums tend to work well with smaller room-type reverbs. Use the amount, decay time, and other parameters to adjust the perceived distance and depth of each track.

Used judiciously, delay and reverb breathe life into a mix and provide that elusive sense of “space”. Take the time to experiment with sends, effect types and parameter settings until you find the right blend.

Panorama and Stereo Imaging

Panning is an essential mixing technique used to position instruments within the left and right channels of the stereo field. This creates a sense of width and space to make the mix sound bigger and more dynamic (Mastering the Mix, 2023). Some guidelines for panning instruments:

• Lead vocals are usually panned center
• Guitars can be double-tracked and panned left and right for a wide stereo image
• Keyboards and supporting instruments may be panned left, right, or center
• Drums are often panned with kick and snare center, toms panned left and right, overhead mics in a wide stereo position

In addition to panning, stereo imaging plugins can further increase the width of the mix. These work by manipulating the phase and timing between the left and right channels. Adjust these settings subtly because pushing them too far can negatively impact the mono compatibility. A wider mix sounds spacious but also retains clarity when collapsing to mono (Avid, 2023).

Final Mixdown and Exporting

Once you have completed mixing your song, the last step is to export a final stereo mixdown audio file. Most DAWs have the option to export or “bounce” the final mix down to an output file. Common formats to export the mix to are WAV, AIFF, MP3, and FLAC files.

To export the mix in Pro Tools for example, go to File -> Bounce -> Bounce To Disk. You can select the output format, sample rate, bit depth, and dither options for the exported file here. Select Add to iterate the exported file name to avoid overwriting previous bounces.

In FL Studio, you would go to File -> Export -> Export to audio file to access the bounce options. After entering the output file name and selecting the format, bit depth, and sample rate, simply click Save to bounce out the mixdown. Enable dithering here as well if you need to reduce bit depth.

Once exported, you can then import the mixdown file into a separate DAW session to master the song if needed, or upload the bounce file directly for distribution. For more tips on bouncing tracks from different DAWs, check out this informative guide.