PE5_Soundation

Mixing your audio tracks is one of the toughest moments in the music recording process.  Volume and balance are amongst the most important part of mixing.  Musical Instruments must be balanced in the right or left channels, for the listener to hear them and not get lost in the mix.  Rhythm guitars could get lost in the mix if they are not separate in the mix.  For this post I create a funky rhythm piece featuring bass, drums and two rhythm guitars.  When I finished, the track sounded like this:

If you have external speakers on your computer, you will hear that the guitar tracks are on the center, mix with the bass and drums.  Although you can hear them well, you can't distinguish the nuances or extra notes that each rhythm guitar has.  To balance the guitars, I turn the pan control to the left and to the right.

Once I placed the guitars on the left and right channels, the music track sounded like this:

To finish my mix I decided to add a fade in at the beginning of song (or melody, if you prefer).  I added de fade in the master channel so it won't interfered with my instruments.  To add a master channel, simply go to "view" and choose "Show Master Channel".  Once the master channel appears on the bottom left of your screen, press the black button where it says "Display off" and choose volume.  Click on the timeline and a line will appear.  Click on the yellow line and "dots" will show up on the yellow line, with this dots you can move them up or down to control the volume as you can see here:

If you are not satisfied with the fade effect, you can still work on it until is done the way you want it.  After finish with the fade, go to "File" and choose "Mixdown" and choose "save as .wav" or "Publish and share".  For my RILS project, my students will export to .wav, for them to keep as part of their portfolio that will deliver at the end of the semester.

Hope you enjoy this demonstration!!!!