Welcome to part 3 of my "How to Make a Juice WRLD / Wavy Trap Type Beat" tutorial. In part 2 I showed you how to take an 8 bar loop and turn it into a full instrumental track.
In today's video, I will be showing you how to mix your instrumental on GarageBand iOS as well as show you some cool FX automations that I use to help spice up my beat.
- Gain Staging
Start by swiping the track icons to the right side to bring the volume faders. I like to start my arrangement timeline from chorus or the loudest part of the beat. From there I will loop the segment over and over again and adjust the volume faders accordingly until they all sound evenly "Mixed".
80% of mixing consists of getting the volumes right, the rest comes from FX and other creative elements. Watch the video as I go through the steps to adjust the volumes until they sound right.
- Saturation / Overdrive
If you want to make things "louder" or more specifically bring more presence into the track, consider using a Distortion/Overdrive plug in to bring the gain up. After you gain stage and create enough headroom, the next step is to enhance certain elements by using plugins.
One of the most common plugin that I use is some sort of a distortion unit (Saturation / Overdrive) to help bring the volume back up. This is how I was taught to mix when I was learning in school. It makes sense to work this way because if all mixing consisted of was adjusting volume faders, that would make things certainly easy but also very boring and dry.
Speaking of things being too dry, my next favorite FX plug in is the Reverb plug-in.
- Reverb
On a surface level, Reverb makes things sound more "Wet, Distant, Drowned, etc". On a more technical level, reverb helps put things into space by allowing you to control the reverberation (prolongation of a sound; resonance.)
A practical example of using reverb is when I bring a sound source such a drum sample into my music and if the sample sounds "out of place" from the rest of the elements that I have already created. I use reverb to help shape the sound until it fits with the rest of my elements.
If you watch the video this is what I do with my Hi-Hats and other percussive elements. Reverb is also a highly versatile plug-in that I use quite often on Synths and Vocals. Do yourself a favor and play around with the settings until you get familiar with how reverb works because trust me, you're going to be using it quite often if you plan on taking your music making career seriously.
- EQ
EQ also known as equalizer can be used in multiple different ways, but to keep things simple, EQ is used for taking out certain frequency of a sound to create room for other elements. I won't dive too much into the technicality of EQ that is for another video, however I will show you some practical applications to get you started.
Use EQ to roll off the low-end of your Synths (I usually like to roll off around 100~200 hrtz) to make room for your bass and other percussive elements. Also you can use EQ to roll off the high-end of your bass elements to make sure the low frequency elements are not crashing with your high frequency elements.
- FX Automation
When you click the "FX" tab on the top left side of the playback list, it will bring another window where it allows you to apply some cool Performance FX to your beat.
I won't dive into every single features of the FX automation but you can filter things in and out which is very useful for creating more tension and release. You can use beat repeater to give your beat more variations. So many different possibilities, check out my video to see how I like to use the FX plug-in to help me finish my beat.
That's it for today's tutorial. If you enjoyed this make sure to like and subscribe to my youtube channel, https://youtube.com/laritheghost and like and comment down below if you found this tutorial helpful!