Mixin before handin out CDS

Ive been trying to get my beats out there. Its hit and miss. I was wondering any if not all of you go through and eq and mix your beats before passin your cds out (postin em up, whatever)? Me personally i find it a waste of time beings that they gotta be re-mixed once the vocals are mixed for it to be proper. But if it helps in the selling, i guess kcuf it. Some insight please!

Professionalism is the key. What u put in is what u get back. If you handle it as professional as possible you are more than likely to get a better networking such as labels with a lil name out for their company and even get majors labels hollarin at u. U just pass out cds wit no type of professionalism(no contact info, no inserts, mixes sound bad,ect..) then dont expect big names/companys to get at u cause they will take u for a joke. Real talk playa. U gotta know the game in order to play in it.

Nicole

I got the inserts and shit. All thats set. It just takes me hella days to mix, i could **** with a beat for a month and never be done....... Plus the compression always **** me up.

my man jada said it best

" your new cd is just something to break up buds on "

make sure when you hand out stuff its mixed so they can hear what the potential is. i know it takes a little longer but it may get you that extra $$ or bigger client in the long run. this is def 1 business you cant be lazy in.

If I'm givin beats to my close peeps or even a rapper who's gonna spit on it then I usually don't bother with serious mix-downs, but if I'm puttin **** out there for a whole heap of people to listen to then it has to sound professional cause u don't want experienced rappers & producers to think you're a noob

I would say it doesn't fking matter one bit, and that's my word.
If the beat is hot, it's hot. If it's mixed horribly, sure, it's bad, but if the track itself is catchy, that holds alot more weight. If you care about your ish, you will mix it nicey nice anyway. But if you really ain't at that level of engineering to make it pop like what you hear in big-time industry ish, it don't matter anyway. look at all the silly sounding sh** that's out there now!! How did it get there? The people collecting tracks for artists these days have little or no standards. Most dudes with money who can do anything for you these days have low standards and don't give 2 sh**s about no mixing or anything. They don't even know what that means, never mind what it supposed to sound like. All standards are gone from music. Sad, but true. Alot of the stuff you hear on the radio was mixed horribly from begging to end. Why you think they gotta pay Duro or maybe some old white rock dude lots of money to make it sound better?Alot of these cats don't know sh and they go by what they friends tell them is hard, and that's all. So make beats you think are fresh, mix as good as you can, and call it a wrap.

Mix as you Make! While your making the beat set the levels and eq as you go so its almost completely mixed the way you want when ur done. Then tweak and mixdown.

I used to not mix anything... I figured it wasn't worth it (plus i was to high most of the time back then)
But i go back and i listen to all those tracks i put out and i get imbareassed. Cuz i know that some fool somewhere out there is gonna be hearing these sh***y sounding tracks and thinking" This ish sounds like crap!" And next time he hears of me hes gonna think about how whack i am and not how much i improved.

I agree you don't want it to sound like trash but I think if it sounds good in the car then roll with it. I'll make some tracks bounce em to a disk & take em to the car. If they sound good there then I'm good to go. They can mixdown on their time.

[quote="DLF"]Mix as you Make! While your making the beat set the levels and eq as you go so its almost completely mixed the way you want when ur done. Then tweak and mixdown.


This is great advice, I cosign on that!

thanks for the input folks!!!! Do you guys throw a compressor or limiter on the final?

trupro wrote:I would say it doesn't fking matter one bit, and that's my word.
If the beat is hot, it's hot. If it's mixed horribly, sure, it's bad, but if the track itself is catchy, that holds alot more weight. If you care about your ish, you will mix it nicey nice anyway. But if you really ain't at that level of engineering to make it pop like what you hear in big-time industry ish, it don't matter anyway. look at all the silly sounding sh** that's out there now!! How did it get there? The people collecting tracks for artists these days have little or no standards. Most dudes with money who can do anything for you these days have low standards and don't give 2 sh**s about no mixing or anything. They don't even know what that means, never mind what it supposed to sound like. All standards are gone from music. Sad, but true. Alot of the stuff you hear on the radio was mixed horribly from begging to end. Why you think they gotta pay Duro or maybe some old white rock dude lots of money to make it sound better?Alot of these cats don't know sh and they go by what they friends tell them is hard, and that's all. So make beats you think are fresh, mix as good as you can, and call it a wrap.

I got to Co-Sign fa sho! The more beats/tracks you sale you find this to be true for the most.

LOL, I know cats who make lots of dough off beats and they like:
"What do you mean MIX? I have an MPC plugged into my little
sister's computer speakers"! This has tought me that sound selection is
the first and possibly most important step in digital beatmaking. I'm still working on that, word up!! I can't even front, some of my beats I like the best had little or no mixing. Maybe because they were ok from get-go, I dunno.

Personally, I like put a limiter on the 'beat tape' version of the mix.
Maybe I do as good a mix as I can through the board, dump it two track in the computer or your DAT or whatever. Then sort of try to 'master' the stereo mix through a limiter and stereo eq. If my mix is really sucky and I'm lazy, I'll squash the hell out of it. Works for david banner, lol!! No seriously tho, I like to listen to tracks that I feel are poorly made, but for some reason bump rediculous, and then figure out what they did. Compression is a huge part of that. One trick that makes even the most sparse, terrible beat sound 'full' is: You have everything except the bass track compressors triggered by a key-input. The key input trigger is your kickdrum track. But you gotta really experiment with attack and release times, and then seriously re-adjust levels after your settings are good. This tequnique, along with master stereo limiting are part of what people refer to as "Making the track 'breath'". On the real though, which you probably know already: don't just squash everything through a limiter and think it sounds good cus it's louder. You'll just ruin it! Happy mixing!!

sweet nice trick. I forgot how to do the key-input on PT. Imma have to look that one up again.

trupro wrote: One trick that makes even the most sparse, terrible beat sound 'full' is: You have everything except the bass track compressors triggered by a key-input. The key input trigger is your kickdrum track.

huh? the key input on the bass' compressor triggered by the kick is a pretty common trick

Yeah, yur right about the bass thing, but I was tryna to simplify it so as not to be too long-winded and confusing. You can get away with not compressing the bass, and you can ruin the bass track if your not careful with this. So I just left that out. but If you have enough racks or plug power, the way to go is (and you know this already): compressors on everything, with varying amounts of compression. Most of them (including bassline) can get a key input from the kick, but there are caveats to this. For instance, if your bassline sounds better with heavy attack, then having the kick 'ducking' the attack of your bass would be bad. Also, say I have a sample running where I've taken all the lows out. Like I just want mids and highs in there. Then, and ESPECIALLY if there was a snare drum in the sample, I might use my snare instead of kick as the key input. Also, sometime I'll bus kick and snare to the same bus, and use that as a key input, to duck all those instances. Of course, you don't always need to compress everything, but these are just examples...

peterparker: The key inputs on PT can be done within the plugins themselves. So example: You set a bus output on your kick track, then on the track that will recieve that, you open a plug in. Uually at the bottom of the plug-in graphic interface, there will be the 'key input, key listen" etc. controls. You just hold down that button for a drop menu that lets you select a physical input, a bus input, etc. Then select the bus you sent the kick out on. But it varies by plugin, sometime's the input control buttons are all fancy within the interface, sometimes its just at the bottom.