Mixing as a bass player always keeps my guitar tracks lower in the mix, my mixes still suck but at least nobody notices my shitty guitar playing. WIN 🎉

Glenn: “you are awesome on guitar” Me: 😬

Number 4 is so true, that it’s bizarre how I got better mixes by simply sleeping and waking up on the next day with a fresh mind. Awesome video, as always, Glenn.

The golden rule I was taught doing FOH mixing was that if you were also musician, usually the guitar player, you have a bias for that instrument, so mix it to your liking, and then dial those guitars down a notch below what you would have liked. And I was taught that by a soundguy who was also a bass player. An exception to Rule No. 2.

Spot's production on Husker Du's records is an amazing achievement because every part is somehow inaudible at the same time

Joke's on you, I'm not awesome on guitar.

Come on, that wasn't bad. It had character.

Glen, yes I am a guitar player. I am old. 63. I finally can record at home inexpensively. Thank you for all your help. What helps mixing my guitar? Marshall Silver Jubilee plugin that came with my Focusrite. I can see why you preach re amping. I record with “my sound” and then adjust settings on play back to make it sit well in the mix. Hell, I can even change the amp plugin. IRs, whatever. Now I don’t use real drums. They are from software I have but the bass and any keys are me. What great fun this is and thanks again for your help.

Unholy HELL the advertisement interruptions in this video!

I don't know why anyone would edit while isolating one instrument and not listening the whole thing , awesome video Glenn

Great to see some mixing videos! Keep it up Glenn!

Great video as usual and a nice Hesu cab in the background. Cheers from Poland 🤘🍻🍃

Love this Channel!!! Keep it up,Glenn.👍

As a Bassist its really difficult to record while putting in effort not to drool all over my bass

I don't do metal, as my area is more synth based, but one of the biggest hurdles I had was indeed with the EQ overuse. It's similar to when you first start out and make the mistake of pushing too much volume on a channel when you want to hear it ending up with a mess. Because the natural inclination is to add more until it resolves, when that's often the worst with audio. It can't be over emphasised that turning off the EQ and running the mix, then adding it bit by bit on the fly is a great way of gradually getting it right. One thing I normally do when using a drum machine (such as the Elektron Model:Samples) is bang in my rhythm track, get it feeling right, and when it comes to time to add it to the mix I start with just the bass drum, and add each part going up through the range, EQing on the fly to make them stand out individually. Of course you need to be careful not to have it so that it swamps everything else in your mix, but it's for me by far the quickest route to get up and running.

Glenn, these are awesome tips! Thank you!!

It'd be great to see a video of you doing a full mix using dearVR, then playing it through monitors and seeing how you'd change things

Looking healthy Glen! Congrats!

Fantastic video. Makes me rethink some of my own choices how to do things.

Great video, Glenn. It's cool to see you trying out the Dear VR stuff. I have been curious of what you would think of solutions like that now that they're becoming more common. I'm sure it's not a replacement for actual monitors in a mix room but they always struck me as a decent alternative for situations where regular monitors weren't an option. Keep it up.

you're amazing, thanks for giving your expertise and knowledge to the community

Got the Drum eq and it's awsome thanks Glen!

I Appreciate You Glen So MUCH. Enjoy ALL your Takes on Guitar, Recording and LIFE !

Nice video Ima have to check those headphones out!

Nice video bro i found it very useful

Spot On! This is all so true, these headphones look great, I am using a sennheiser pair now which are great for tracking, but these look great for mixing, will definately check them out!

A lot of sense spoken. Direct. To the point!

Gleeeeeaaan!!! Cheers bro, it’s all about the tonewood, bruh!!

this is the best video ive ever seen you make champ. hell yea

1. Waves has an abbey road headphone sim that sounds great. Worth a listen. 2. Your vocalist is key. Bad vocals, buried vocals, thin vocals, nonsensical lyrics, and you can have the heaviest riff in the world. No one cares. 3. When i mix vocals, i make their volume generally the same level as the snare hit. 4. AUTOMATE….. if your rhythms are the same volume throughout your guitar solos; you’re gonna have a fight on your hands. 1-2db is all you need. 5. Bass….bass….bass… you want your guitars to sound heavier? Burn your copy of …and justice for all, and get a great bass tone. 6. Songwriters!! Look into pond5. Consider writing stock music. Max 2 minute songs, that teach you to get to the point in 8 bars. It will do wonders for your songwriting, riff writing, and composition. I try to do a 0-day challenge: write as many 2 minutes tracks as i can, one a day, for 30 days. Post em all to pond5, sell them for 5 bucks each. Sales don’t matter. It’s the challenge of writing as many riffs, beats, and Melodie’s in as many genres you can, as fast as possible in 30 days. You’ll love the challenge. It will improve your mixes. It will teach you to cut the needlessness from your songs. And, usually, some of those riffs will be expanded into full length tracks! 7. Headphones. If you cannot use speakers; i can’t due to the constraints of my workspace- get GOOD, flat response headphones. My favorite closed back are the audio technica ATH40’s. My go to for open backs are the AT 770’s. I use both when mixing, because they offer different plus and minus’s. Cheers to all, and see your mixes on the livestream mix show soon!!! AD

What helped me is to listen to a lot of music, a lot of different genres. And really paying attention to every little detail going on in the song.

Hey good on you man, you've restored my faith that the over the top reaction to things is just part of the show. Good to see you're still open to trying new things. There are certainly cheaper options for open back headphones that still hold up (Philips SHP9600) It really is incredible that just removing the cover on the back of headphones could make such a difference, I can see why you probably dismissed it as just another "it's in the pickups bro" argument. 🤘😈👍

The best comedy is the truth - very funny glenn! (and informative)

Great tip about EQ'ing in the full mix and keeping it minimal. I am probably guilty of a lot of what you said in that segment. *Sigh* I'll have to move onto making different mistakes!

I've heard some of your work Fricker... And it is anything but top notch 😂

Can just imagine Glenn producing Hendrix: 'Timmy!! how many times do I have to tell you? the guitar is NOT the focus!'

Hey Glenn. In my case you are absolutely right about guitar players making horrible mixes. I'm a guitar player but years ago I decided to quit the band life to build my own non-pro tiny home studio so I could record and master my own home-made music. I've finally managed to get the mixing gear that I wanted and needed to reach that goal including musical instruments such as a drum-set, synth and a bass guitar. In my quest to become a descent self-educated mixer, I've bumped into several issues. The most frustrating thing was that most tracks sounded awful on other devices and honestly...I couldn't get my head around this. So, Yeah....Turns out that I was dramatically over-EQ-ing every single instrument (especially guitars) in solo mode which fucked-up the frequencies of the total mix. Fortunately for me I stranded here on your channel a while ago and since then things started to get better. I'm not there yet at all but your believes, sharings and advises are a blast and golden. A big thank you and shout out to you, man! Love your (re)presentation and insights of great things that really matter in this business. Greetings, John from the Netherlands.

Love the Hitchhikers reference at the end lol 😂

God damn man... Your mixing/mastering advice & tips are deadset priceless...😱😃🤟🏻 If I only I had the patience to do all that "HARD WORK"...🤬💥🦵🏻 Lol🤣, I just want to play guitar but I got to learn all "this stuff", so I might sound as good as it does "to me" in my bedroom"🤣...

No 2 is so true. I’m relatively new to mixing, but EVERY TIME I start getting a mix close to being finished I end up needing to take off EQs that I did early on when mixing that track. Especially if I spend a couple days away from it. I’ll go back and see these wild EQ moves on the vocals or guitars that just puzzle me, bypass the EQ plugin, and suddenly it all sounds a little better and maybe only needed a 3db boost in the highs or 2db cut in the lower mids or just a db of volume. I just finished mixing an EP for a band I recorded and half the vocal tracks, and a lot of the guitars, ended up being basically flat in the final mix. Turns out all that work I did in the tracking stages paid off and I didn’t need to fix as much as I thought I did, and there’s no rule that says you need to EQ everything.

Curious what your thoughts are on these Sennheiser's vs. the Slate Audio VSX?

EQing advice is excellent! I use Mixbus32C for my mixes and the built-in 32C channel strips make it so easy to EQ, compress, etc on the fly while the mix is going.

Write music that people want to hear more than once. Easier said than done but it’s been my mantra since I heard those words. Thanks mate!

Dear VR is incredible. Love that software. Gotta get me some open back headphones at one point, but the dear VR is great for now.

I have a spare room at home and realized there's a closet full of clothes, about 3 matresses laying around, and a shitload of old books and Lego boxes. Not looking to avoid spending money on some sort of acoustic treatment but I think all those house ítems can be put to good use. Is there any chance of a video that expands on acoustic treatment? Love the videos, greetings from the land of burritos and tequila! (Mexico (Yes, I can get away with the joke cuz I'm Mexican)).

Hey Glenn, always a pleasure to see a new vid with great tips! I'm an average guitar player so I have no problem turning myself down, but I was wondering if you had any tips (or could do a video) about mixing cymbals. When I use Superior drummer writing my own stuff I have no problems because the software seems to do everything on it's own, but when I try to record live drums I end up with a shit ton of wash and no amount of de-essing seems to work and I either end up with a pool full of snakes or no cymbals at all. I typically use 2 overheads about 4' up and whatever bleed I get from the floor tom with regard to the ride. Also... how the fuck do I stop the hi-hat bleeding into the top snare???? (using an SM57) I know you mentioned you were doing some drum mic vids, specifically snare, so I thought I'd ask. Thanks! Love you brother!

Ironically the main complaint I had about my song "Torn Apart" was that it was too short at a mere 2 min 18, I might be okay on that point. I know on this one the drums are lower in the mix, however that was a deliberate choice. Great video as always

Dude, be really interested to see you do the comparison with the Mackie 8 bus analogue desk

Sticks N’ Stones! Played with them in Rochester, NY! Very cool music and cool guys

I only started mixing the last few months, and the more I'm doing it the more I'm realising I make music I wouldn't listen to which is giving me serious pause for thought. I was not expecting this to be the outcome but it's given an insight I'd have never gleaned otherwise. I highly recommend people do it just to let themselves truly become a listener of their work

Guilt af.😅 thanks for the help. Tough love. Eq as a group with context as a band performing as a team.

On format limiting run times. Do you have any thoughts on setting limits on yourself, to boost creativity? limits on track count or releasing a track a month etc.?

great video glenn!!! keep the good work. Just sharing here. I`m from Brazil, yesterday I went to Thomann and guess what???? I bought another guitar that I don`t need but really made me happy LOL. WTF is that place!!! It is THE CANDY STORE and I was just the fat hungry little kid...

Awesome video Glenn! I have a curious but weird question for you: Would you be able to bring a studio tour 2024/how you get the best out of your gear? just for everyone starting and wanting to get the idea on typical things like The way you organize your gear How you like to start working (kind of like what you like to do before starting to work and during work, so on na so forth, I think you get where I'm going to with this) I'd love to see more of your actual set up and habits man If you have a video like it, please let me know cause I might have not seen it lol I really admire your work and hope I'll get your response Cheers and greetings from Mexico! 🇲🇽

I love that the Sennheiser headphones come with a multi environment listening capability. I wish my audio-technicia r70x reference headphones came with something like that. You make the best mix using all environments and it's going to work.

This channel is the pinnacle of metal mixing!

Taking a break is actually a good advice. I was mixing a song for a band we had in covid times, I think I spent like 3 or 4 hours working on the song, cause after recording it, I jumped to mixing and mastering, and when I processed everything, according to me, it was an awesome mix, but when I showed it to the band members, they started pointing stuff like the compression was killing the mix, some parts were louder and then the compression hit it hard to lower the sound. I was irritated with the comments, to be honest, to the point that I was gonna send the stems to the other guys criticizing my work, but then I calmed down, slept my respective 8 hours, then checked the mix... guess what? I had to redo the whole mix, cause even in the EQ I messed it up. After that embarrassing moment, I learned to take breaks so I could do a better job mixing the songs.

About that Sennheiser headphone software: isnt that literally just an impulse response of different environments put in a convolution reverb?

Gotta love how Glenn talks to us guitarists and then talks to drummers like they are his newborns :)

Love the Neve mixer flex 😂

I've been mixing on the Slate VSX headphones and it's been a game changer.

I've actually had the opposite problem. Being the guitar player, knowing all the guitar parts and being so "used to it" and excited about recording, my older mixes all suffer from having the guitars too LOW in volume. I was so excited to hear the drums, vocals and even bass that I let my guitar tracks take the back seat. Making my mixes sound thin, weak, "missing something". I was guilty of the same bias and it still resulted in a mix where the guitars weren't properly leveled.

Glenn!! I have a video idea I'd like to share, if thats ok with you. So, you talk about the snake oils of guitar (expensive pickup, tubes etc.) A lot How about a video series where you go through these items of luxury and go through when they ARE applicable (if at all). It'd also be to cool see this series span beyond the guitar (like mokn gel for drums or... i dno, dog treats for bass players) Cheers man. You're one of the best. I've learned a lot from you (and I've finally been able to do a cool DBZ metal cover cause of your teachings)

Glen ----- Your 2003 mix sounds way better than new "polished" mixes. I prefer raw, real instrument mixes. Reminded me of the album In/Casino/Out.

Hey Glenn, leveling instruments can be hard even with a reference track my question is can a compressor on the master buss level things out? I know this is a dumb question but Ef You Glenn

One thing you forgot was using compression to make your tracks sound loud. When bounce midi tracks they sound way to quit so I use compression to make them louder.

very true, but it even goes back to the arrangement and sound choices for me , I think the hardest thing for me as a guitarist learning to produce was I spent years playing guitar by my self so I would try to make it sounds as big and full as possible . So when I record a guitar part to drums when starting to produce, I had essential used up most of the frequency space in a mix with one instrument and trying to add more parts it just got more and more cluttered , looking at the tracks of great songs really opened my eyes to the fact that most instruments parts are sparse and underwhelming on their own but collective you get a full sound .

You've worked with the VSX headphones, how does Dear + Sennheiser compare? I loved my HD595's until the plastic holding them togather aged into powder.

That Ams Eq sounds really killer man. Wow Is that the 88r eq?

GLENN!!!!! I've been playing for 30 years. And asking a guitar player to make a good mix. Is like asking a bass player to change your strings, or not eat your own hair. Or asking the singer not to get to drunk before the show. Or asking the drummer to tone it down. Asking a guitar player to make a good mix, is like asking your wife to have a real conversation, where you don't have to apologize after. It's impossible. But thanks for playing.

So, for $400, is there benefit to these next to monitors (outside of portability)? I've been looking into some options and definitely dig the plugin.

how are those Senneheisers compared to VSX?

Mixing WITH the full mix playing is something I need to reprogram my brain to do. Everything I’ve heard over the years talks about soloing, then eq, then unsolo and see if you have it right.

GLEEEEEENN!!! I keep running into the same problem of my guitars being too loud. In general I have a huge problem with gain staging. Do you have any advice? Greeting from Germany

Doing a tutorial on how to get drums to sound like that in general would be great on snare Tom’s and kick along with cymbals and rooms!

Always love a good Hitchhiker’s reference.

I'm sort of relegated to having to use headphones, and thanks to your suggestion (much earlier video) I went out and grabbed a pair of Bayer Dynamics DT 990 Pro's and they are great.

If I have Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro monitoring phones and this software, am I good?

Has there always been the segment meter on the top? Nice touch if not!

Glenn, hi! Do you still do mix reviews? I would brag about a couple of tracks)) Thanks in advance)

Yo, whatever that song is that you were mixing with the headphones, let us know when it's out and released, cause I'd love to hear the whole thing!

The heavy metal equivalent of Vogon Poetry :D LOL, I'm going to steal that and hope I can use it in a conversation somehow!

Can virtual drums like roland vad 103 replace real acoustic drum set in professional production? Like im recording my roland via usb into daw with other recorded instrument tracks by bandmates, we send it to audio mastering engineer and release it in professional quality?

You ever think of comparing bridge types? We know pickups don’t matter but what about if there’s a strat style bridge, or a Jazzmaster style bridge, or a stop bar, or a tunomatic or a mastery on the jazz master style bridge? I’ve seen this video of this guy Aaron Rash comparing a Gotoh tune o matic to the stock bridge on a vintage fender mustang, and it sounds like the gotoh holds the bass notes out more but it may just be that guitar player mind of “Oh it looks different it must sound different”

Okay, with now heard the forth or so pair of headphones with a control room software - it's time for a comparison, isn't it?

thanks for the killer content

Last trick is great... I walk away from mixing everytime and I SUCCEEDED at making no good mix.

So help me out here. I make all my music on analog tape. I just got my first Neve mixer and i’m super excited about it! My mixes sound awesome, but… I mix on regular headphones and of course bounce between those and my car. There are a couple of reasons why I have to mix this way. Number one, I still live with my parents, and I usually record on weekends and finish my mixes at night after work throughout the week, so blasting music at 1 Am is definitely not possible. Number two, I spent all of the money I set aside for music purchases this year on the Neve, I’ve never even thought about proper monitoring. So… speaker systems or even a good set of mixing headphones are out of the picture for now. Is there any way I can make my Beats brand headphones work for me a bit better? Thanks!

A bass question: Do bass pickups play a bigger part in the sound more than guitars? Since there's less distortion overall and a little bit of change in dynamics or player's mistake affect the whole mix way more than guitars. Also, I kinda found more people (usually luthiers and engineers) doing A-B comparisons which seems to be a lot more audible than guitar pickups comparison (search keyword "EMG vs LHZ vs HazLabs clone", Aging Engineer channel).

Dearvr mix is also available without the Sennheiser cans, did you test it with other headphones?

I thought you weren’t sure/impressed about the slate vsx headphones. So how do these stack up to the slate?

Hei Glenn. Would the software in combination with another pair of headphones also lead to good mixes? For example a Beyerdynamic 770 or 990 (open)?

Wow that’s REALLY the best mix you’ve got.. I need to send some of mine…

Gleeeeeeeeeeeennnnnnn I'm fuuuuuuucking subscribed just wanted to hear that in the helium voice lol haaaaaaa

7:53 beyerdynamic has a free VST that does a similar "room emulation". Would love it if Glenn does a comparison between that and the Steinberg paid product

What do you think of PreSonus Eris gen 2 monitor speakers? Glenn

My biggest issue is that as vocalist and guitar player, I overcompensate on trying to NOT over emphasize them in the mix that I end up making the drums, bass, and ambience/keys way too loud, instead. This after years of making the guitar and vocals way too prominent, as Glenn said. I also had a habit of mixing on $20 sony headphones or cheap logitech speakers. Now I use a pair of flat response open back headphones or proper studio monitors.

Hi glen what is your top 5 metal albums mixes,

Waves has some fairly fantastic virtual room plugins that work well. If you have a webcam you can even have it emulate moving your head in the room. Kind of gimmicky in that respect. Also, the Sonar works EQ corrections for headphones work well. I have found that mixing with corrected headphones translates into much better sounding mixes across audio platforms.

I’m very happy that I am nearly deaf. I can’t hear the bad mixes, country, or modern pop music. Most music sounds like I’m riding my trike blasting music through my six speakers. Lots of ambiance and wind noise. When I do listen to music for enjoyment I use my hearing aids and block everything else out. ✌️✌️