Jon Musgrave
Jon is a London-based platinum award winning mixer, producer, composer and club remixer with a diverse CV that spans dance, pop, rock and music for media. He’s also a long term contributor to
Computer Music.
Jon usually handles final mixdowns, which is why we’ve got him to share some of his pearls of mixing wisdom here
We use compression to iron out undesirable level differences but usually this is coupled with level rides both to add drama and to finesse our mix levels.
Once upon a time, level rides would have been performed live as the mix was printed. Then desk automation and DAW automation made these moves that bit more repeatable, recallable and much easier to execute. Indeed, the ability to draw and edit fader levels to quickly achieve incredibly accurate moves is without a doubt one of the biggest successes of DAW-based mixing.
Nevertheless, knowing when to use that flexibility is a skill, and if you start adding complex automated level changes to multiple tracks at the early stages of your mix, you’ll more often than not end up in a mess. A good rule of thumb is to start by getting the mix sounding as good as possible with no level rides, but, at the same time, think ahead to where and when level rides will be needed. As could be said for the progression of a mix in general, when it comes to adding rides, initial changes are quite broad but become more focused and precise as the mix progresses.
Of course, not every track will need rides, and techniques range from very precise word specific changes on a vocal, to broader section by section moves on instrumentation, and finessing fades on effect tails. In this tutorial we’ll look at various scenarios. Let’s get to it.