About The Course
What You'll Learn
Our 6-week intensive short course Mixing For Dance Music will introduce you to new and highly coveted skills which will help take your music and/or mixdowns to a new professional level.
During the course, you will learn to use compression and EQ – the building blocks of audio engineering – to create loud, balanced and dynamic mixes. You will learn how to group and process stems and to properly mix into a master compressor. We will also be covering stem mastering and the basic premise of mastering, setting you on the correct path to practice and perfect your skills, whether looking to improve your own music or becoming a mixing and mastering engineer in your own right. Whether you’re delivering for Soundcloud or online streaming services like Spotify, you’ll have access to the correct metering targets and learn to print deliverables for a range of media.
How We Teach
With support and guidance, we’ll empower you to rethink how you act and react to certain situations or problems. This approach, when aligned with an engineering context, results in speeding up your learning and gives you a more profound awareness of your own skills. Come to the course with an open and curious mind and it will give you a distinct advantage for getting the most out of it. This mindset will also be beneficial to your creativity in general.
What We Cover in the course
- Development of your mixing and mastering skills
- Understanding the parameters of a Compressor and an EQ
- How to correctly identify Attack and Release times and ratios/thresholds of Compressors
- How to make space for elements in a mix by removing competing frequencies
- Balancing tracks within a song by level, purpose, frequency content and dynamic
- Managing sessions through bussing and master-chain processing
- Mixing tracks into stems
- How to use advanced mixing techniques like multi-band techniques, mid / side, and parallel processing
- How to tame already affected/over-processed stems
- The different elements of a mastering chain
- Use of Multi-band imaging, compression on a wide signal source
- How to rebalance or tilt a mix both frequency wise and spatially
- The importance of clear file-name conventions and store prints to send to clients
- How to get your mix up to industry standard, delivering for online media, broadcast formatted files
- How to use metering standards appropriately
- Training your ears to listen for typical errors in a mix
- Improve your critical thinking – understanding why you might use a tool rather than just knowing how to use it
Ready to book your place?
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This course taught me how to set up a freelance structure. Knowing things about invoicing and tax and learning how much I should charge. Abbey Road taught me that I have to look after this myself.
Alex Mraz, Graduate
Before I was at Abbey Road, it was easy to write a song, and get a singer. But the songwriting process doesn’t work like that. It was important to understand vocal production, writing, and music. It should all happen simultaneously.
Joel Robinson, Graduate
Abbey Road really helped me with the foundation of audio. It’s an overwhelming subject at first, but [the course] really breaks it down and really makes it digestible.
Charlotte Rochecouste, Graduate
The time I spent at Abbey Road Institute helped me transform my skills. I came from a bedroom producer who made music as a hobby to an audio professional.
Phoenix Manson, Graduate
Abbey Road was the perfect stepping stone into my professional career as an artist and audio engineer.
Alex Braithwaite, Graduate
Education is more than a lecture. It is decades of experience from all corners of the globe brought together into a community of dedicated and passionate individuals joined together in journey to push the limits of creativity. This is what we aspire to every day at Abbey Road.
Gianni Michelini, COO
Studying the past year at Abbey Road has been phenomenal. The teaching staff are top notch and I now have a community of people to draw on who are as obsessed with music as me.
Emily Toner, Graduate
Abbey Road Institute gives students the head-start they need to succeed in today's industry. The facilities at Melbourne are second to none and it’s great to see students grow and be rewarded for their efforts.