The Mix Academy: bit.ly/mixacademy Mixing Acoustic Pop: mixingchosen.com Mixing articles: theproaudiofiles.com Learn to mix hip-hop: mixinghiphop.com Compression tutorial: learncompression.com Ear training: quiztones.com Some tips for creating a sample reel to promote your studio business. — Transcript Excerpt: Today I want to talk to you about business, and hopefully a strategy that will help you to grow your business. If you're doing this professionally or you're doing it on the side to make some extra money, if you're a hobbyist and you would like to transition into maybe finding some clients that are willing to pay you, this could be a huge step in the right direction for you. This works for me, I swear by it, I tell everybody about it that I can to try to help as many people as possible, and I've written an article about it. I've got that pulled up on the screen over at theproaudiofiles.com on Grow Your Studio Business, it's called “How to Attract New Clients to Your Studio,” I would encourage you to go read this, but I want to scroll down. The part that I'm going to talk about today and show you in Pro Tools is how I share my work and I create an mp3 of my latest samples. Well, this is that session. In Pro Tools, I would go and I would drag songs in so that they each have their own track. You'll see that there's some processing on some of these tracks. One track I just did some processing because as I listened to it, I felt like it was a little muddy, so I threw the VMR on there. A little shout out for the Slate plug that was just released. You can see I've just faded in and out of multiple samples. This one's a little bit longer because it's for that video. I recommend keeping your sample reel to about 4 or 5 songs and be genre specific. So if you want to gain a bunch of hip hop work, then throw your hip hop samples in, and go find hip hop artists. If you're working to find maybe some country artists, by all means, take just the country samples. I work a lot in the Gospel and CCM world, and there's a lot of cross genre work going on, so one artist in the Pop/Hip Hop/R&B world, they may also have some folk stuff, so for me, I take those samples and I market to that niche. You want to be specific on who you're trying to reach. You want to pull those samples in, fade them in and out of each other. What I was trying to say there was you want to keep it to about 30-45 seconds, so don't be afraid to fade in and tease them for 5 seconds on one song, fade it out, maybe 5 or 6 of the next, 10 seconds of the next. Try to keep it short and sweet, because people don't have a lot of time, and our attention spans are a lot less than what we give ourselves credit for, so you want to really capture them with your most impactful stuff first. Don't be afraid to include a ballad or whatever, but make sure it's not the first thing you hear, unless you're marketing to people who are doing a lot of ballads. That would be a good idea. [sample reel] I'm going to stop it there, because I want to talk about individual processing so that they sound – I dunno mastered is the right way to say it, but you want them to sound good transitioning in and out of each other. Some genres by themselves are going to be maybe darker than others, or wider than others, or more low-end, and that kind of stuff, and with this sample reel, you're really putting yourself on the spot here, and you've got to be careful not to let one song out-perform another too much. And so, for me, if I bypass VMR, I'll open up and show you what I did, I used a free plug-in, but coming out of this song, listen to what this sounds like without my processing here, and without the limiter on. [song plays] Noticing the difference, the transition there, this song is one that I actually didn't master. It went to a mastering engineer with the rest of the record. It was mixed by myself and a few other guys. So what I did is I pulled in a maximizer for this song, set it to a certain setting just to kind of hit it a little harder, and then I've got a mastered – not a mastered, but a limiter on the overall big picture just so that if anything was going a little bit above, that it kind of hits it and keeps kind of a consistent level. Nothing really too much going on with that. But then VMR, I felt like Chosen was a little bit too beefy, a little bit too much low-end. It's kind of muddy, so I'm going to show you now that we've got that limiter on to help that one be a little louder, we'll adjust the volume there. You could use clip-gain as well, that's a cool tool.

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