Learning to Mix: Which Online Audio Education Outlets Are Right For You?

Tape Op’s Larry Crane reveals all in his Lynda.com course, “Music Production Secrets”, one of many options now available in online audio education.

The web abounds with sites promising to help you improve your mixing skills. At times, it seems like there is an online education outlet for every audio engineer, and with all these choices, it can be difficult to determine where to turn if you’re looking to up your your audio game.

The most obvious question is whether or not they’re worth the money. If they are, which ones are the right fit for you? And, are there any free options that can help you get to where you want to be?

There are probably more sites offering online audio education that we can reasonably cover, so for this roundup we’re going to focus on some the most popular around, including Mix with the Masters, Pensado’s Place, CreativeLive, Lynda.com, The Recording Revolution, The Pro Audio Files, David Glenn Recording and pureMix all of which I got to try out personally over the course of a month.

For The Beginner

Sometimes, the best place to start is at the beginning: The Pro Audio Files, David Glenn Recording, and The Recording Revolution all cater to entry level engineers who are just starting to learn to mix, or who have been mixing for a short while without much in the way of formal training.

These sites can teach you how to set up a Pro Tools session, route signal, get acquainted with efficiently editing and using effects, and will remind you to edit drums before you mix them. Many of the most basic of these courses can be especially useful to the beginner-est of beginners.

The kind of specific task-based knowledge found in these courses is quite easy to come by these days via Google, and of course, Google does have the advantage of being free. Still, for the novice, there may be some real value to having all of these lessons bundled together into a well-structured curriculum and taught by a single trusted guide.

Some of the additional features these services offered, such as session files that you can download to follow along with didn’t feel particularly useful to me, but if you’re not already working on projects of your own, it may be helpful to have these bundled sessions at hand to start playing around with immediately.

GRAMMY-nominated audio engineer Matthew Weiss is one of several independent online audio instructors who have geared their offerings toward beginners.

All three of these beginner-focused sites do cover the basics of recording and mixing, but I found that Matthew Weiss‘ lessons on The Pro Audio Files were more to-the-point than the others.

I appreciated Weiss for not making me wait for information. He says only what is needs to be said, allowing the viewer to get up to speed on the basics of mixing as quickly as possible.

I found that Graham Cochrane of the Recording Revolution, and David Glenn (whose courses can be found á la carte on David Glenn Recording or as part of The Pro Audio Files subscription plan) focused on similar information to Weiss, but didn’t quite have his talent for filtering out extraneous information and getting right to the meat of a subject.

Mixing, like most creative skills, is about getting a solid conceptual understanding and putting it into practice more than it is about rote memorization.

This means that taking time to memorize specific applications of an idea (such as placing a hall reverb on vocals, a short plate on drums, or a spring on guitars) is arguably less valuable than focusing on mastering the core concepts—especially if you are interested in developing your own style in the long run.

Coincidentally enough, The Pro Audio Files has just added a new offering from Matthew Weiss: Mixing 101.

Matthew Weiss of The Pro Audio Files stood out to me as the most efficient of these options because he stayed so focused on making the essential concepts clear and quick to pick up.

When talking about four main flavors of reverb for instance, he would clearly explain what they are and how they are different, then let you hear them solo-ed, let you hear them in a mix, and move on to describe and demonstrate other essential new concepts.

That’s all you really need to get started. Once you understand what these tools are and how they work the rest is up to you to put into practice. On this front, Weiss gets my personal vote for the best educational resource for beginners thanks to his combination of speed, clarity and a strong focus on the fundamentals.

With this said, different learners may take a liking to the personal style of one teacher or another. Cochrane and Glenn, who both live in Florida, have a more relaxed and ambling approach that may suit some, while the more rapid and direct style of Matthew Weiss, who hails from Boston, is more likely to keep your average north-easterner like myself interested.

Fortunately, it’s easy to get a feel for the personal style of each of these three prominent beginner-focused instructors through their free content on YouTube, and each of them offers a money-back guarantee just in case.

David Glenn, pictured here, has become one of the more popular independent online audio educators, along with Graham Cochrane of the Recording Revolution and Matthew Weiss of The Pro Audio Files.

The Pro Audio Files has recently switched over to a subscription-based model for their entire video library, which includes all the major courses from both Matthew Weiss and David Glenn.

In addition to appearing in The Pro Audio Files’ subscription-based site, Glenn also sells his courses on a one-off basis on his own site, David Glenn Recording, and offers a spinoff service there, called The Mix Academy, which is subscription-based.

Graham Cochrane sells all of his courses individually or in small bundles at his own site, The Recording Revolution, and offers two subscription-based courses for his more advanced students: A community site called Dueling Mixes, in which members get new multi-tracks to try their hand at mixing each month, and The Audio Income Project, which is intended to teach freelance business skills to budding engineers looking to monetize their newfound audio chops.

The Mainstream Marketplaces

Next up are Lynda.com and CreativeLive. Both of these sites host content from many different contributors, resulting in a wide variety in approach, feel, and quality. A subscription to either of these sites grants you access to education in more than just audio, as well: Between the two of them, you can find in-depth courses on everything from photography to video editing, from writing to web design, from business accounting to personal finance.

Larry Crane walks us through his “Music Production Secrets” in a course for Lynda.com

Lynda.com’s audio engineering series with Tape Op Magazine‘s Larry Crane is especially spectacular, but there are plenty of Johnny-bedroom-guy’s EDM tips to be found as well.

It takes a minute to filter through and find the best courses on either site, but both sites have a ton of great content to offer once you’ve done some sifting. The best of these offerings can be truly awesome (again, looking directly at Larry Crane’s course here), but a bit more of a burden is put onto the consumer to build their own curriculum.

The key difference between these two sites is that Lynda.com is much more tutorial based, while CreativeLive’s videos try to put you into the classroom. Both have their advantages for different kinds of material: If you’re trying to learn a new DAW, definitely go with Lynda.com, but if you want to understand how the size of your room will affect the frequency response of a vocal, CreativeLive is probably the better option.

Most of the individual courses found at Lynda and CreativeLive are more targeted and niched-down than any of the other educational outlets I looked at. Look to them for learning a specific new skill, gaining a deeper understanding of a specific topic, but expect to stitch together a learning experience for yourself on an á la carte basis.

Because these sites are only as good as the specific courses you choose to take from their extensive libraries, exploration is key. If you are a self-starter these sites will treat you very well, but if you want to hammer through a structured, pre-existing curriculum, other options may serve you better.

Lynda.com has a monthly fee for all-access streaming, while CreativeLive charges per course after offering a substantial free preview.

Also available in this paradigm are macProVideo, which originally focused on teaching new DAW skills quickly—and has since branched out to cover more general audio education—and its more recent offshoot Ask.Audio.

The Pro Audio Boutiques

Both Mix with the Masters and Pensado’s Place offer a wealth of fantastic tips, experiences and stories from A-List engineers that can be of benefit anyone in music production, regardless of their level.

Mix With The Masters began as a series of intimate, in-person seminars, and has expanded to include a huge online library of wit and wisdom from some of the biggest mix engineers of recent decades.

Unlike the other resources on this list, neither of these sites is primarily in the business of teaching you how to do things, and instead focus on refining the way you think about recording and mixing overall as an art, as a craft, and as a business.

They touch on deeper topics like how to manage an argument with an artist, how Michael Brauer’s multi-bus approach affects how he conceptualizes a mix, and how to overcome slow periods in your career.

These are not the kinds of tips people usually search for through Google because they do not have an immediately tangible payoff, but they are often the most beneficial kinds of lessons to learn in the long run.

The only big hurdle I find these sites have to overcome is that many of the guest speakers end up talking about techniques and gear that only an incredibly small amount of engineers can actually afford to use. These sites seek to feature the masters after all, and the masters are often accustomed to employing the best gear around.

For one example, Tony Maserati makes a sound argument for having multiple analog summing busses so you can find the best one for each mix. Though this makes plenty of sense, how is promoting that kind of budget-busting approach helpful to most of the clients on an educational site? I found the best videos to be the ones that spoke to concepts that the commercial studio engineer and the bedroom producer could apply with equal success. Fortunately, those videos comprise the vast majority of the libraries on these sites, helping to make these two my favorites out of all the educational outlets I looked at.

Pensado’s Place is free on YouTube, while Mix with the Masters costs $289/year, and comes with access to all of their exclusive video content, plus special one-off webinars and in-person seminars. This annual fee breaks down to $24/month, which is basically comparable in price to The Pro Audio Files or Lynda.com. However, the minimum buy-in is for one full year, which must be paid up front, making MWM a significantly more serious commitment.

I highly recommend giving both Mix with the Masters and Pensado’s Place a shot, even if only to be reminded of some important things you already knew.

pureMix: Best of Both Worlds?

Lastly, I have to put pureMix in its own category since it is an amalgamation of the other three categories all in one site. pureMix has tutorials for beginners, technique-refining videos for advanced engineers, and conceptual interviews with the pros.

pureMix’s Fabrice Dupont at the console.

Their target audience is definitely advanced engineers—they expect you know a good bit already—but they don’t get too crazy-in-depth like some of the videos on Mix with the Masters.

The first thing you see when you log in to pureMix is their motto, which takes up the entire window: “Learn the theory, not the presets.” I couldn’t agree with this philosophy more.

This site has it all, and in my opinion, it is the best all-in-one purchase you can make if you’re looking for a bit of everything. It has the choose-your-own-adventure feel of Lynda.com and CreativeLive, but the content is from a smaller selection of fantastic contributors (Fab Dupont’s videos are especially great), and unlike the mainstream marketplaces, it is strictly audio-focused.

You do still need a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit to create your own curriculum, but since the content has a significantly higher average quality than some of its competitors, it’s far less likely you will waste your time on a sub-par video.

pureMix offers some videos for free, some for on-demand paid viewing (ranging from $12-$40 a pop), and some are reserved for a pro membership, which costs $89.99 for 3 months, or $269.99 for a full year (comparable to Mix with the Masters), and grants you access to all the videos on the site. Also included as part of the membership are a useful ear-training tool and access to the premium pureMix forums.

Summing it Up

In my view, The Pro Audio Files is my vote for beginners, pureMix is perfect once you have a good base of knowledge already, and both Pensado’s Place and Mix with the Masters offer macro-level refinement for engineers of all levels.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed going through the content on all of these sites. My ego had been telling me that my engineering didn’t need the help of an online educational outlet, but after getting to know the options, I have become aware that I was very wrong and I suspect many others will be in the same boat. It’s always good to to be reminded that we’re never done in continuing our education, and sites like these make it very easy for us to do so.

Kyle Joseph is a freelance producer and engineer who recently opened his own studio in Greenpoint, Perimeter Recording.

For more information on SonicScoop’s own course, Mixing Breakthroughs, coming in Spring/Summer 2016, be sure to click here and subscribe to the SonicScoop newsletter.

Please note: When you buy products through links on this page, we may earn an affiliate commission.