Wednesday, August 17th - 18th Lesson - Posted on 2016-08-21 by Michael Francis

I had my 18th lesson with Joe Hernandez at Innovative Music studios this past Wednesday.  After lesson 17, Joe gave me a copy of my first mix of "Deal with the Devil" on CD.  I went home and listened to the song to see if there were any improvements or errors that needed to be fixed for the mix.  I let my wife listen to it as well and she helped me figure out that the lead vocals were louder than the instrument tracks.  It sounded as if the music was just playing in the background and the singer was directly on the mic.  There was also some weird static noises that needed to be eliminated at the very beginning of the song.  So for this lesson, the first thing Joe had me do was make the necessary changes I found to "Deal with the Devil", then he burned the 2nd mix on another CD for me.  After that we started working on a new mix session for this Hip-Hop song called "Good Morning".  The song had a slight gospel feel to it.  There was one particular instrument track that had a popping sound.  We tried to use a noise leveler to remove the popping sound, but that didn't work.  So we just added EQ.  I had to split the track into 2 mono tracks in order for it work and removing all the popping noise.  Joe stated that the popping sound was due to the track being sampled and sometimes that happens when it's a sampled track.  I went through the same mixing process as before.  We didn't have enough time to finish the whole song during the lesson, so Joe bounced the song to me and asked me to finish the mix at home.  I completed the mix and bounced it back to him on Saturday, August 20th.  We will see how it turned out this coming Tuesday.

Mike