Fundamentals before fancy

Everybody’s obsessed with the latest plugins these days, looking up YouTube videos on parallel processing, and other cool-sounding tricks. And all of that is really good, but don’t start with that.

If you’re a relative newbie, just learn how to listen and balance things. Faders are engineered to move up and down, so do that. Can you hear all the vocal parts? Know what an alto is? Can you distinguish the various guitars? Push the lead vocals as necessary to keep them in front of the band. Bring up that guitar solo a bit, or the riff between verses from the keyboard. Adjust for different keyboard patches, some being louder than others. Some keyboard parts need to be loud, like a pipe organ. Others far lower and in the background, such as a string pad. Learn what this sounds like and what you’re listening for musically. That’s far more important than twiddling knobs on a plugin.