Image Credit: Ultimate Producer

Just how good are you at mixing music? Challenge yourself with Balancing Channels and Mastering the Mix.

Work on your producing skills with Tom Frampton from Mastering the Mix, learning mixing techniques using Ultimate Producer’s new Balancing Channels challenge. It’s a fun way to try playing around with mixing a song outside a DAW, to learn skills and practise until you can produce like a pro.

The interactive music production challenge helps to train your ear, ultimately improving your ability to achieve a pro-sounding balance in your own mixes. Balancing a mix is all about fiddling with the volume of the individual tracks’ faders, finding the sweet spot before even considering moving onto the next stage of applying effects like EQ and compressors.

Within Balancing Channels you can test your ability to balance a song, adjusting and soloing the bass, drum tops, kick, music and effects, and vocals faders until you think the mix sounds perfect. Hit “submit” and you’ll be judged out of 100 – pass and you can move onto the next level. Get stuck and you’ll be offered a preview of Tom Frampton’s balanced mix for reference, and further guidance if you still can’t match it.

Ultimate Producer offers interactive music production challenges that test and train your studio skills. Balancing Channels is a fun way to practise working on a mix that isn’t yours. The program has a series of levels, getting steadily more difficult as you progress, covering 12 songs from pop, hip-hop, rock, and house genres.

Tom Frampton, founder of Mastering the Mix, said: “The volume of a channel has a huge effect on its overall sound, especially when adjusted in the context of the whole mix… This is an important skill to work on, but it’s not really possible to use your own mixes or even professionally mixed stems in your DAW as focused practice with measurable results and actionable feedback. Balancing Channels on Ultimate Producer is a smart, fast, and fun way to improve this skill.”

It’s easier to be more objective in your decision-making when it’s not your own carefully crafted beats. All you need to play is an internet connection and ideally a pair of headphones or external speakers.

You can try out the challenge for free here. The full Balancing Channels challenge is $37 for access to the full 12 songs and unique personalised feedback. There’s a 30 day money back guarantee too.