Trancendance: Good comment on the headphones.. A few spin off tips..
1. Get a good monitor system.
Particularly when your learning to hear the beats. Having a good quality speaker up close will really help. Also make sure its pointing at you rather than the rest of the room..
If your using a stereo system then TURN OFF any digital EQ effects (POP, ROCK and any music enhancing stuff), this really seems to screw around with the bass line..
2. Tape yourself often.
Its easy to think that was really good or really bad. When you've got your headphones on it sounds different. Listening to a tape of yourself helps identify your mistakes..
BUT don't listen to it straight away, leave it a day. You can get far too critical if you've just recorded it and start hearing things.. Like faults with the song production rather than your own mixing ability
3. Practise..
Practise often and put some structure into it. When your first learning getting beat mixing, down just keep at it. Time spent here should be on just getting with beat mixing.
As you get better just keeping at it, isn't as good a technique. Its better to spend time concentrating on mixing two records till your completely happy with it than spending hours mixing loads of records and not evaluating what your doing. - I've done this and others have and sometimes you get worse rather than better..
4. Commercial Chart Stuff..
Don't waste your money on cheesey records while your learning. This is not a slam on cheese! But you'll be suprised how easily you'll get fed up with those anthems when you only have 5 records and are practising for 4 hours a day!
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All this comes with a big pinch of salt. I've been mixing 18 months and I'm still shit, but these tips helped me along..
Jase.