I have recently come across a product called “Mix Templates for Cubase”, which are Cubase mixing setups for different genres, using normal Cubase plugins and effects. (There is also a version for ProTools but I won’t give any links here - it’s easy to find with Google). The demos are quite impressive, but I cannot find an independent review anywhere. The reviews I find are all along the lines of: “This is an independent review”, or “Is it a scam?” “Mix templates are legitimate”. Such reviews set off a lot of alarms.
Does anyone here know anything about this product? Have you tried it? I am interested because the demos sound so good, and the pricing is OK, but…
I think this is probably a waste of money. Mix templates are not something that really works in practice. Even if I mix songs from the same genre, there are few commonalities that would allow templating. You cannot sensibly separate the recording process from the mixing process in a way that would allow for generic templates.
The examples of the differences before/after are also very likely not authentic. The before sample sounds like a recording with badly placed microphones and a lot of room ambience. If you want to get the result they present as “after”, you would have put quite a bit of thought into microphone placement before already, close miking the individual drum elements. If you did that already, it’s extremely unlikely that you’re so incompetent to create the ‘before’ mix they show by making the room ambient channel so dominant. So it seems they deliberately made a very bad mix from good source material to show their point. The same is true for the other examples.
So to me it sounds not exactly like scam, but like a poor product with limited applicability together with dishonest marketing to take advantage of those who believe that mixing is too hard for them to master. Mixing is hard, but if you trust your ears and just collect some experience, you will get there soon enough. And most importantly, you will learn how to produce good quality from step one. Nobody (and especially no template) will create a good mix from a bad recording.
If you want to invest money into better sounding mixes, I would recommend you get Alan Parson’s DVD training. It’s one of the best resources you can get for learning about audio engineering on a level you need as a creative musician who wants to perform all production steps himself.
I totally agree with Jazz. Mixing is so dependent on the specifics of the source material, which by its nature will vary a lot between different projects, that it makes no sense to apply the same processing across the board - even within the same genre. For example, imagine you have 2 tracks with different singers on them where one is very consistent in their volume and the other moves around a lot so the volume varies. You are likely to use a compressor on each of them, but the settings would be quite different for each singer. That’s not something a template can really take into account. That’s also why presets in compressors with names like “Lead Female Vocal” are at best maybe an OK starting point and at worst probably misleading. It’s better to just understand how the compressors work, understand the issue you are trying to address, and use your ears. This is true for every other aspect of mixing.
Like any other skill it can take awhile to get proficient at (and much longer, if ever, to master). But that’s the nature of skills. Take the money you would have spent on the templates and get a good book or two about mixing. There is also a lot of material on the net (but also a lot of misinformation). I’m also a big fan of the Groove 3 music training videos.
Thanks Jazz & Raino. I understand where you are coming from. I planned to use these templates as a starting point for some of my mixes, not sticking with what was proposed. I thought it might give me some idea of what each plug-in can do. But I do understand the uniqueness of each song.
What I want to know is whether anyone has actually tried this.
Does the mfg. have a user forum? Post a product link so we can see what they’re selling.
I’m skeptical you’d get much insight based on how a plug gets used in one context. If you were taking up painting it might be useful to look at some Picasso paintings. But that’s not a starting point. To get anything out of it you’d need to have at least some basic knowledge about brushes, paint characteristics, composition etc. before hand.
Check these out. $15/month for all you can eat (or a la carte if you prefer).
I appreciate the concern about whether this practical. The main reason for my post is to see if anyone can confirm that there is a product here. As it is, there is no user’s forum, useful knowledge base, …
Yeah, that seems pretty sketchy. They promise the impossible, that you can just import your audio and get a professional sounding mix without needing to know how anything works
Easy to use template, built according to audio mixing methodologies used by sound experts.
Gives you access to mixing knowledge you will not get anywhere else.
User friendly approach
…
Get the sound of a pro artist, without being a professional sound technician
Affordable offering to get you the ‘expensive’ result
They offer zero details on how such a miracle might be accomplished. Also the language/jargon is off - they don’t use the normal words audio folks use (e.g. wave size instead of signal level).
You’d probably actually get a template from them since that’s a pretty trivial thing to create. But I can’t imagine it is in anyway useful. Personally I’d be worried about getting a virus from them.
Just think they want to make a little money on the templates they already made when recording.
I would recommend using money on video tutorials instead.
The comments confirm my reluctance. There is no visibility into what they are actually offering, and the reviews are sketchy. I’m out. Thanks for the discussion and input guys.
Take the minute to enjoy how well it worked for you.
I would say there could be something valuable here in the fact there will be a type of ‘preset’ for a newbie to learn from. The problem is that there is never a ‘preset’ that works every time for any instrument. Actually, except for simple things like a delay, presets for any effect IME are never perfect. Too many variables…
Now there is nothing more valuable than experience and learning what works from it. This could be something that benefits a lazy trust fund kid who doesn’t wish to spend the time learning. But then they have much better than the stock Cubase plugs already and this would be beneath them right? lol! I kid…
For $49 bucks I would say take a day off work, watch 1000 free youtube videos on recording techniques/getting tone/room treatment/etc… Learn what it takes to achieve a good mix before adding FX and EQ. Then if 20 years later and tens of thousand dollars, it still sounds like crap. Buy those templates and give up.
Maybe if you joined the forum sooner and asked some advice you wouldn’t have needed them…And if you had still got them and liked them then you would at least have some other posts on the forum already making you look less of a shill than just having 2 posts only about these
I wonder why nobody ever does that???..Mysterious slight of ear?
Bell? Roy? Both the boy? Come on man, at least be creative… This is stupid.
Reported both. Bye boys…
Actually before you are deleted as obvious spammers, I am curious as to what makes you think you would get away with this on a software developer forum site? And how incredibly horrible are you as spammers that you have not tried at home recording forums? I look forward to deleting you as a spammer there. You really need to look into other means of promotion. BS fake posts are not going to work. Sorry, it is obvious…
Actually there is some irony here too. First we have a bunch of credible Cubasians pointing out how dodgy the templates seem. Then we get a couple of obviously dodgy posts claiming the templates “worked” for them, which only casts more doubt on the templates’ value. So in an effort to improve the rep of their templates they’ve actually made it worse.
Why do you want to spend more money on this? Cubase ships with many Track Presets that may help you get started. Just rt-click on the track header and apply one of the built-in presets built for the type of track you are applying it to. Then tweak from there. Might help you get some ideas of what works, and more importantly, doing some analysis might help you learn why.
Actually the OP came to the conclusion quite awhile back that the templates weren’t useful. Then recently there were a couple of (now removed) posts claiming the templates were great. Presumably these were from the folks who made the templates trying to counter the negative reaction here.
