Pro Producer Reacts to TERRIBLE Suno Ai Mixing Advice

[00:00:00]I have been producing, mixing, and mastering music for the last 13 years.

[00:00:04]I've put out over 300 of my own songs, and some songs that I mixed and mastered have gotten over a million streams. So, I know what I'm talking about. And before I react to this video, I just want to put out that this is not meant to be hate, but there are a lot of people making Suno AI content that do not have the music production background. It just sounds like they make up stuff so that they have a video.

[00:00:25]Some information is just bad, and I'm here to expose it. And the video I'm going to be reacting to is this one, "Your Suno AI Song Sound Bad? Here's Why and How to Fix It" by AI with Tech Snap.

[00:00:35]Let's take a gander, shall we?

[00:00:37]>> I have this bouncy cat song that I love.

[00:00:40]I'm going to click the three dots here, go to remix, and click on open in studio.

[00:00:47]First, we need to unlock the mix. I'm going to click on extract stems, and here I'm selecting all detected stems.

[00:00:53]>> There's the first problem. When this video was recorded, the advanced stem splitter was not available with Suno.

[00:00:58]So, I would actually not suggest stemming out your song, because Suno isn't stemming out anything. What they do is Suno creates full songs. After the full song is created, Suno is basically guessing to get what it thinks are the stems. So, you're not getting actual stems. The advanced stem splitter is a little bit better, because it actually regenerates the stems, but that's still in beta as well. Unless you really, really know what you're doing, it's probably best to not stem it out, because even if you stemmed out the whole thing and then just exported that, that is going to sound worse than the original song without any stem separation. Let's continue.

[00:01:36]>> Yeah, this sounds a bit messy to me.

[00:01:38]>> It doesn't It doesn't sound messy.

[00:01:39]>> So, I'm going to solo the drums here and check again.

[00:01:44]>> [music] >> See, as you can hear by the drum stem, the drums already just sound bad because of the stem separation.

[00:01:51]>> So, let's open the EQ on the drum stem.

[00:01:54]I'm going to apply the notch filter here and adjust its shape until we get rid of the hollow sound.

[00:02:02]>> Okay, so as somebody who's like actual engineer, I'd never do that. Especially not on an entire drum stem. Usually as a music producer / engineer / all of that, we would have the kick, the snare, the symbols, and all the different elements of the drums separately so that we don't have to do that. There would be some processing that goes on the entire drum bus, which is just all the drums together, but that's usually maybe a tiny bit of EQ, but mostly just a little bit of compression to get everything glued together. I would never ever ever ever make an EQ cut like that on a drum bus unless there was some type of unheard of anomaly where that was needed.

[00:02:41]Bad.

[00:02:42]>> That's definitely better. Now, the snare sounds crisp and sits well in the mix.

[00:02:47]I'm boosting band one slightly to add more kick to the bass. Then I'm lifting band five a little to bring out more brightness from the symbols.

[00:02:54]>> Whenever you have that EQ on the entire drum bus, once again, you are affecting every single part of it. So whenever he says he's taking up the high end to make the symbols come out or whatever or make them crispier, you're also taking up the high end in the snare, in the kick. And whenever you boost the low end, if there was some low end from the snare, you're also boosting that, which is not good usually.

[00:03:17]>> The bass stem. This is the anchor of your entire track and I need it to be solid. So here I'm going to boost the bass in the bass stem itself.

[00:03:25]>> Oh. Oh. You never [ __ ] do that. Sorry to interrupt you, Panic. This is Chill Panic. Did you know I just opened up custom mastering services? Well, I did.

[00:03:32]That means my 13 years of music production knowledge will be used on your song. Here's an example of what I can do to your song.

[00:03:39]>> [music] [music] >> Spots are limited because I only have so much time, so get in while you can. If the link is still in the description, that means you still got a spot >> Back to the video.

[00:03:52]>> You know what? Let's go to the whiteboard. This EQ, it goes from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz because this is the range of human hearing. He boosted this right here. That is the lowest of the low.

[00:04:03]That's the bass that you can't even hear, but you feel. And he boosted the [ __ ] out of that. That's a no-no. That's not going to help anything. If anything, you should cut anything below 20 Hz. You should definitely not have a low shelf that's boosting 20 Hz and possibly even below 20 Hz. That's going to distort your mix, making it where you can't get it as loud as you potentially could otherwise. It's just It's going to [ __ ] ruin the mix completely. Bad.

[00:04:29]Bad. Don't do that.

[00:04:32]>> There, you can hear the bass boost. It anchors the drums and melody together for a more expensive feel.

[00:04:37]>> It anchors the drums and melody together for a more expensive feel. That doesn't even make sense. It doesn't mean anything.

[00:04:45]>> I also need the vocals to sound more open here. I added a fifth band there and lifted it to increase the brightness.

[00:04:52]>> No. No.

[00:04:53]>> [laughter] >> Just like we talked about with the 20 Hz. Okay, the 20 Hz boosting, that's going to distort the whole mix. Doing whatever the [ __ ] that is, that's just going to hurt your ears. If you have to boost that much, then there's just not enough there to begin with. And if there's not enough there to begin with, boosting it that much is not going to do anything except maybe make it sound more distorted.

[00:05:16]>> Let's compare this final version with the original track.

[00:05:19]>> Yeah, let's let's uh let's compare it.

[00:05:23]>> [music] >> Bass is so [ __ ] loud. [laughter] It doesn't sound much better to me. It does sound brighter and louder, which gives the illusion of it sounding better.

[00:05:33]>> Just a reminder before you take off, if you'd like your Suno AI song mastered by somebody with 13 years of experience, check that link in the description. If it's still there, I need an inside joke.

[00:05:42]>> Operation shock and awe.

[00:05:44]>> And if there is anything else you'd like to know about Suno AI, let me know down in the comments or I'm going to get so jiggy with it that they're going to call it operation shock and awe.