The dreaded mixing rut is something we all encounter from time to time. This can mean that you slave over your mix for hours and hours, only for it to sound gradually worse the more time you spend on it, or you find yourself stuck in patterns that doesn’t really help you get better results. Not to mention obsessing over tiny little details that in the grand scheme of things don’t really matter all that much.
In this post I will be going through a few things that I find helps in getting out of that mixing rut.
FREQUENT BREAKS
By far the most effective and simple thing to do is taking breaks, and it is absolutely crucial. It will vary obviously, but most people have trouble staying focused and objective after about an hours worth of mixing. And if your monitors are on the loud side as well, your ears are getting fatigued.
Grab a coffee or whatever beverage you prefer, take a few minutes off doing something else. Going outside for some fresh air is gold.
When back in, what I then normally do is play through the song without touching anything. Normally I can then pinpoint exactly what I need to do pretty instantly.
And if I find that everything I’m doing is sounding horrible, I’ll take a couple of days off – if I can. Very useful between projects!
If you’re working with deadlines, schedule so you have at least one day off from time to time. Mixing can be quite exhausting mentally as well as for your ears, we all need to reset ourselves occasionally.
Also, if you’re doing long hours, don’t send your mix off until the next day. Seriously.
Check it again in the morning when you’ve had a good nights sleep, and fix the stuff you need.
HAVE A DEADLINE
If you’re mixing songs for other bands and artists you’ll usually have a deadline to work off. But when doing your own music, it’s very important you set yourself a timeframe for when it needs to be done, and stick with it.
Having the mentality of «it’s done when it’s done» is often a horrible idea. What eventually happens is you keep yourself from making decisions until way too late in the mix, and then start obsessing over every tiny little detail. Repeat ad nauseum. And the result more often than not is it never gets done – or you keep making it worse the longer you work on it.
A realistic deadline will force you to focus on what is important for that mix. Depending on the genre and instrumentation that could be different things. For a pop/rock type thing, I’ll typically spend most of the time getting the drums and vocals right.
The key thing is making decisions early on, and realizing that every instrument doesn’t have to sound amazing for a mix to be really good. The more you do this, the better your mixes will become in the long run.
PLAN YOUR MIX
Somewhat related to the point about deadlines is having a plan. This why I’ll always start off with just getting a decent static mix with just levels and some panning, and then just listen through a few times without any plugins.
Usually I’ll then make notes of what I need to, whether it be eq, volume automation, panning and things like that. To this day I still prefer writing stuff down by hand.
From there I’ll usuallly start with pulling out mud with eq and doing clip gain automation on a few tracks where needed (usually vocals). The idea here is that I should be able to hear everything clearly before I start adding other stuff. From there it’s normally quite obvious what I will need to add.
LEARN TO MUTE
This is something that can be a game changer, especially for mixing your own songs. You’ve layered in some wicked parts throughout the song, and you really dig them. But…often they don’t really add anything useful to the song/mix, or they might actually get in the way of the important stuff.
I’ll often listen to the mix with just the rhythm tracks and lead vocal and then add in the extra stuff, one by one. Quite often I find there’s stuff that the mix doesn’t really need, and I’ll just remove it from the session altogether.
For this you really to put on a listener’s hat though. When done with recording the tracks, it’s often a very good idea to stop thinking like a musician. Again, this comes down to what the key elements for that mix are.
CHANGE YOUR WORKFLOW
Another great way to get out of a rut. Over time we tend to find we use the same plugins and approaches on the same tracks, and things tend to sound…the same.
Trying out something new can really spark some new ideas.
I just did a little experiment myself where I did a video series on mixing with an analog type workflow in the box, where all I used were console/channel strip plugins and emulations of vintage analog gear. There were no fancy new specialist plugins, no overly surgical eqs or frequency analyzers or things like that.
Doing a mix like that really forced me to trust my ears, with no visual cues as to where I should be eqing or how much to compress, to name a couple of things. And doing eq more in broad strokes really makes you focus on what really is important for a mix to work. No tracks where you have 5-6 obscenely narrow notches to take out frequencies.
Doing it this way does require fairly well recorded tracks though.
But once it was done I was very happy with the result, and I can see myself mixing in a sort of hybrid way of that way and how I’ve mixed before.
Link to playlist here:
Hopefully some ideas there that you can use!
TRY TO AVOID PRESETS
Presets can be great ways of getting decent sounds quickly, say for a rough mix or something like that. And I’ll often use some in a project with multiple songs where you want a fairly uniform sound on drums, for example. But, I will only use them as a starting point.
I generally avoid them when starting on a new project though. What often happens with them is you just call up a preset and then move on to the next track and do the same thing, without really listening properly to how things sound. Needless to say, after a while everything just sounds the same. Very easy to get lazy with this!
And presets just don’t work for some things. The song and arrangement will dictate what sounds you need, not the other way around.
START AGAIN
So, you’ve spent 2-3 hours trying to get a good vocal sound going. You’ve got a couple of deessers, 3 eqs, saturation, 2-3 compressors and whatever fancy plugin you otherwise have on it. You bypass the plugins and realize you’ve wasted 3 hours by making your vocal sound a hell of a lot worse than it was to begin with. Oh yeah, we’ve all done it at some point. And it usually starts with some frequencies in the upper mids poking out, and dynamics a bit erratic.
This is when you take a good break, remove ALL of the plugins on the vocal and start again.
In general, if you’re spending more than an hour on any one track, you’re doing it wrong.
Chances are there’s something else in the mix that’s causing your vocal to sound poor.
Either that or the vocal was recorded with the wrong microphone for that particular singer.
This is also a major reason why I tend to work on the vocals before guitars and keys. I’ll usually have the drums, bass and vocals sounding great first and then add in the other stuff. Once you start adding in the other stuff, it’s usually quite obvious where the culprit is.
It’s also a lot better fitting the other stuff around the vocals than just adding the vocals towards the end of the process, hoping that it will work. Guitars in particular can very often mask the vocals as they’re often in the same frequency range.
And if the vocal still has nasty stuff poking out, more often than not I find a dynamic eq works wonders. The TDR Nova is great for this, and it’s free. So much more transparent than static eq notches that can destroy a vocal sound if you get carried away doing them.
And be very careful about doing eq boosts in the 2-5kHz range. That can get really harsh very quickly.
LISTEN TO MUSIC
Painfully obvious I know, but so easy to forget when you’re always working. And most importantly, listen to other stuff than the genre you tend to work in and have an open mind.
Plenty of cool mixing tricks and approaches in other genres that you can take inspiration from, and try out some new techniques or ways of working. Or you can find new ideas when it comes to instrumentation. So much that you can pick up from getting outside your comfort zone, and we all need that every once in a while.
Personally I’m not a fan of most electronic music, but damn there are some really cool ideas you can pick up and incorporate into the stuff you work on here and there.
And obviously study the greats from way back when. Those guys came up with some fantastically creative stuff to get around the limations they had.
STOP COMPARING YOURSELF TO OTHERS
So easy to fall into this trap, especially when using reference tracks with your mixing.
Reference tracks are very useful, don’t get me wrong. Use them to get as close as you can when it comes overall frequency balance, dynamics and things like that. But stop there.
What many will do is beat themselves up over their mixes not being as good as the pro ones. Don’t do that. Remember, a lot of those guys have been doing this 30-40 years on incredible equipment in well treated rooms, and are usually handed impeccably recorded tracks to mix.
Mixes of that quality should be a long term goal (long term as in years). For now, compare yourself to the last mix you did, you’ll most times see there is some gradual improvement. Take confidence from that and strive to get a little bit closer to your long term goal with every mix you do. Just keep in mind that it’s all about the song.
SEEK ADVICE FROM PEOPLE BETTER THAN YOU
Sometimes we may not even be aware what we’re doing wrong. To take massive steps then it’s quite important to have some sort of mentor or community that you can get advice from. The worst thing you can do is work in a vacuum and never getting stuff out there because you’re not sure how good it is.
These days there are plenty of recording and mixing communities and academies online that you can join. There you can find people at your level, semi-pros and professionals that do this for a living. Get feedback from these people. It might hurt your ego a bit to begin with but it’s absolutely worth it in the long run.
Well trained ears can quickly spot areas where you can improve. Listen to what they have to say – and implement it. It has definitely worked for me. And something I noticed wen joining the community I’m in was that I wasn’t as far off quality wise as I thought I was.
Self doubt can be crippling to say the least, having other people around that can help you out is absolutely brilliant. And before you know it you have made a massive improvement!
Hopefully you found some of this useful!