10 STEPS TO A BETTER MIX
You got all the tracks you need to start mixing, and they’re recorded quite
well. Should be a breeze, right? Well, for most of us who are not seasoned professionals, this is not always the case. Below I’m going to share a few tips that massively increased the quality of my own mixing.
Some of these suggestions might be basic knowledge for one guy, but very useful for another.
Do keep in mind: I’m by no means an expert, but these are things that have worked for me.
Anyway, let’s go…
- SET A DEADLINE, AND KEEP IT
This is a huge one. By nature all of us who do recording and mixing are tweakers, and we’re never completely happy. And the longer we tweak, the worse the mix gets – almost without exception. I’ve found setting realistic deadlines for when a project has to be finished crucial. Little extra tip: grant yourself an extra day for checking what you did last night, making last adjustments and «printing» the final mix.
Another thing setting a deadline does is force you to make decisions.
In this age of digital recording that’s a very good thing. These days we have the opportunity of fixing stuff later, and quite often choose to do so. Danger of that is eventually you get so much stuff to fix that you have no idea where to begin, or just flat out skip sorting out what you need to do entirely. I’ve been guilty of that myself frequently.
Making decisions early on really helps focusing on the important stuff, and allows you to mix effectively.
- BE ORGANIZED
Organizing everything before you start mixing is often dull and quite tedious, but absolutely necessary. For years I was horrible at this. I’d just jump right in and throw on plugins left and right, often in the same session that I was using while tracking. Quite often with unnamed tracks all over the session as well.
Didn’t use templates either.
That really is a recipe for disaster.
Easy to fall into that trap for us who are musicians..we just want to play.
Although you can get a decent mix going that way as well, you’re making it unne
cessarily hard and you waste valuable time on the dull stuff while you should be mixing.
These days I’ll have separate templates (which interestingly enough are easy to adjust for any given session) for tracking and mixing, with all the necessary routing, submixes and such ready which allows me to focus on the music.
And…use buses/submixes (or VCA’s if that’s your thing for everything. Every track. Huge timesaver for when you need to rebalance your mix, which inevitably happens on pretty much every mix the further you get through the process. Very few things are more frustrating than having to adjust invidual faders on a 50-60 track mix right before you should be finishing it. That’s a proper rabbit hole.
- EDIT BEFORE PROCESSING
Another very important one, in my experience. When doing the actual mixing you should be doing as little as possible of the technical tedious stuff, left/right side of the brain and all that jazz.
This includes sorting out timing/phase issues, getting rid of noise and similar, tuning vocals (if that’s your thing), volume automation/clip gain, adding drum samples if necessary, not to mention getting rid of stuff that doesn’t work or isn’t needed.
Doing this right you should then be left with a static mix that already sounds quite good.
And…resist the temptation to start throwing on compressors in that phase.
Do volume automation where needed so you can hear stuff clearly.
This way you can get away with a lot less processing later, and your mix will thank you.
- INTENTION BEHIND EVERY DECISION
NEVER insert a plugin or do some sort of processing without being able to answer WHY. Don’t just throw on a plugin just because you saw this and that mixing engineer on YouTube doing it on his mix. Have a good reason for everything you do.
Listen to your static/rough mix, figure out what it needs and use the appropriate tools for the job.
This is also why it’s crucial that you learn the plugins you have. This takes time and a lot of trial and error, but eventually you know what works for a certain task. Do this for a while and you know that a Neve-style EQ for example is a horrible choice if you need to go really surgical on a track, while it can sound glorious on a very digital sounding VSTi.
There’s a time and place for experimenting of course, but you need to decide that a mix needs it. Or not. Sometimes the line between being creative and ruining a song can be very thin.
- TAKE FREQUENT BREAKS
Ideally this shouldn’t be necessary to bring up, but it really is important to remind oneself. The obvious reason is ear fatigue. After a while your ears do get tired, and the first thing that happens is you start cranking upper mids and high frequencies, especially if you’re listening at too high volumes to begin with.
Another thing is you lose concentration if you sit there too long, and start making weird or plain wrong decisions. Sometimes we start hearing problems that don’t even exist. Very easy to end up with a horrible mix when that starts happening.
For me I’ve found that after somewhere between 60-90 minutes I need a break to reset. Grab a coffee or something to eat, check some mail or in general just do something entirely different for a few minutes. Most often this does the trick.
- BE BOLD!
Safe is boring.
This is probably my biggest pet peeve when it comes to a lot of the YouTube channels/blogs that are mainly directed towards home recording/project studio guys. Too many of them stick to the narrative that you should never do anything drastic. Subtle eq moves, barely any compression (if at all), to name a couple of examples.
Sure, go that route if you want, but what you will end up is boring mixes and you won’t get much work.
NO. Screw that.
When the song allows for it, do something different or wrong (in a good way, of course). Mangle an acoustic guitar through some weird effects, run vocals through guitar pedals, a way too loud guitar solo, the possibilities are pretty endless. Just make sure it adds to the song.
Related to this, stop mixing with your eyes. If it sounds good, it is good.
Too many will look at an EQ curve and think «wait, this doesn’t look right».
Don’t be one of those guys. Do what’s needed for a song to sound as good as it can. Make it interesting for the listener, and they’ll remember it.
Now, let’s be honest. I’m not an expert by any means, and I still make some of these mistakes, but the longer you do this the better you get at avoiding most of them.
- LOSE THE ATTITUDE
Here’s one that applies to both sides of the desk, so to speak. As with any line of work, be confident in your abilities but keep your ego in check.
Short and simple answer is no one wants to work with someone with an attitude problem who constantly makes everything about him or herself.
Good communication and being open to suggestions and constructive criticism is incredibly important in helping everyone moving in the same direction. Yeah, some ideas might be just too crazy, but not even bothering trying something out can be stupid. If nothing else, you might learn something cool that you can use sometime later.
The overall goal is always getting the best out of the music and artist you’re working with, rather than feeding someones ego.
- COMPRESSION
Beginners often get taught this thing about compression taking the peaks and making them quieter and bringing up the low level stuff, sort of like an automatic volume knob. This is indeed true.
However, it’s only part of the truth, and almost none of all the various YouTube channels and such even talk about that – I can only think of a few exceptions. Compressors are incredibly useful for shaping your sound as well as for front to back placement in the mix. Just tweaking attack and release times can really change where an instrument sits in a mix.
For many years I didn’t really think about this, but my mixes really improved a lot once I started shifting my thinking on compressors.
One argument I often hear is with distorted electric guitars. They’re already compressed so you don’t need more. Quite often that’s wrong. A great example is if you’re working on hard rock/metal songs and need the guitars to be very «in your face», try some compression with a slow attack time (an LA-3A is fantastic for this). Suddenly you have more attack on the sounds and they poke through without you having to turn them up and then have your vocal or snare disappearing – that can be a right rabbit hole. Other times you’ll want a quicker attack time for instruments that have more of a supporting role.
A square wave can be made to sound cool with the right compressor settings.
They can do so much more than just smoothing out peaks.
- AUTOMATION
More than any other mix move, this is probably the one thing that sets a great mix apart from an ok one, especially when it comes to pop, rock and electronic styles. Most times it’s not too hard to get things sounding good and getting levels right. Keeping things interesting for the listener throughout the whole song is the hard part, and sometimes the arrangement alone isn’t enough.
The big thing to remember with it is…don’t be lazy.
And remember, you can automate a hell of a lot more than just volume and panning. In most DAWs these days, you can pretty much automate any parameter of any plugin. And this is where creativity shines. Reverb/delay sends, filter frequencies, fx on/off, you name it.
It can be quite tedious and time consuming, but it’s almost always worth the effort.
And to round this post off…
- JUST FINISH IT ALREADY!
Again, this very much relates to the first tip about realistic deadlines.
What I’ve found works well is when you’ve been mixing for the whole day and it’s just not getting any better, bounce it and don’t touch anything.
The next day, grab a pen and something to write on (yup, real analog style) and listen to the mix a few times with your computer screen off and preferrably away from your mixing position. Take notes of what needs to be addressed. Tweak the things you’ve just written down – and ONLY THOSE.
Repeat this process 2 or 3 more times and usually you’ll find it’s as good as you can get it at that point in time with the source material you have.
Eventually you’ll find something you could have improved on it, but don’t beat yourself up over it. Make a note of it, use that acquired knowledge next time you mix.
A perfect mix just does not exist, and we never stop learning.
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Hope this was helpful, and check back for more posts. 🙂