How To Create A Great Mix:

First and foremost, a great mix does not require the most expensive equipment. Many popular songs have been recorded on less than stellar gear. The most important tools for a great mix are a great song and a creative mixer. Everything else is icing on the cake. 

Mixing is an art form. Yes, there are technical skills you need to have, but in the end, you need to treat your console, mixer or DAW as a musical instrument and your outboard gear and plug-ins as your paint brushes and color palette. When famed mixer Chris Lord Alge (CLA) gets into the groove of a mix, he starts moving around his large SSL console like a dancer and works the faders like piano keys. He prefers the large console format because, as he says, just imagine a concert pianist trying to play using a mouse! The point being, whether you are mixing on a console or completely in the box, you have to treat mixing as a creative process. If you get too caught up in the technical side of the process, you will lose sight of the overall vision and end up creating a small, lifeless mix.

Another important rule of mixing is to keep it moving. Work fast. Trust your instincts. It is very easy to get bogged down in the details. This will lead to what I call mix paralysis. Everything grinds to a halt while you spend potentially hours on a minor EQ adjustment on the keyboard, or the compression attack time of a snare, or the reverb trail on a vocal. While these may be important, they are not important enough to waste your valuable session time tweaking to death. Just go with your gut. In the end, nobody is going to care whether the guitar is a half db higher or lower. You need to be confident in your decisions. After 5 minutes of work on a particular sound, for every additional minute you spend tweaking the sound, your confidence level goes down 5%. No, that is not based on any scientific observation, but you should use it to identify the onset of mix paralysis. 

As you mix, you become highly sensitive to every sound in the mix. This can make you susceptible to overthinking. As Mixerman says in his book Musician’s Survival Guide to a Killer Record, “Do. Don’t think. Definitely don’t overthink”. If you find yourself going down the tweak rabbit hole, just stop and move on. If you insist on a resolution, then go outside and take a walk to clear your brain. Sometimes that is all you need to fix the inertia. 

When you mix, it is important to always keep the musical vision, the end result, in mind. Every instrument must be mixed within the context of the big picture. CLA says, “Nobody will ever hear anything in solo. PERIOD. So the only way to get a great vocal sound is when it’s competing with everything else in the mix”. If you EQ and compress the kick drum in isolation, then there is a good chance it’s going to sound like crap when you blend it with the bass. And visa-versa. That doesn’t mean that you should never solo an instrument or section to get the right sound, but always polish each sound or section in relation to all of the others sounds around it. Bottom line: the only thing that is important is the final mix.

To understand the big picture, you need to familiarize yourself with the reference mix. This mix is presumably what the client wants you to emulate and enhance with your brilliant mixing skills. If you don’t take the reference mix seriously, then you will probably end up with a serious disconnect with your client. That said, the mixing room is your domain and you should feel free to create what you think is the most kick ass mix you can achieve. Just keep in mind that the further away you get from the reference mix, the more intense the conversation will be with the client when it’s time to discuss mix notes.

Before each mix session, you need to do your setup. When you sit down to begin mixing, everything needs to be in the right place and running smoothly. To this end, your prep should include:

• Import the project into your DAW and ensure that all tracks play and are aligned
• Delete any tracks you are not going to use
• Arrange your tracks in the order you like to see them and label them coherently
• Set up your busses and subgroups
• Set up your sends (reverb, delays, etc.) the way you like them
• Use clip gain to ensure that your audio files are volume consistent
• Make sure your audio buffer size is high enough to handle the track load
• Test all the monitors you will be using to ensure they are working as expected
• Ensure your storage devices have the necessary space to store the mix bounces
• Listen to the reference mix provided by the client

Now you should be able to begin actually mixing. Each mixer has their own style of initiating the mix session. I like to throw up all the faders to see what everything sounds like and then begin listening to each track and then combining them into sections. For music where there is a rhythm section, I usually start there first. The rhythm is what everything sits on. So, in my opinion, this is what should be established first. Yes, I am a drummer, but I’d like to think I’m being objective here! You need to get the bass and kick drum to sound like they are a part of a single structure. One should be lower or higher than the other to create distinct frequency boundaries. They should sound cohesive and connected but you should also be able to hear each of them distinctly. Once you have that foundation, everything else should ride smoothly on top.

The first step in mixing after setup is known as the discovery phase. This is where you listen to the different tracks and discover their quirks and eccentricities, combine tracks together to see how they play with each other, and generally establish a framework and path forward towards achieving the final mix.

There are obviously many, many other tasks and decisions that you will need to make as you move forward in the mixing process, but let me end this article with one final piece of information that I feel shouldn’t be left out:

The most important thing to remember is that, unless you are mixing your own music, you are working on somebody else’s vision. As creative as mixing is, it is still a service they are paying you to perform on their music. You need to try and stay as neutral as possible even when you disagree with what they are saying. That doesn’t mean that you can’t make suggestions. But remember, in the end they have veto power over those suggestions. Be professional and lose the ego. You might actually learn something you hadn’t thought of before.

Stay tuned! The Sound Sculptor will continue to provide blogs, articles and interviews with other mixers to give you the tools you need to become a top shelf mixer. 

By Jeff Neiblum