In this article Julian suggests 7 things you can do to improve your mixes. Not all of them happen at the mix stage…
In my recent post One Thing Which Will Make You A Better Engineer I was rather scathing about the value of ear training. In a previous job, along with all my colleagues, we had annual hearing tests. These were to indemnify my employer rather than to benefit us but it did highlight the massive differences in the response of our ears. DJs and drummers usually looked ashen-faced on receiving their results (hearing damage is real kids!) and older colleagues would look in resignation at their progressive top end loss.
The thing is, the people with the best hearing weren’t the best engineers, it was the people with the most experience and talent who were. So rather than treating mixing like a competitive sport, what can we do to make a practical and appreciable improvement to our mixes? Here are seven suggestions:
Write Away From Your Computer
If you are a songwriter recording your own material, if you don’t already, try writing ‘old school’ with a pen and paper, a keyboard or guitar and a simple recording device like a phone or hand held recorder. We must have all fallen down the DAW rabbit hole of letting the production process precede the writing and it’s very much a case of letting the tail wag the dog. No one ever scored an ear worm because of a reverb patch.
There are styles which suit this approach better than others but if you can’t convey your tune on an instrument or a cappella, maybe you don’t have the banger you think you do. Once you have a good song you’re in with a fighting chance. Without that you are probably just ‘rolling it in glitter’ as the old joke goes!
Track Stuff Right
Anyone who has ever mixed live sound will have noticed how great performances kind of mix themselves. I’ve had the experience of mixing a festival stage and really struggling to get a band’s sound into shape, beating myself up that I can’t get it sounding right. Then the next band come on and with the same settings it sounds awesome. It wasn’t me…
It’s important to concentrate on what is good about a recording when mixing. With the power and control of modern DAWs it is too easy to squeeze the life out of a performance chasing down every imperfection.
That doesn’t apply in quite the same way when tracking. If the take isn’t good, the mix is unlikely to be all that. Tracking is hard because you have to balance getting what you need with recognising when you have got it and not pushing the performers to the point of diminishing returns. If the singer is tired and takes are flatlining or deteriorating then you’re unlikely to get a better one but that doesn’t mean you can just go with what you got and fix it later. Be fussy but work quickly and keep the vibe positive, and don’t forget to take detailed notes. Rubbish in Rubbish out works the other way round too - Grammy in….
Work With Someone Else
There are of course examples of extremely successful projects which have been completed by one talented individual from writing to mixdown. Prince, Mike Oldfield, you get the idea. However I believe that most of us would benefit from input from other people. In a recent episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme This Cultural Life, Paul McCartney said of his songwriting partnership with John Lennon that working like that they never got stuck. Compositions were written by one or the other but the creative nudges from a trusted second party meant they rarely got stuck on an idea. The occasional “no not that” or “try this instead” kept the momentum of the creative process. This approach is valuable in every stage of the production process, not just writing. Maybe some people fear relinquishing control by working with others, or maybe it’s the discomfort of sharing incomplete work which isn’t yet finished. As William Wittman said of his sessions with Cyndi Lauper “daring to suck” is important. Bad ideas generate responses which can ultimately result in better ideas. Work with other people!
Mix References
We’ve got half way through this article without actually talking directly about mixing. This isn’t an accident. If you have a good performance of a good song and a creative environment in which to work, the mix is going to be much easier. One of the most common issues facing mixers is losing perspective. The more we listen to a track the harder it is to keep that freshness and clarity we felt when we heard it for the first time. After chasing down guitar squeaks for 20 minutes it’s probably not a surprise that you hear the guitars differently than you did on the first listen!
Taking a break is important but the sure fire method for recalibrating your perception is using a mixing reference. Using an appropriate reference track to compare your mix to is useful and the reason isn’t that hard to understand. We all want our projects to “sound like a record”. The only question is how to do it and what to compare to. The choice of reference is either personal or is something supplied to you by a client as an example of their vision for the project you are mixing. Either way you aren’t trying to copy it directly, you can’t, it’s a different song. Instead you are trying to imbue some of the essence of that recording’s sonic fingerprint into your mix.
Exactly how to set up this comparison is up to you but I don’t favour copying a track into the timeline and checking my mix against it. I find it fiddly. Instead you can do a quick and simple A/B between your reference and your mix using your monitor controller or a dedicated referencing tool.
Looking at the first of these, if you have a monitor controller which accepts two stereo inputs you can set up your reference running out of whatever streaming software or music player you use into one input (via an alternative set of outputs on your interface) and your DAW’s output into the other. Match the levels and use the source selector to swap between them. I like this method for its simplicity and its tactile hardware control.
The other approach is to use a dedicated referencing plugin. These allow various playback options and level matching and are very worth trying. Click the image below to see a detailed walkthrough of ADPTR Metric AB, my preferred tool for this purpose.
Sort Out Your Monitoring
This one has to be in there. An awful lot has been said on it both on this blog and elsewhere and while it’s all important I’m going to gloss over most of it. Monitoring is a frustrating can of worms because once you become aware of just how many factors conspire to make truly accurate monitoring impossible, it’s understandable how many people throw the metaphorical towel in and reach for the headphones.
This is a mistake. Monitoring on loudspeakers is too important. The thing which too often gets overlooked is the fact that our hearing is an active, perceptual process and imperfections in your monitoring don’t translate 1:1 into our mixes. In the same way as that ashen faced former colleague with the big upper midrange dip in his cymbal-battered hearing test results didn’t mix everything with a big peak at 4KHz, if you have imperfect monitoring you can still work.
However, everything you can do to improve your monitoring will make you a little better at mixing. Even if you can’t afford or accommodate proper bass trapping, find the best spot in your room for low end response and even though they won’t help your bottom end, buy or build some decent acoustic panels. Get the best monitors you can afford (not the biggest or bassiest, the best) and use a speaker calibration system like Genelec’s GLM or Sonarworks. Your monitoring isn’t ever going to be perfect but it can always be better.
Learn Your Bypass Shortcuts
Whichever DAW you use, learn the fastest, most convenient way to bypass plugins, both individually and in groups. Our job as mixers is to improve the raw recording. So why do we all know of examples where just bypassing all the plugins on a project sometimes make things better!
I’m not too proud to say I’ve overcooked things more than once and the only way to make sure you’re not doing it too is to level match your inserts and to regularly bypass them to make sure you’re actually improving things. Bypassing individual plugins is straightforward enough, though make sure your processed and bypassed signals are properly level matched, we all prefer louder and brighter. Bypassing chains and groups of tracks is more involved but is a really important technique.
In Pro Tools on a Mac use CMD to bypass inserts, add Opt and Shift to bypass across and particular slot and selection of tracks, use Control to bypass progressively down chains and use the ‘Shift + something’ shortcuts to bypass by plugin type.
Practice
Lastly, I can’t think of many things we get better at without practice, and there is no reason not to get in regular mix practice with little more than a DAW and an internet connection. There are free resources everywhere but one of the longest running and best is Cambridge Music Technology’s Free Multitrack library which contains free multitrack projects for mix practice. Set yourself a realistic time limit and see how far you can get in the time, from import and session organisation to a static mix. Can you get all that done in 30 minutes? With practice you probably could. Fast mixes tend to be good mixes so get up to speed with your DAW and practice mixing lots of different styles.
So there are our seven tips. A lot of it is about having something good to mix in the first place, both in terms of the song and the recording. That’s intentional. After all, the song is what’s really important.
Photos by RODNAE Productions and ANTHONY SHKRABA production from Pexels