In Summary

Engineers are being bombarded with information telling them what not to do… Whether you’re a new engineer or just fancy a fresh perspective, here we flip that to talk about some positive techniques to get the mix most of the way there.

Going Deeper

Engineers might have noticed a lot of stuff out there on social media or YouTube these days along the lines of “STOP DOING THIS”, or other advice that is sometimes useful and almost always well-meaning. These are easily found by their big pictures of big pointy fingers or arrows that can be seen from space to get the message across. Useful, but not always constructive.

Mixing is a huge, complex subject. Like any skill, all you have to do is scratch the surface to realise the infinite number of layers that can be uncovered. We cannot know everything. That said, the basic process can be distilled a bit to get to the heart of the matter, and any guide on how get the mix done faster and better is more useful than any bunch of Don’t Do’s.

So let’s stop pointing and get down to doing… Below is just one way to approach the none-too-complex task of seeing a mix through from start to finish.

Get Organised

Messy or tidy? Both are fine, but when it comes to the studio, not having to clamber over things to get to the monitors is a given. But the place where chaos really loves to set in is right at the start of the mix in the DAW itself.

Let’s assume that people mixing their own work already know how to navigate their session - skip ahead, feel free. Anyone else reading this who receives others’ tracks to mix might recognise the following: dozens and dozens of tracks playing a handful of parts, in no particular order. When was the last time any artist said “Hey guys, these extra ideas I’m having are awesome! I’m just off to read up on how to use Takes and Playlists more effectively”…

Track Name

When faced with a gargantuan number of tracks with names that are cryptic or just plain missing, I find that looking along the timeline and placing multiples in order of appearance can help. Soloing and giving them proper names is essential. Musically descriptive comments or notes can help, like “Pre-Chorus Hi Chords Double” instead of “new git idea37” can help.

Track Order

Things like track order are an essential personal preference, with many engineers following a convention from left to right across the mixer. This could start with drums and rhythm instruments, followed by synths, keys, guitars, vocals. Many keep their effects returns and masters at the end on the right.

Track Colours

Track colours can tap into engineers’ synaesthetic mind relating to frequencies, or maybe just what colour the artist’s guitar or T-Shirt was! Colour is so useful for navigating at a glance, and monochrome mixers can be slower to use for some people.

Editing

Some might agree that record making can be broken down into a Big Three of recording, editing, and mixing. It goes that there’s no point mixing anything that isn’t fully formed or later discarded, so once your DAW is in order, it’s time to get into some editing.

Takes And Composites

Fundamentally, are you mixing the right take? This could be a whole take of the song across all elements, a single track, a drop-in, or any of those little additions that happen when someone has an idea. Assuming there’s a listenable monitor mix in place, now’s the time to confirm which take is being worked on, and to start wrangling the best sections for comps on things like vocals

Markers/Locations

Locating sections of the project can help a lot. Location markers for the song top (after the count-in), and other signposts such as verses and choruses will come in handy whether you like to work in sections or not. Taking some time to set up your DAW’s recall of these in a single stroke will save time over this mix any many others.

Fixes

Some genres will see instruments like drums quantised or tightened up a bit, while others will rely on the ebb and flow of human performance. What gets fixed and what stays in? That’s down to whoever is producing, which increasingly is the artist or engineer. Some simple imperfections are too easy not to fix, such as that loose bass note that can be easily locked in with the kick. The trick is to stick only to fixes that serve the music.

Mutes

Once the music is pinned down, now can be a good time to go though and mute rests in-between sections or phrases on things like vocals and guitar amps. Leaving in things like coughs or throat clearing is usually not an option! Killing a symphony of hissing amp noise or buzz in the gaps can make a real difference to mix clarity. Most DAWs have a way to strip silence, but getting too bogged down with this won’t be audibly better than just swiping and muting the worst-offending clutter. Muting, rather than deleting audio can be beneficial because you can still see what’s there.

Grouping And Routing

Next comes how to pipe it all through the mixer. On all but the smallest of mixes, most engineers will use some way to change the level or process common groups of tracks together. Groups of drums, keys, guitars, and vocals are common, and the way to do this can vary depending on what is needed. Whatever the way to affect multiple tracks at once, setting up appropriate gangs of tracks ahead of the mix itself can speed things up a lot.

Groups

Using fader groups is a quick way to change the level of one part that’s made up of multiple tracks, such as a drum kit. By ‘ganging’ faders in this way, having one fader to move them all has obvious advantages, with the relative levels of group members preserved. Going further, using VCA groups can be a slick way to trim existing group automation or other tricks with a single fader and hiding the members. Grouped tracks often go straight to an output, meaning that common processing is not possible without bussing tracks together.

Submixes

Another approach for anything that needs to be treated as one is to make submixes. Submixed tracks’ audio meets at the submix fader, meaning that levels can be controlled using one fader like a group. However tracks can also be processed together through the submix’s bus or aux channel insert. Sorting out the finer points such as where to route submix-only effects returns can also happen ahead of the mix. Nesting these in the submix with everything else will keep everything behaving as expected.

Listen Busses

It can be useful to have a way to monitor audio other than the mix itself in the DAW. This way imported reference tracks or even freshly bounced mixes can be reviewed in the same session without hitting any mix bus processing. Some DAWs have dedicated ways of doing this, referring to themselves as ‘control rooms’, ‘listen busses’ or similar. Whatever the label, these can be more elegant than setting up extra routing or remembering to bypass master inserts for reference listening.

The Mix

Once all the prep is done, it’s time to get down to the mix itself. If you’ve ever bypassed all audio plugins to compare with the raw mix, it can sometimes be surprising how passable fader work on its own can be compared to its processed relation.

Templates

Some people use them, others don’t. They can save a load of time, but if you’re regularly having to unpick what your template wants you to do, then maybe it’s time for a newer, simpler one. It can be hard settling on one template that will serve every job, so ones that only have what always gets used can help. Titles with specific requirements can be the template for something else, but how many times have you looked at an old template and forgotten its rationale? On smaller mixes, old templates can be slower than starting from scratch.

Faders

If a mix is the meal the faders are the ingredients. Fundamentally, the mix is about levels, and no amount of fancy toys or audio plugins can change that. This means getting the mix as far as possible using just the faders with only as much automation as needed. Doing only the moves that will actually be noticed is a good start; you might be able to see the music, but nobody else can!

To listen like a listener, consider looking away, or turning away from the DAW from time to time. Turning off your display momentarily to confirm the mix sounds as good as it looks is a great technique.

What does a great balance sound like? Every mix is different, but listeners usually expect to hear the lyric, which often means the levels of synths, keys, and guitars are lower. Hovering just below level of the vocal, and poking slightly above other elements can be the snare drum. This might be slightly above the kick and bass which could take the least prominence. This is purely subjective, and depends on so much including taste and genre.

Control Surfaces

For some mixing engineers, nothing beats real faders to let them use their ears, fly the mix and write automation. Control surfaces offer this and a whole lot more, but above all else the ability to steer the mix primarily by listening is a technique everyone can benefit from. Scooting through large mixes can be easier by showing or hiding tracks, or even creating ‘null tracks’ as spacers. These can keep tracks in a logical spread across your surface in banks or 8 or 10 or whatever your board has. The Scroll Into View feature in Pro Tools (Shift+Control click on a track or right-click the track name) instantly puts Track 1 on Fader 1.

Control surface users can really go to town with how they interact with audio plugins, and also with things like locators or other navigation.

Audio Plugins

Processing and effects are a whole other world of detail, but zooming out a bit, using fewer tools to do the lifting can keep the DAW and the mind free of clutter. What is important is the order of inserts; do you really want your dynamics to react to EQ moves or is that comp better placed upstream?

Going back to bypassing inserts, louder things can sound better than quieter things, so level-matching the results with bypassed audio makes meaningful comparisons possible. Most DAWs allow rows or groups of inserts to be bypassed at once - learning your DAW’s way of doing this will quickly save you minutes and hours, not seconds. Same goes for knowing your mixer’s MO for things like solo safes or solo logic such as latching or switching behaviour.

Mixing to loudness for the destination can also be handled with your audio plugin(s) of choice. This can be limiting (if needed) into a meter, or a limiter with its own readout. Many DAWs will let you specify the loudness of the final output in the bounce window.

Referencing And Review

Reference tracks are a great way to keep perspective; not only can they confirm your track’s aesthetic, but also familiar references can tell you much about the monitoring itself. Just make sure any imported tracks aren't playing though mix processing...

So after some quality time perfecting the mix, it’s time to take another break before the final listen for the bounce. This is where moving between different monitor pairs where available can pay dividends. Same goes for using headphones, buds, or other devices to get the biggest picture possible. The old trick of listening from an adjacent room with the door ajar can work well in the absence of a range of listening devices, or even having a quick listen through laptop speakers if available.

Mono checks are just as important. These can transform the balance on any wide or correlated mix elements; hard-panned double tracked takes can lose a tonne of level in mono, as can many reverbs.

The Final Mix?

A friend once summed things up perfectly when they said: “You never finish a mix, you just stop it”. While true, the mix can still reach a point where it not only serves the music, but also enhances it. Some might agree that the later the revision, the smaller the difference.

In a way, getting to that magic point is best achieved by knowing what doesn’t matter; We’ve all had that message or email saying “yeah I think I preferred it before actually”. Tweaks are good to a point, and many reading this will have stopped using “......... Final Mix” a long time ago!

The reality is that the biggest, most useful changes happen early on in the mix, and it seems that the best mixes seem also to be the quickest! The quickest mixes are always the most compact or the most organised, both musically and technically.

How quick is quick? Few of my own favourite mixes happened after days or weeks of deliberation. I’ve certainly heard plenty of great monitor mixes and even final mixes that happened in the time it took the band to lose half an hour getting some coffee and/or daylight!