More and more artists and bands benefit from the unlimited studio time that comes with having your own recording set up. Whether that is a mobile rig or a home studio, freed from the constraints and expense of limited and costly studio time, many people who choose to engage the services of a professional do so at the mixing and mastering stages. After all, much of the potentially expensive experimentation happens at the recording stage. The freedom to explore ‘off the clock’ and then to enlist the services of an experienced mix engineer sounds like it makes perfect sense.

This can be true. However it does come with pitfalls. What are the most common pitfalls facing self producing artists? What can be done to avoid them? And if you are that mix engineer taking on a self produced project, what can you do when faced with some of these most common pitfalls?

Do You Really Want Someone To Do This?

If you are a self producing artist or band, ask yourself how you will feel when the finished mix is different from your demo? It's so common for people to become attached to their rough mix that this phenomenon even has a name: ‘Demo-itis’ is a resistance to change because it differs from the familiar version that no one outside of the project has heard. While it isn't impossible for a mix engineer to reproduce the demo, that would raise the question of why you aren't just using that demo? It's happened before and there's nothing wrong with it. There is no right answer here. Just be clear at the outset about what it is that you want.

Following on from this is the matter of mastering. If you have a good demo mix perhaps what you actually need is a mastering engineer? However while mix engineers can do the mastering as well, they are different jobs. Don’t assume that your mixer will master the tracks too.

Give Your Mix Engineer A Finished Song To Mix

If you are engaging the services of a mix engineer then they are there to mix a completed recording. If you want somebody to help with creative decisions around performance, song structure and arrangement then you need a producer. It is perfectly possible for a mix engineer to fulfil both roles but it is very important to make clear at the beginning of a project what it is you expect the person whose help you are buying in to do.

Do Commit On Performances

A DAW allows the user to postpone decision-making later in the production process almost ad infinitum. This has some unhelpful consequences. One of the most pervasive is the temptation to fail to commit during the recording stage. Virtually unlimited track counts and the facility to keep every take can result in an unmanageable collision of decisions when it comes to actually starting the mix.

This isn't ideal if the process is being handled entirely by the writers but it is almost definitely unacceptable to a mix engineer. Decide on what you're keeping and strip out what is not needed. Removing something from the project doesn't have to mean putting it beyond reach permanently. But for lots of practical reasons it makes sense to remove it from the current, working version of the project. In short, decide how the song goes before you try to mix it. It sounds obvious but it often doesn't happen.

Don’t Commit Sounds

I am mindful of the fact that there is a lot of conversation that happens, particularly online, about committing during recording and usually it refers to committing a sound. This is something we've explored on the blog before. A great insight into some of the historical reasons behind the affection experienced professionals have for committing a sound at the recording stage is illustrated in the podcast discussion of William Witman's excellent article The Great Balance Mix Off in which the importance of committing sounds to tape was made clear for practical as well as artistic reasons. In those days before full recall the easiest way to make sure the sound you wanted made it onto the records was to print it to tape. The workflow benefits of printing sounds rather than leaving them live in your sessions plug-ins certainly exist but they assume that the person committing the sound is experienced enough not to need the safety net of leaving processing happening in real time.

Unfortunately much of the discussion around music production online encourages people to adopt the working practices of experienced professionals, whether they are experienced enough for those practices to be of benefit. The situation where inappropriate processing choices are forced onto a professional mixer by a client, who presumably is less experienced in mixing, is not a justifiable choice.

Far better to give the engineer your hiring the best possible material for them to make the best choices. If you're particularly fond of a choice you made in the rough mix then point it out to the engineer but don't tie their hands.

What A Good Mix Looks Like To A Pro

There are several things that you can do to help your professional mix engineer. As already mentioned give them a full song with a nailed down arrangement. Most engineers are very used to receiving multitrack files rather than DAW sessions. I'm not going to call them stems because stems are something different but this terminology varies between users. An individual print of each track from start to finish with no processing applied along with your stereo mix will be appreciated.

You might well be working in Pro Tools and might think it's helpful to provide the session. In truth it might well not be, just check. Much of the reason why mix engineers are so used to working from files is because so many people work in other DAWs. Logic Pro is particularly common amongst recording musicians and the most straightforward way to transfer a project to a mix engineer who is reasonably likely to be working in Pro Tools is using raw audio files. Making sure those files are properly labelled will earn you far more goodwill from your mix engineer than showing off the quality of your processing choices.

A Pro mixer will probably expect to mix your track in a day, possibly two. It is in everyone's interest for your mix engineer to spend as much time as possible mixing and as little time as possible preparing your project for mixing. The two processes are different and most mix engineers would prefer to prep then mix rather than combining the two processes concurrently.

Common Issues In Self-produced Projects

Beyond the aforementioned issues with arrangement and performance choices, what specific issues to mix engineers encounter? The specifics of course vary widely but in conversation with working professionals some issues seem turn up regularly.

A key difference between a self produced track in a home studio and a professionally recorded track is in the nature of the space in which the recording is made. Smaller rooms in domestic settings sound different to larger tracking spaces and beyond the influence of acoustic treatment, just the dimensions of these rooms impart a sonic fingerprint. The desire to keep the sound of these less favourable rooms out of recordings can encourage much closer close miking than would be found in a pro studio. Vocals recorded into condenser mics from 3 inches away and acoustic guitars miked up as closely as a 57 on a guitar cab are more common than some might think. This combined with often inexpensive microphones can give rise to a characteristically ‘spiky’ close miked sound which is a world away from the choices which might be made in a more forgiving environment.

Remedial measures used to be limited to judicious use of EQ, multiband compressors and the like but a new generation of plug-ins can really help in situations like this. oeksound’s Soothe 2 and McDSP’s SA3 for example excel in situations like this and can go along way towards alleviating the issues. This of course isn't as good as using a better mic in a better room from further away but these processes really can go further than a static equaliser ever could.

If you don't already, always capture a DI of guitars and capture MIDI of keyboards when it's available. If you have a beautiful sounding vintage AC30 then of course record it properly with a microphone. However your mix engineer will always appreciate having a DI of the performance as well. They probably won't use it. If they do use it, don't worry. Does the guitar sound good? If so there isn't a problem.

A very common preoccupation amongst anyone with a DAW and some plug-ins is really exploring compression. Compression is cool and can do some really interesting things to a piece of music but it has to be used with care and, along with its cousin limiting, it is these processes which get name-checked most frequently by mix engineers as the cause of problems inherited from self produced projects.

I understand why this is. I'm sure we've all been there when learning compression. It can take a long time to understand that most compression isn't supposed to be heard. The problem is that if poor compression choices have been baked into the audio it's incredibly difficult to do anything about it at the mix stage. If you have created what you consider to be a killer crush setting for your drum bus then print it to the demo and point it out to the mix engineer but absolutely don't force it on them.

Speaking of drums these are the most typical example where inappropriate compression experiments can present themselves. If the results are baked in then there aren't many options. Assuming the issue is overcompression then replacing kick, snare and toms is a viable strategy and if kick and snare are working appropriately then as long as the cymbals aren't too badly damaged then it may not be too much of an issue.

There is of course the option of using an upward expander to perform the opposite action to the compressor but anyone who has tried this knows that unless you know the exact compression parameters used, it is not a practical solution. An alternative approach for badly overcompressed audio which has been proposed in the past is to completely flatline the audio with a limiter to remove the inappropriate compression and to reintroduce dynamics using fader rides. While I can see the sense behind this it’s going to be of limited use in practice. In fact it leads me to my final point.

Do We Need An Effective AI Driven De-Compression Plugin?

I’ve long regarded compression as an irreversible process. But I’ve also regarded mixing signals together, applying reverb, clipping and even just plain bad recording as irreversible and the current generation of AI products such as dxRevive and Acon Digital’s plugins have proved to me time and time again that ‘impossible’ audio processing is possible after all. I’m not aware of any de-compression solutions which can perform the same kind of magic as dxRevive but it’s probably not far away. That said, things move fast so if you know of any new developments please share them in the comments. I’m sure that when it does arrive it will find a welcome home with mix engineers receiving mix files. What do you think?