I've been taking Gordon Ramsay's Masterclass on cooking this past week and been loving it. The passion this guy exudes about his craft is incredibly inspiring.

The warmth, the passion and the exuberance he shows for cooking is a far cry from his TV persona:

When one of the students in the class asked him to recommend five fundamental skills for the amateur chef to master, he mentioned these:

1. Vision
2. Taste
3. Good ingredients
4. Being adventurous
5. When to stop

Now if that's not a perfect analogy for mixing, I don't know what is!

Vision

You need vision before you start mixing because you should know what sound you're going for. Are you working with a sparse arrangement in a laidback genre such as folk or jazz? Then you might want to plan your processing accordingly with subtle compression, tasteful spaces and vintage warmth. 

Or maybe you're working on a hard EDM rock song a la Imagine Dragons. Then you might pull out more parallel processing power, saturation, and tighter spaces to make things hit harder.

Taste

You need to know what "good" sounds like so you need to have the taste to recognize "good" when you hear it. 

However, it doesn't have to be Grammy Award-Winning Wonderful. If you're starting out, it just needs to be good enough to the best of your abilities. 

You'll improve as time goes on and your perception of "good" will grow. Your work will slowly edge closer to the taste you have, and the sounds you hear in your head.

Good Ingredients

Having good ingredients is incredibly important when you're cooking, and it's just as important when you're mixing. 

The musical performance must be spectacular. The source must sound good. Although you can tighten things up with editing, the ingredients need to be good so that it's even worth doing.

Being Adventurous

Being adventurous is an important trait to keep in mind when mixing because you often doubt yourself if you're thinking even slightly outside the box. 

Although I teach a great workflow inside Step By Step Mixing and Mixing With 5 Plug-ins, I don't think there's anything wrong with experimenting and being adventurous. There's no risk in seeing how far you can take your mix. The worst case scenario is that it'll sound bad, at which point you'll deactivate the plug-ins and start again.

Just yesterday I got this email from Dale, a longtime reader thanking me for this perspective:

"...stuff you put out to all of us every day was SO helpful!  I mean seriously helpful!  Granted, I just used your info as prompts for the things cobwebbed in my head anyway, but your tips are fabulous and great reminders of common wisdom.  PLUS, you are so freaking fun to read!  Thank you so much...I do tell all my friends about you.  I hope one (or all) buy buy buy!  I have no doubt your guides are stellar, technically correct and fun at the same time. Anyway, thank you!  You really made my mix better, as in a LOT better.  Mostly you convinced me to stop following dumb rules.  I used instinct, experience and some very good guidelines from you.   The result was really pleasing for me.  THANK YOU"

Knowing When to Stop

This last one is incredibly important. 

One of the significant challenges with mixing is knowing when you’re done. They say a mix is never finished. It is abandoned. 

You can keep slapping plug-ins on a mix until your CPU breaks down and starts crying in the corner but if it’s not making your mix any better why bother?

It’s insecurity.

You want to make sure that nothing you have in your DAW is going to add that magic to your mix. I get it. I do it all the time. I keep trying out new compressors, plug-ins, spaces, and routing shenanigans until the mix is so convoluted with plug-ins that anything I do breaks the mix.

And then I listen to the original rough mix and it’s so much cleaner, making me realize that everything I did was a waste of time.

So if that’s something you can relate to, here are a few steps to do to keep you on track to a finished mix.

1. Make a rough mix that sounds good to you. Not just a static mix where the chorus is good, a complete mix that sounds great from beginning to end. Have fun, experiment, be adventurous.
2. Bounce it out, upload it your phone, take a walk and listen to it on your earbuds. My dog loves this parts of the mixing session.
3. Listen to it a few times on your walk and make mental notes of anything you would like to change.
4. Go back to your session, make your tweaks, do the necessary automation and bounce it again.
5. Now find a reference you like and compare it to your mix. Make a list of what you need to change.
6. Go back to your mix session and apply the necessary fixes from your reference.
7. Bounce it again, go for another walk, return happy with a finished mix.
8. Rinse. Repeat.

Don’t get stuck on all the minor details that don’t contribute anything to the final product. But also don’t ignore things that need to be fixed.

Sooner or later you’ll find that you don’t have to overanalyze and obsess over every little detail in your mix to make it sound good. You don’t need every single Waves plug-in package to make your mixes sound powerful, punchy and professional.

All you need is the workflow I teach you how to use inside the Step By Step Mixing eBook or the Mixing With 5 Plug-ins course.

Here's what a recent student had to say while he was going through the Mixing With 5 Plug-ins video course:

"Just finished Mixing With No Plugins-great foundation of info! I often get lazy and forgo organizational steps that will save me time down the line, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s because I’ve always lacked an efficient and effective process. As a result, I spend far more time than necessary fiddling with levels at the onset of a mixing session and run the risk of losing focus. Your process was succinct and very easy to emulate."

If you want to take your mixes from good to great, then Mixing With 5 Plug-ins is for you. Or, as Chef Ramsay says it: