You might struggle with knowing where
to start mixing.
What do you do after importing a session? Where does everything belong and how do you get going?
Let's use a construction analogy to explain.
Say you want to build a house. Congratulations, you’re ready for a house that’s all you, with everything you’d need. You can visualize the fancy interior, high vaulted ceilings, and the swanky kitchen that’s pulled right out of a fancy magazine.
Unfortunately, all that plush decor is far in the future because you’re still standing on a dirt lot that you haven’t even broken ground on yet. You won’t be buying fancy chandeliers, leather sofas, or smart appliances any time soon.
You’ll have to start at the beginning and dig the foundation.
Mixing follows the same thought process. You don’t start off with fancy vocal reverb tricks or parallel distortion on the solo. You start off with the foundation and go from there.
Think of the Pareto Principle when you’re mixing: 20% of the work results in 80% of the outcome.
That means that you have to get through the basic mixing workflow that builds your mix before you can add fancy stuff on top of it.
The thing about modern mixing is that there are so many options and ways to do things that you end up getting confused by all the possibilities. That makes you more insecure about whether what you’re doing is correct, and often you’ll end up doing a bunch of different things that contradict each other.
Instead, stick to the basics and follow a workflow that you know from the start will get you to the finish line.
And what are these basics that comprise 20% of the work?
Those are the important things to think about, regardless of what plug-ins you use. If you focus on mastering those five concepts through practice and repetition, your mixes will get better.
Now that you know that those five principles work together to get you 80% of the way there, let me show you the workflow I use to take that information and apply it every time I do a mix.
Step 1 – Start in Mono on a Crappy Speaker
I try to make the initial part of the mix a little bit harder than it needs to be. I mix the entire song in mono on a one-driver mixcube. This is kind of like exercising with weights. It’s really hard while they’re on, but once you take them off everything becomes easier. Getting a rough mix on shitty speakers in mono really makes you pay attention to what you’re doing in the mix.
I do this religiously, but it’s not necessarily the fastest way to get things done. If you are stressed for time or only have one pair of monitors then getting a rough mix in mono is a fine substitute.
Step 2 – Find the Busiest Part of the Mix
Find the spot in the mix where most, if not all, of the instruments are playing at the same time.
This is the densest part of the mix and therefore the hardest one to balance together. Start there.
Step 3 – Levels and Panning
It’s amazing how much a mix can come together if you just take the time to fine-tune the levels of your tracks.
Trust me, a dB up and down on the fader can really help you finesse the faders into place.
The same goes with panning. Just moving certain instruments away from each other in the stereo spectrum cleans up the mix.
There is no one way to get the right levels, and there’s certainly no rule about where you should pan the instruments. Nobody’s lost a mixing job because they panned the shaker too much to the left.
The goal for the rough mix is to create as much separation between the instruments in the stereo field (even if you’re panning in mono) and create balance among all the different instruments.
What kind of balance you’re looking for is up to you. If you’re a guitar player chances are you’ll want your guitars loud. If you’re a self-conscious vocalist you’ll probably make your vocals quieter than if you gave the song to a different mixer.
Don’t worry too much about getting a perfect balance to start. You want to move fast. There’s a reason we call it a rough mix. It’s rough because you haven’t added any processing to make those instruments jump out.
Step 4 – Master Bus Processing
After I get a rough mix going I like adding some master bus processing to enhance the entire mix before I start tackling the individual busses and instruments.
At this point I usually feel like I’ve done as much to the overall mix as I can. It’s usually sounding a little tighter because of the compression, and with some subtle EQing the mix sounds a little cleaner.
Step 5 – Mixing the Drums
On my drum bus I’ll have the usual plug-ins ready to rock: EQ, compression, and some form of saturation.
I’ll use the EQ on the channel strip for broad strokes, cutting what I don’t want (usually the boxiness) and adding what is lacking in the lows and the highs.
I tend to use the compressor on the channel strip very subtly, just adding a few dBs of gain reduction to steady the drums a bit. Most of my drum punch comes from parallel compression anyway.
If I have separate kick and snare busses I’ll treat them the same way, with a combination of analog summing or saturation, EQ, and compression. If the individual drums need specialized processing like transient design or sample replacement I’ll do that on the individual tracks.
Step 6 – Mix the Bass, Guitar, Vocals and Other Instruments
The process I use on each instrument bus follow a very similar pattern:
- Saturation
- EQ
- The compression style that fits the instrument
- and a rebalancing character EQ if needed.
The reason my mixing template has every plug-in already in place is so that I don’t have to make a lot of software decisions and can focus on making the mix sound good instead. That said, if a particular instrument just doesn’t work with the processing I have in place, it will take more time to force it to work than to experiment for a few minutes with different plug-ins.
That’s why a workflow is so important. It helps you most of the time, but it’s never going to be perfect for every scenario. Making the workflow save you so much time also means that you can use some of that extra time to deviate and experiment when needed.
Step 7 – Add Effects and Parallel Processing
At this point I’m usually still in mono, trying to wrangle my mix together through my MixCube monitor and getting ready to give it all up.
However, I know that my mix is definitely sounding better than before because I’ve created enough separation between the instruments with EQ, and everything is sounding a lot tighter and nicer due to the compression and saturation.
At this point I’m ready to add effects. If you’ve created your own mix template similar to mine then you know that I already have most of the effects I need within reach.
I’ll have:
- Parallel Compression for drums.
- Stereo spread for vocals and some instruments.
- A drum reverb.
- A snare reverb if needed.
- A general reverb for everything else.
- Vocal space bus.
- Short delay.
- Long delay.
- Random effects channel.
Sometimes all a mix needs is some space. When that’s the case, it’s just a matter of finding the right reverb (or using the same reverb preset you like all the time) and calling it a day.
Other times you want to take a little more time dialing in the parallel compression on the drums, adding some stereo width, and playing around with the various times on your delay to get the right feel.
Step 8 – Stereo Tweaks
At this point everything is sounding as good as it possibly can in mono on my MixCube. Meaning: not very good, but that’s more the fault of the mono MixCube than my mixing. When I change it over to my better studio monitors and flip it over to stereo I want to be impressed by the change.
There’s something wrong if the mix doesn’t come to life in both power and stereo width. If that’s the case I’ll look for the instruments that sound buried in the mix and try to bring them to life, either through effects, EQ enhancements, or parallel processing.
Step 9 – Translation and Automation
Now, all you need to do is listen to it on multiple speaker systems and change what jumps out at you as different. If the bass is really muddy on a certain speaker then try to EQ the bass so that it still sounds powerful on your studio monitors while staying clean on the muddy speaker.
Give yourself a couple rounds of tweaks and then call it a day. If you’re constantly tweaking and rebouncing, you’re wasting an awful lot of time that could be better spent otherwise.
All of the steps listed so far should define about 80% of your workflow.
Sticking to a standard workflow that works for you will help you know what to focus on next.
You can certainly do a fair amount of jumping around from one thing to another throughout the mix, but in general, sticking to these guidelines will speed up the entire process and help you complete your mixes faster.
Step By Step Mixing - How to Create Great Mixes With Only 5 Plug-ins
