Today I wanted to touch upon the "middle" part of mixing...or what you do once you've got your tracks in there and are ready to get creative.

There are multiple ways to mix a song, and every song is different, so how you approach your mixing process varies depending on complexity, preference and experience.

There is no one correct way to mix a song. 

Anybody who says so is so full of himself (and it's always gonna be a "him") that you might be better off ignoring him altogether. Mixing is a fun, creative thing to do, and just like every creative venture, there are no rules. Only guidelines.

That said, I have found three effective approaches to mixing, depending on what the song needs.

 

The 3 Ways to Approach an Initial Mix

• Bottoms-Up (Or individual track mixing)
• Top-down
• Middle-out

 

Individual Track Mixing

If you choose not to do any channel grouping and would like to mix each individual track separately then this is what you’ll end up doing. Maybe the song isn’t that complicated and adding busses doesn’t really save you any time or processing power. If that’s the case just slap a plug-in on every track and mix the tracks together that way.

Top-Down Mixing

Top-down mixing is when you start mixing your song with plug-ins on the master bus. After you’ve got a good static mix going, you’ll start by adding EQ, compression and other plug-ins that give your mix color (such as analog summing plug-ins or mild tape saturation) to the mix bus.

It’s actually a great way of starting your mix because you’ll immediately get some big wins from tightening up your mix with compression, tweaking the overall EQ response and adding some secret sauce with saturation.

From there you move from the top (master bus), to the group busses and finally end up at the individual tracks. With this method, you might actually find that you need to do very little processing at the individual track stage because you’ve already made some big strides with your mix by applying processing to the master bus and the subgroups.

Middle-Out Mixing

Middle-out mixing is when you start using plug-ins on the subgroups instead of the individual tracks or the master bus. (I don’t know if “middle-out” is an actual term or not, but it’s what I call it.)

I tend to do a combination of middle-out and top-down when I mix.

Sometimes I just put a compressor on the master bus and then start focusing on the subgroups. If the subgroups sound good but there is an overall frequency issue in the entire mix, I like to try fixing it with a master EQ instead of drilling down into the tracks themselves.

Once I tweak the subgroups and the master bus I’ll turn to the individual tracks if necessary. Usually, the individual tracks can benefit from slight EQ tweaks, especially if you’re trying to separate things in the mix, like two similar-sounding electric guitars. Other times you need to add compression to reel things in or make them hit harder. 

How To Finish Your Mixes?

Once those tracks are sounding good, regardless of which mix approach you take, you can get creatively complex with additional routing, parallel processing and multiple effects chains.

That's also when things can get overwhelming to the point that you don't know when your mix is done.

That's what I'll be talking about in tomorrow's video: The Song Finisher Formula.

It's the second-part of my free 2-Part Mix Workshop that helps you confidently finish your mixes so you can be proud to release your records.

It'll go through my entire mix translation process so that you can guarantee that your mix sounds good on any speaker you play it through.

We'll discuss:

• My embarrassing story of how I learned about the importance of mix translation
• The "Hallway Technique"
• The importance of listening like a consumer
• What you can learn from audio idiots
• And more...