Did I ever tell you the story of how bad my mixes used to sound?
I'm sure you can relate so let me share it with you:
To put it bluntly, I used to SUCK at mixing!
Mixing looked so cool when mixing engineers did it, but when I tried, it was a disaster.
Randomly slapping plug-ins on every track and shrugging my shoulders isn't how you make better mixes.
The mixes sounded boomy in the low-end, the drums sounded boxy and the overall mix balance was always either too harsh or too muddy.
And when I played any mix outside the speakers I mixed on, they always sounded completely different...
Put simply, my mixes screamed: "Amateur!"
The reason why was simple. If you have no plan of action, and no concrete steps to make your mixes sound like you want, you'll mix in circles, never getting to a final, finished record.
If you've ever had your guitars get in the way of the vocal and your bass guitar clashing with your kick drum, you know the feeling.
It was impossible to create separation between any of my instruments so every time I used an EQ I had no idea how much (or where!) I should boost or cut to make my mix sound better.
If EQ was Hard, Compression was "Expert Level Difficulty!"
Using the wrong compression settings will doom your drums. They'll sound squashed and weak instead of tight and punchy. Every time I tried to compress my drums and bass to make them tighter, I'd end up with a squashed drum sound and a weak low-end.
I was never really sure what all the buttons on the compressor did, and I certainly didn't know how to use them to create tight mixes like the ones I heard from expert engineers.
Balancing the dynamics of the song without squashing and over-compressing each instrument was a completely foreign concept (and I can read Old Norse!)
Sure, presets were handy to start with, but I usually got lost trying to tweak them to suit my mix.
If you've ever got a rough mix using EQ and compression, and then derailed the entire thing again with reverb and delay, you can imagine how frustrating those first sessions were.
I'd end up with way too much reverb that made my mix weak and washed out. Then, when I'd return to the mix the next day I'd overcompensate for my mistakes and end up with a mix that sounded two-dimensional and flat.
I honestly didn't understand what to listen for in a mix so I kept randomly putting plug-ins on tracks, tweaking presets that didn't fit, and selecting inappropriate effects that weren't suitable for the song.
Avoid These Mistakes So You Can Get Better Mixes in Less Time
Luckily, you won't need fifteen years to learn what I know.
I've come a long way since my crappy mixes.
When the economy crashed in 2008, I escaped from Iceland like Snake Plissken, hoarding the measly savings I had left from my audio job, and decided to give this audio career a shot.
I found myself at the SAE Institute in Madrid, Spain and that's where everything changed...
I started a tiny blog to remember everything I was learning in school. I figured that if I knew the topics well enough to write them down and teach them to others, they would stick better in my brain.
That’s the year Audio Issues was born and since then I've helped thousands of home studio musicians and bedroom producers like yourself improve their mixes.
In fact, ten years later, SAE Insitute invited me back to Madrid as a guest lecturer!
