Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes you better. And as anything else mixing is a skill that needs practice. The more you do it the better you get at it. There are no tricks or secrets that the “pros” are hiding from you or magic frequency values that work all the time for everything. What professional mixing engineers have in common is a lot of experience and practice. They know when and where to cut or boost or add compression because they work on songs all the time and have learned what works and what doesn’t in each situation.
Having said that, there are certain moves and routines all engineers do to hit the ground running that anyone can apply and will help your mixes sound better.
Let’s find out what they are.
1- Filter Your Tracks
We have talked about the importance of filters in previous articles. They are great tools to remove rumble, noises and focus the sound of your sources. By high-pass filtering most elements of your mix but the bass instruments, you will find that balancing your song is easier and you will get more headroom to work with. It doesn’t need to be a very steep filter at a very high cut-off frequency. Most of the time filtering things at 80 or 100 Hz will do the trick nicely. But if in doubt, listen to what you are removing by doing the opposite filter, and judge if what you hear is important for your track.
2- Subtractive EQ Is Your Friend
Rather than start boosting frequencies or stacking EQ plugins in your chain try simply cleaning your tracks from unwanted frequencies. Locate the frequencies that make your tracks sound boxy, nasal, or harsh and scoop them out by 6 dB or so. All of a sudden your audio will gain more presence and sound more focused. By sweeping the frequencies with a band EQ and either boosting or cutting you should be able to find where those unwanted sounds are.
3- Use Sends For Your Reverbs And Delays
A common mistake when somebody starts mixing is to add reverbs or delays in the plugin chain of your track. This way you end up with tons of reverb effects (in many cases multiple instances of the same plugin) populating your session and drowning your CPU power.
Unless you want to create a specific effect for an instrument, try adding auxiliary tracks with one reverb or delay each. Perhaps one Hall, one plate reverb, one ambient, tape delay, and an echo. Then use sends from your tracks to get signals through those effects. By doing this, instruments will share reverbs and delays which will add cohesion to their sound in the mix. On top of that, you will get independent control over the effects and save some DSP from your computer.
4- EQ Your Effects
Now that we have dedicated Aux tracks for the effects we can process them as we like without interfering with the other tracks. There are plenty of processings that you can try but a very cost-effective one is EQ the reverbs and delays. This will shape their sound and keep them under control in the mix. High-pass filters and subtractive EQ, as we saw in the previous sections, can be very powerful tools to do so.
5- Don’t Compress Everything
Compression is one of the most exciting tools for an audio engineer. It is the sound of records. It can make things quieter, but also louder, sharper, and punchier and even change the tone of an instrument. That is why everybody loves compression.
But not everything needs to be compressed. Keeping the dynamics of certain instruments natural is something beneficial for the overall balance of the song. In the end, it is all about building a structure and telling a story. Having differences in volume for certain elements in the verses and choruses will help your song move and be more dynamic. In short, more interesting.
Before applying compression, think about what is the function of that element in the whole song. Does it need some control or perhaps more presence and attitude throughout the track? That will give you an idea of whether it needs to be compressed or not. And of course, if it sounds good before any processing, just trust your ears.
6- Make Space For Your Vocals
Let’s face it, vocals are the most important element in a song. They need to be intelligible and shine over everything else. Listen to your favourite music at a really low volume. What can you hear? Exactly! That’s why It is important to always make space for your vocals and adjust things accordingly to accomplish it. In the end, vocals are in charge of telling the story and thrilling the audience.
A good strategy some engineers do is starting the mix with the vocals and keep adding elements sequentially. That way you will find out when something might be clashing or interfering with them. Also, checking your mix in mono and/or at low volume is really helpful to notice if the vocals are still in the right place and not masked by other instruments.
7- Spice Things Up With Saturation
Adding saturation and distortion to elements in your mix can make it more exciting. It creates harmonics that are sonically related to the music which results in a thicker sounding track. Either by using it in parallel or in your plug-in chain, saturation will help to add presence and bring elements forward in your mix.
We covered the benefits of analog saturation and how to mix with it in our blog and it is one of the great features that Sonimus always gets right in their plugins.
8- Ride Your Vocals
People might think that compression will take care of keeping the vocals in their place. Set and forget, right?. Nothing further from the truth. As much as compression will give the consistency of the vocal, there is one technique that will always help to sit your vocals right: riding the fader.
For those of you not familiar with it, this technique consists of writing volume automation on your track while you are playing through it. It can be done in sections or with a full pass of the song. It normally results in very small variations (3 dBs tops) from your original position in the mix but it gives the feeling of movement and keeps the attention on the vocals (see point 6).
9- Compress Everything!
And by everything I mean EVERYTHING. Use Bus compression or a master bus compression to glue things together. Instead of compressing each individual element in a mix, using compression in your summing buses can give a much better result to tighten things up. It is very common to see a compressor in the master bus making sure that the whole track sounds together. Tuco and the Compressor module from Satson CS can do wonders in these scenarios.
A good starting point is setting the compressor with a slow attack, so it lets the transients pass through and use a moderate to low ratio. Depending on the track it can be interesting to use a side-chain filter on your compressor to preserve the low-end dynamics. Experiment with these settings until you get something that works for you.
10- Create Contrast Through Automation
Making sure that not everything is static and playing at the same time throughout the song is key to make it interesting. We already touched on riding the fader on the vocals, but muting other elements, changing their pan or volume at specific moments will bring attention to them when needed. It is the icing on the cake. Make sure to dedicate time to decide when and how to use it so there are not too many things happening at the same time. If done right, automation will help your track tell a story and make it more exciting.
What do you think about our list? Do you use all of these practices when mixing? Let us know in the comments and share your own workflow and practices to get your mixes going.
