Sometimes mixing can seem overwhelming. You can spend hours and hours jumping from one track to another without any real point and lose your time and focus if you’re not careful.
You have to have a plan: a roadmap to get your mix done in a few hours.
Here are 5 steps you can follow to get good mixes very quickly.
1. MIX PREPARATION: USE GROUPS AND BUSSES
When your first open your project, sort the tracks. If your tracks are in disorder, you’ll have trouble knowing which track you worked on, and you will waste time scrolling up and down looking for your Electric Guitar Solo track. Usually begin with drums, then bass, then acoustic and electric guitars, then piano and pads, then vocals and harmonies, from top to bottom.
Then, create subgroups and route your tracks correctly. Create a DRUMS bus, a GUITARS bus, a VOCALS bus, etc. This will allow you to simplify your mix, control the volume of many tracks with just one fader, and apply EQ and Compression on all the tracks at once if you want to.
Listen to the song, and find the busiest part of the song. It can be the last chorus, or the bridge, etc. Loop that part. This is the most complex part to mix, so if you start here and get it to sound great, the rest of the song will sound great.
2. GET A STATIC MIX WITH LEVEL BALANCE AND PANNING
This is a very important step. Mixing is all about setting levels. EQ, compression, reverb and effects are just polishing and fine-tuning. Setting levels right is critical for the quality of your final mix.
Balancing the volume of your tracks is the fundamental starting point for every mix. A clear balance is almost half the work, especially if you’ve got great sounding track. You need to be able to hear all the instruments, yet give them each a place, because not all instruments are important.
Play with just the volume faders, and try to achieve a good balance between the instruments. Don’t use any processing or PLUGINS, just volume faders and try to achieve a good LEVEL BALANCE.
Oh, and don’t forget to leave some headroom! Your mix should not clip. Don’t be afraid to turn your tracks down, and turn your speakers up.
Panning is also important. You don’t want all of your tracks fighting for the centre. For instance, panning out the drum-kit is an important way to expand and establish the stereo spectrum. If you have all sorts of different elements and instruments, you need to find a place for them in the stereo spectrum. Pan everything around until you’ve found a good balance.
Keep in mind that you don’t want to tip the balance of instruments too much to the right or left either. Sure, you’ll obviously have to do some additional mixing, but if you get the balance right from the start, it makes the rest of your mix easier and more fun to do.
3. APPLY EQ TO GET CLARITY AND DISTINCTNESS
EQ is your first mixing tool after levelling and panning.
EQ is a tool that you should use to get clarity and separation. If instruments are competing for the same frequency range, then EQ can help make them sit well together. Equalization is an incredibly useful tool for enhancing the sonic colours of your instruments and making a better mix where you can hear all the instruments and tracks clearly. Cutting out unwanted frequencies and boosting the fundamental characteristics of instruments is what EQ is all about.
A nice cut in a less important instrument in that frequency range can go a long way to free up space for others. The low end of your mix should be occupied by the bass and drums. The other instruments do not have a lot of information in the low end, but they have some that might add up and make your mix sound muddy if you’re not careful.
Learn to clean up your low-end, reduce bleed in your drums and eliminate annoying resonant frequencies from your recordings. Click here to read our blog on how to clean up low end frequencies.
Get rid of muddiness in your low-mids, tame the harshness in your mix, and get rid of your boxy sounding drums. Learn where to add presence to your vocals, brilliance to your acoustic guitars, thickness to your keyboards or weight to your bass. These tips are broken down by instrument and help you fix your frequency problems with simple solutions that you can use right away.
4. APPLY COMPRESSION TO GET PUNCH
Compression is with EQ, one of your most powerful tool. Basically, a compressor evens out the volume of your tracks. It turns down peaks, and turns up the quietest parts. Compression is what makes your mix breathe. It can also squash your mix and choke out the naturalness of it. Depending on the genre, instrument and other considerations, the approach to compression varies. We could decide to completely squash down a room microphone for a punchier drum sound, but we would never compress a beautiful vocal to such an extreme. Use a compressor on your drums to fatten them up, and make them punchy.
Compress your bass track to tame the attack a little and get more sustain and body. Use it on your main vocal tracks to turn up the quieter words that might get lost in the mix.
However, make sure to avoid over-compressing your tracks. As a rule of thumb, 3 to 6 db of gain reduction is enough. Be subtle and start with low ratio like 2:1 or 3:1. The point is to make your tracks more consistent and punchy, so the compression should not be obvious.
5. APPLY REVERB TO GIVE A SENSE OF SPACE AND DIMENSION
Most of us are working in home studios or semi-professional environments which makes it sometimes difficult to estimate what instrument should have more space than the other. The result is dry sounding tracks. Use Reverb on drums and vocals to give them space. Every instrument might benefit from a little reverb, but you can go little further on drums and vocals. Reverb creates the stage in which you set your mix. Think of it this way: If you want your song to take place in a big cathedral, then use the big cathedral reverb. If you want a tight studio space, then use the space that sounds like a small studio space. Just make sure you find a good space for your song. Again, be careful not to drown your mix in reverb. A High Pass Filter on the reverb track can also help you avoid muddiness. Reverb also hold everything together, just like compression tends to glue tracks together in the dynamics department, so does reverb in the space department.
So reverb is the answer, most of the time. But if you’re scared of using too much of it, you might want to resort to delay instead.
Maybe you want to let go of the reverb for one day and use a delay instead. Delays are easier to handle, and some are much less confusing than the average reverb. Sometimes you just need a little depth, without adding reverb, and delay can easily do the job.
SUMMARY
So, just to recap. In order to take your mix from bad to good you must:
- Make your track right starting from the arrangement process. Paint the frequency spectrum and make sure your track sounds good even without mixing first.
- Level and Panning. Level balance and pan the sounds across the stereo spectrum to create more separation.
- Use compression the right way. Nicely compressed sounds will make your mix sound better, that's just a fact.
- Space and Depth. Use effects and equalizers to create a sense of space and depth in your mix. Use buses for full control of your effects.