The Chronology of a Good Mix
A week ago, in Fix It Before You Mix It, I wrote about 8 simple things you can do to set yourself up for success leading up to the mix stage of your project. In this article, I’ll try to take you through a few things that can help you during that mix stage.
The mixing stage, including editing, can often be the most daunting task of a recording project. It’s here that you have to make the final decisions on which guitar solo to use, how much you want the bass to punch, how saturated you want that reverb, etc. All of those choices will undoubtedly shape the sound and in extreme instances, even the genre of the album.
1) Choose your sound. Identify some albums that you really like, that sit in the same genre of music you’re aiming to create. If you’re having trouble finding an artist that relates, pick some albums that have influenced you and listen for what you like about those albums. Maybe it’s Coldplay Parachutes, and you like the intimacy of Chris Martin’s vocal on the album. Maybe you like the drums on John Mayer’s Room For Squares. If so, refer to those albums during your mix to see if you’re achieving the same result that makes those albums so alluring to you. How compressed do they sound? How much reverb is on them? How loud are the overheads compared to the rest of the kit? Can you hear the room in the tracks, if so, how much?
2) Know your room. Are you mixing in your bedroom or on headphones? How much commercial music have you listened to through the same system? How many mixes of your own have you heard on that system, and how have they translated to the rest of the world? This is one of the most critical and toughest things to hammer out because it takes time. Spend some time with music on while you’re just hanging out or working in the room, but also dedicate an hour a day to some critical listening in your mixing room. These steps will familiarize your ears with what a good mix sounds like on your system, so that you can replicate it with your mixes. Good ears and a good knowledge of your room will go farther than the best gear and plug-ins you can buy.
3) What’s the driving force behind the album? At the first big studio I worked at, my boss used to reiterate that there were two main schools of mixing in pop music (and I use the term “pop music” in the looser sense, describing all radio-playable music including rock, country, hip hop, etc):
Nashville and LA.
With Nashville mixing, the lead vocal is the driving force behind every song. When you get to the mix stage of a project in which the lead vocal is the focus, start your mix with the lead vocal. Mute all of the other tracks and only listen to the vocal track. If you’re going to be comping a good take together, do it here. If you’re taking a straight take, identify you’re winning take and start to work on any sibilance and honkiness with EQ, dial in your compression, and find a tasteful reverb for the vocal. After you’ve nailed the vocal down to exactly what you want it to be, start pulling in the other instruments and mix them so that they sit well and complement the vocal, not vice versa. Be sure that after each track you un-mute, you can still hear the vocals shining through the whole mix.
With LA mixing, the rhythm section and guitars drive the song. This was hugely popular with rock in the 80s. Check the mix on your favorite Poison or Motley Crue album; the vox are totally reverb saturated, drums kick hard and at times you can hardly hear the vox when the guitars are kicking in. That creates a louder, in your face hard rock mix. In LA mixing, you’re conceding that the instruments are driving the song. Start with the rhythm section. Mix the drums to kick your teeth in, be sure the bass is locked in with the kick to maximize impact. From there, add in your face-melting guitars and be sure they’re EQ’d to cut through really well. Lastly, drop your vocals on top. If the vox get buried at times, you’re cutting your losses since you’ve already yielded with the vision of the song that the vocals are not what’s driving it forward.
It’s mostly a question of priorities and identifying the style of your mix. At any given moment, what is it that you want your listeners hearing and focusing on? Are you guiding their ears to that part with your mix?
4) Don’t make too many rough mixes. You can call me a hypocrite on this one, as I’m still sitting on some mixes of my own from 2004 that I have yet to release. If you start making rough mixes and listening to them over and over, you’re sabotaging the process. The faults in that mix will start to sound right since that’s the way your ears will learn to hear the song. It also has huge potential of zapping your creativity since it will be tough to add something to a song on a production level when you’ve heard it so many times that it sounds finished to your brain. At that point, anything you add starts to feel like you’re corrupting the song, and you’ve got to bring a new set of ears to help you finish.
5) Impose a Deadline. This stems directly out of number 4. Give yourself one afternoon to mix the song. If you notice glaring mistakes, clicks and pops, things like that later, of course you can go back and fix them. However, do not go into your mix under the impression that you’ll just work on it a little bit, listen to it for a few days, then work on it some more. You will never finish. We can make small tweaks into eternity; we can wait for better plug-ins and outboard gear for years. If you don’t finish your mix with some sense of immediacy, the song will be irrelevant and the genre will be dead by the time you get it out. It’s happened to me before, and I still kick myself over things like that.
I’ll crank out another article soon with more practical how-to’s on getting a cleaner mix. These 5 steps will help you gain a clear vision for your project though, and help your workflow so that you can get more music out there.
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