My Approach to Mixing

Hey There!

Mixing can be a daunting task with so many things to do, that it can be insanely hard to get anything done. I struggled at this at first as well. Finding where to start and where to focus your attention can often lead to confusion and agitation. To combat this, I have developed my own process for mixing a song. This helped streamline my process and allow me to start quickly on mixing, while still focusing on the crucial areas that need to be worked on. With all of that said, let's get into the mix!

Organization

After you've loaded up your track, you have a bunch of jumbled tracks sitting inside your DAW. Some of them may have some kind of numbers beside them, names are all over the place, and instruments aren't grouped together. This can be a very large issue, especially when trying to work with a plethora of tracks. That is where getting your session organized comes into play. Now I see this looked over time and time again. Trust me though, you will thank yourself for putting in the extra time to organize.

The way I go about doing this is first grouping all like-instruments together. In other words, all drums go beside each other, all the bass tracks go beside each other, and guitar, vocals, and effect tracks as well. After this, I will add buses to get some minor routing started. Starting with drums I see if I have multiple tracks for my kick and snare. If I do, I route the kick drum tracks into one bus, and then I do the same with the snare. I don't worry about the toms because I am going to affect them differently, and depending on what you're going for you can do this with the overheads as well. The next step in organization, at least for me, is color-coding. Each group of instruments will get its own color so I can quickly identify what track is what. I don't have any set colors for this and will choose from session to session. On top of this, I will add pictures (thank you Logic and Reaper for this feature) to each bus track to signify what it is. Ergo, bass will get a picture of a bass, the guitar a picture of a guitar, and so on and so forth. After this, you are basically ready to move on to the next step!

The First Listen

Now you have all of your tracks neatly organized and can see what's going on. Now is the time to grab a pen and paper and take some notes. Normally I will play the song one to three times all the way through and get a general feel for the style of music, vibe, and energy of the composition. Noting all the little things I hear down helps me a lot because I can return to those notes later to focus on what needs to be done. I will try to notice little things like what style of drum sound the recording engineer was going for, what guitar tone the guitarist provided, and how I can use it to the benefit of the song or replace it with something similar if need be, or even little errors I may be able to notice off the bat. Be thorough with this one but don't overdo it. Trust your gut to make the judgments, you've been listening to music for a long time, and you know what sounds good to you.

Rough Fader Mix

Now that the first listen is done, I want you to pull all the faders down all the way. Then, go ahead and reset your bus faders back to unity gain (the default gain setting). Now that you have done this, I want you to do a very rough fader mix. Try to get the mix as close to the final product as you can by only using faders. There are some rules to follow here though, and they go as follows:

• Try to keep the peak for each individual fader at about -6db for mixing headroom

• Try to keep the Master Fader at around -3db for mastering headroom.

Now, these rules aren't concrete, and in certain musical genres such as metal music (what I specialize in mixing) sometimes it is a good idea to break these rules. For now though, just try to follow them as much as possible. My rough fader mix starts with drums. I pull the kick and snare up to the loudest they can be with those rules (around -6db). I do the same thing with the toms, then adjust the overheads and room mics by taste. Next, I move on to bass. This is now the time to add a Bass amp sim to the DI track and dial in a rough or final tone if you are going to use one. I make sure that it doesn't overpower the drums, but is still clearly audible and supports them. After this, I move to guitar, doing the same thing with the guitar amp sim if I need to. I then bring up the guitar to around the same volume as the bass, then pull it up or down depending on if it is poking out too much, or not enough. After this, I move on to vocals, adjusting each vocal track to make sure that it is coming through in the way it was intended (yes this includes harmonies and double tracks as well. we are leveling the WHOLE song now). I do the same thing with the sound effects as well. Once everything is roughly leveled, I go through a second time just to make sure I have everything just where I want it. After I double-check, I move on to the next step!

Start Adding Plugins and Mixing the Instruments!

Now it is time for everyone's favorite part! Plugins! After the fader mix is done, I start to add my plugins to my tracks, going in order from drums down to vocals and effect tracks just as I did with the last steps. This time, however, I like to do things just a little differently. I mute out all vocal tracks and focus on the instrumentation. This is so I can hear every little piece of the instruments and fish out things that the vocals may be masking.

EQ or Compression first?

I will typically start by EQing my tracks. This is because I want to bring out the sound of the polished waveform instead of enhancing the un-equalized sound with compression. I basically remove any unwanted frequencies in my tracks and accentuate the ones that support the overall vibe and tone of the mix/song. After this, I will go into the tracks that may have some harsh high end and I will surgically EQ out resonate frequencies. To do this I grab a very narrow band eq, then sweep it across the frequency spectrum until I find a frequency that sticks out for the duration of a section. I then cut it by 2-6db or until it is no longer audible in the full mix. Now is time for compression:

Compression time!

MAKE SURE TO GAIN MATCH WHILE COMPRESSING! (We don't want all that work you did in the Fader mix to go to waste)

Gain matching is super easy. Basically, just turn the compressor off, and see what the volume of the track before compression was. After this, turn the compressor back on and either use the fader, or the built-in gain knob on your compressor to match the original volume.

This stage in the mix is super simple. For the drum shells, I use compression as a tool to bring out the character of the shell. I keep a very fast attack and release on the shells. Now if you want the transient (the initial hit) of the shells to be unaffected you can set a slow attack and fast release. The reason I don't do it this way is that I want even the drum transient to sound massive and impactful. Depending on the drum, I will use anywhere from 2:1 to 5:1 ratio in extreme cases, often sticking with around 4:1. I then pull the threshold knob down until I am hitting about -3db max which isn't a lot, but it does typically bring the character of the drum out. I encourage you, however, to set the Ratio and Threshold to be very high on your compressor to see what it sounds like. This is how you can easily hear what the compressor is doing and dial it back to taste! As for Bass, I split it into two tracks, one for highs and one for lows. To isolate the lows and highs, on the low track I add a lowpass filter that rolls off at the area where the low end starts to go away. I do the same for the highs but with a high pass filter. I then compress the absolute crud out of the low-end to make sure that it is consistent throughout the song. Now what you do with the highs is up to you, but if you want that metal-sounding bass, I would run it through some distortion and then compress it just a hair. Then use the fader to blend that sound into the low end for taste. Next, we move on to guitars, and we are really just using the compression to level out the guitars and prevent any kinds of spikes in volume. I don't do usually more than around a ratio of 4:1 and gain reduction of around -3db. This levels the guitars out without affecting their sound. I will also add a multiband compressor to distorted guitars and compress the low end at about 250hz. This is because that is the area in which palm mutes live, and they can very easily cause a lot of low-end mud whenever they are hit. This multi-band compression just cleans that up. You are done with instruments after that!

Time to Mix the Vocals!

Now it is time to unmute the vocals...oh god where did they go? They're so quiet! This mix is RUINED!....

No, not actually, you are quite okay, and so is your mix. The reason they are hard to hear at the moment is they are being masked by other tracks and to fix that we need to do a few things. Don't even THINK of touching that fader yet either!

EQ

For clean vocals, I usually start by simply cutting out resonant frequencies. This makes working with the vocal even easier. I find them the same way I do on my guitars; use a narrow band eq and sweep through the frequency spectrum until I find spots that sound consistent throughout the entire passage. I then cut them by about -2 to -4db. After this, I try to make it sit in the mix as much as I can. Then you want to cut around 200-300hz with a high pass filter to get rid of the low-end crud that may have built up during the vocal recording. Depending on what I did to the instruments, I will find the frequencies that aren't being occupied and fill the vocal with them. If any other instruments are clashing with the vocal I will go back and eq down a little where the vocal sits. I also like to brighten up my vocal a bit just to make it sound a little more clear and crisp. I then adjust the fader of the vocals if needed, pulling it all the way down to zero and then back up until it is sitting with the music, or on top of it depending on the genre.

Screaming vocals are very similar but there are some differences. The first step is still cutting out those resonant frequencies. Go through the same process to clean up these vocals, you want a very clean track to work with. After this, you will want to start cutting and boosting where you see fit. For screams, I cut anything below 200-300hz out depending on the vocalist. I may choose to automate this back in later if I feel as though it will help a certain part of the song, such as a vocal callout before a breakdown. After this, I will start to boost around 2.5kHz, and sweep around this area until the vocal cuts through the mix. I then like to boost at around 8kHz if needed to boost the constant sounds to sound more aggressive.

Compression

Depending on the genre, compression for vocals can be quite different. For metal music, compression is key. I like to use the Joey Sturgis Tones Gain Reduction Deluxe plugin. I talk about this in my top 10 plugins list, and it is by far one of the best vocal compressors I own. However, you can do this with any compressor. For clean vocals, you have two options. You can compress with a fast attack and fast release. This option is going to bring out the most character in the vocals and soften up the transients of the vocals. The other option is to use a slower release, but still pretty fast, to let that transient shine through a bit before the compressor kicks in. It is up to you which you chose. I recommend testing both and seeing which works better with what you're going for. As for ratio, start with a 3:1 ratio and decide if you want more or less compression. For metal tracks, I will crush the vocals with compression. Anywhere from around 5-10db of gain reduction is what I aim for. This is to completely level out the vocals and bring out all of the character. I then add bus compression to the vocal track as well to cut off any unwanted peaks in volume.

For screams, it is the same approach. This time though, I will compress hard, most times hitting that 10db of gain reduction mark. As for the ratio, I will often stick to around 4:1 to 8:1. I will always do a fast attack and release as well. Doing so will bring out the consonants of the vocal making it very aggressive. These tracks will get bus compression as well, cutting off any of those unwanted peaks.

DeEssing:

This part is important for both scream and clean tracks, and the process will be pretty much the same. It is up to you whether you want to do this on each individual vocal track or each bus. I personally just do it on the bus. You can use whatever de-essing plugin you want, but the goal is to make the "S" consonants and any others that may sound harsh to the ear tolerable. Find the frequency at which this sudden peak happens (it is different for every vocalist) by using a frequency analyzer or even an eq plugin with an analyzer and then you will want to pull that frequency down. You can even use a plugin like a multiband compressor if need be.

Re-Check Levels

You have done a LOT of changes to the overall mix of the song. This can sometimes result in a change in volume for the mix you did, even if you gain matched. This is the time to try and level everything again. There shouldn't be many discrepancies though. Don't stress yourself out if you cant get the levels right on stuff like the drums and vocals because there is another way to get these newly-mixed elements to once again pop out of a mix:

Parallel Compression

This is a technique that I use when certain parts of a mix won't stick out again after I have gone through and mixed all the other elements. We will use drums for this example. First off, you will want to create a new bus and route the shells to it (kick, snare, and toms). Make sure that the snare and the kick are at about the same volume, and the toms are a bit quieter in these sends. You will then add a compressor to this bus and CRUSH it with compression. I mean, a very fast attack, fast release a high ratio like 20:1, and pull the threshold down until you're hitting -20db of gain reduction. Now you're going to level this track by using the fader. Adjust to taste and your drums should punch through again. You can use this technique on the drums and vocal tracks, but I would be wary of using it on much else. I have never had good results on bass and guitar with it.

Congrats!!!

First Time Engineers:

You have your mix! Now don't be discouraged if it doesn't sound like how you want yet, that is part of the process. It takes hours and hours of practice to get this down to an art and the first mix is NOT going to sound amazing. Unless you're just the chosen mix engineer! ALL HAIL THE CHOSEN ONE! No, but seriously, keep it up. You can only get better! Now if you have any questions or need any guidance leave a comment! I'll help as many as I can!

Experienced Mix Engineers:

I hope this gave some insight into my mixing process and maybe you even picked out some things you'd like to try. Now I wasn't able to cram every little detail in so I may have missed something, if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment and ask me! Thanks for reading!