5 Essential Tips For Better Mixing

Learning the craft of mixing is a challenging and dilatory process. The following tutorial will highlight five common mistakes that should be avoided during mixing.  

1. Your Primary Task Is to Focus

Mixing requires dedication and time. As hours of working pass by, you will feel more and more attached to the sound of the track up to the point where everything sounds pleasing to your ears. The mix will sound pretty good, given enough time, and even worse. Many external factors are pulling your attention away from the task that you are to complete. The solution for this issue could be to stop checking your Facebook and other social media accounts. Put your phone on silent and take every second to listen and focus on the sounds you hear on the track.  

2. Solo Button - Use It Less

The solo button is a crucial part of every mixing console of any DAW. To be clear, the task you want to achieve by mixing is to group all tracks and make them sound good together instead of just perfecting the sound of one channel. The solo button makes this task hard. Since you engage it, your focus shifts to just that particular channel rather than the bigger picture. Try to avoid the olo button and use it only when necessary. Doing so will make it much easier to cut or boost specific frequencies of individual tracks when hearing them in the whole mix.  

3. Keep Your Monitoring Level at Low

At high gain levels, your ears quickly become saturated. The higher the volume, the more the speakers saturate and compress the sound. You probably noticed that everything tends to sound good at high volume, which can easily trick you. Instead of mixing at a higher volume, try to do it at a low or a moderate volume. As a result of doing this, you will be able to spend more time on the mix, and it will be much easier to perfect the sound.  

4. Knowing When to Stop

At the beginning of the mixing process, progress is relatively fast. Then, it becomes somewhat slower, and in the end, you hit the point when the mix stops sounding any better. You probably found yourself in this situation more than once before. Of course, you can continue to mix beyond this point, but it will be much more beneficial if you take a longer break or leave it overnight. Tomorrow, with rested ears, you will probably hear something you did not hear during the mixing session from the previous day.  

5. Rules Are Meant to Be Broken

People are often convinced that the approach that worked well in the previous song will work the same on any other track. There are no rules in the mixing process, and in most cases, this won't work as expected. Applying the advice from top-notch mixing engineers you've heard from online tutorials can be helpful, but try to restrain yourself from taking everything they say for granted. Experiment with different plugins and side-chains, and let yourself be creative.