How you start a mix.

 How you start a mix.

It’ something I’ve been asked about a lot so I thought I would give you some ideas to think about when you’re Of course, I can only tell you what I usually do. If that getting ready to mix. your methods are also perfectly acceptable because it’s not method works for you then great! If not, then know that ultimately the most important thing. always the methods that matter, it’s the result that’s WHEN DOES MIXING START?

So let’s talk a little about what it means to “start mixing.” Some people look at mixing like a entirely separate aspect then you would be right to treat it that way. Somebody else of the production process. If you get multi-tracks to mix did the production and the tracking, and somebody will But if you’re involved in the entire project from start to probably handle the mastering. So your job is simple: pull up the faders and get to work. finish the lines get blurred a little bit. If you’re tracking the things should sound in the end so you basically do project and deciding on the sounds and production of each instrument you’re kind of adding a bit of your mixing mentality to the entire project. You have an idea of how everything with the end in mind. same things to the mix regardless of how much you’re Either way is cool, there’s just an interesting mentality shift in your thought process depending on when you get involved in the process. You’ll end up doing a lot of the involved but you’re still coming at it from two different points of view.

IN THE KITCHEN Now, either way, you can’t start slapping plug-ins and processors on until the recording, production and editing process is over. So before you even start moving the faders around make sure you clean up all the crap in your tracks.

1. DO THE DISHES SO YOU CAN COOK Then yo Here’s an analogy for you, let’s see if you can keep up. Cooking is great. Doing the dishes afterwards is terrible. And it’s even worse when you leave them in the sink until the next time you have to cook. Then you not only have to do the dishes before you cook, but you ALSO have to do them afterwards! Terrible right? It’s the same with mixing. If you clean up your tracks before you start mixing you’ll have a more enjoyable experience. You don’t want noise creeping through the vocal tracks during the solo. *Trim the regions and delete the “noisy” silences between parts. *Add fades to all the regions so they don’t If you don’t edit your tracks first, you’ll run into similar problems. You’ll notice an annoying click somewhere, a misaligned drum hit or background noise you should have edited out. This hinders your workflow because you’re constantly going back and forth between the mixing and the editing phase. If you’re always changing hats then you’ll never fully focus on one aspect of your production. Edit first, then focus on the mixing. It’s better to cook with a clean kitchen. Having a full sink of plates and utensils you might need is just going to rob me of the pleasure of making my meal. The same goes for editing. You’ll rob yourself of the joys of mixing if the editing phase is constantly nagging at you in the back of your mind. Like dish washing, editing is pretty boring. It’s tedious and usually pretty un-creative. But if you gloss over it and ignore it, you’ll be left with a sub par production. abruptly pop in.

2. SIMPLIFYING MAKES SENSE

Once you’ve gotten all your tracks cleaned and edited it’s time to simplify. This is where busing comes in. It’s definitely the easiest way to make sense of a really big arrangement. If you have 50+ tracks in your mixer it’s hard to keep track of all that. You waste a lot of time scrolling from one side to the other looking for the guitar parts. That’s why sub-mixes are so great. *Drums

*Guitars (including bass)

*Keys and other synths

*Vocals

Even with close to 60 tracks that’s really what you’re balancing together in your mix. So breathe, don’t worry about the enormity of the session. Once you’ve broken the mix down into a handful of different elements your perspective on the session will change.

Simplify With Routing

Once you’ve drilled the session down you can simplify it even further inside the respective elements. Say you have all these drum tracks that even by themselves are overwhelming. *Two kick drum tracks *Top and bottom snare tracks *4 toms Overheads and room mics You can simplify those tracks further by combining things into buses *Combine the kicks into one bus *Combine the snare into one bus *Combine the toms into one bus *Combine overhead and room mics into one bus That simplifies your 12 drum tracks into 4 tracks you can play with. You’ve cut your hyperventilating down 66%! Of course, make sure you balance each track into the bus before so that you have control over the sound that you want, but if you do it in stages and one track at a time you’ll end up with a session that’s much easier to handle. What About All the Fancy Overdubs? You’ll have sessions that include all the necessary foundational instruments like guitars, bass, keys, drums and vocals. You know, those instruments that make up most of the song. But then you’ll also have solos or lead fills here and there that only play for a limited time during the song as “sweetening.” Sometimes these tracks can make up a good chunk of your session so it might seem like there’s a lot of tracks but there’s actually not that much going on most of the time. It’s a good idea to calm your brain down by completely ignoring these instruments until it’s time to mix them in with everything else. Usually you can group and process those tracks together fairly quickly so worrying about them is pointless when you should be focusing on the mix as a whole. Work on simplifying your mix

*What are the most important instruments? *What’s driving the song? *What should you try to enhance? *What can you leave in the background? Going into the mix with a more artistic approach than a technical one can help you understand what you should focus on. For instance, the most important instrument is usually the vocal but then you also have other instruments that really help support the vocal so you need to focus on them as well. Think of it like a sitcom, there are the main characters and then there are the supporting characters. Find your main character and then mix the supporting roles around them. Once you’ve figure that out you can start your rough mix. An Alternative Way of Creating a Static Mix If you want to get a static fader mix done pretty quickly but you have too many tracks (even after simplifying) you can try mixing in the arrangement window. Set all your faders a little bit below unity gain so you have some headroom to work with and then flip over to the arrangement window Here’s why I think it’s helpful Seeing the waveforms on the tracks as you scroll up and down the arrangement window is incredibly useful. You can tell what tracks will be playing next so you can be ahead of the mix, knowing exactly which fader you need to work on before the track starts playing. Using the inspector window in Logic it’s easy to simply click on the track and raise or lower the volume of the fader to where you think it sounds good. Of course some instruments might get lost during the first pass but it’s a quick and easy way to get a good static mix going. So try that the next time you’re firing up your next mixing session.

READY TO START ADDING PLUG-INS?

Once you’re done with the basic balancing and rough mixing it’s time to start adding plug-ins. And if you want to get the biggest results and improve your mix the most with only the least amount of plug-ins