Rethink Mixing

Question 1

With wich instruments do you start to focus when mixing?

Answer 1

The core instruments, the most important and complex instruments

Question 2

Three steps to fallow when starting to mix from a raw track

Answer 2

1) listen and think like a musician. Is the arrangement great? Is everything in place? Notice everything. Create markers, take notes. Be ready to start.
2) Do a rough balance whit the fadders. Make sure to leave headroom to the fadders. Start with the most important part of the song where all instruments play together. Once the rough balance is done, do LCR panning.
3) Gain staging. Create an AUX (Submix). Route your track to the Submix and route your submix to your speakers.

Look at the levels of your submix NO CLIPPING!

Do a slight master bus compression!

Question 3

EQ And Compress In Mono

Answer 3

Once you have a great static mix in place, it’s time to flip to mono and get your EQ and compression settings in place.

Start with the most important instrument (sonically) listening only to it. Then one by one, bring in the rest of the tracks and continue to the EQ and compression process. Never make critical decisions like this in solo.

Remember to use a high pass filter often, and to reach for subtractive EQ before a boost whenever possible (giving you greater clarity and headroom).

The goal here is to get a great sounding mix with clarity (you can hear each instrument) and punch all while listening in mono. If it doesn’t sound good yet, then you’re not finished with this step.

Question 4

Enhance Your Mix With Busses And Effects

Answer 4

Once your mono mix is sounding great with just EQ and compression, pop things back out to stereo and then route your instruments (drums, guitars, vocals, keys, etc) to their own stereo buss or group track.

At the very least this can give you more global volume control of your instruments in the mix, much like subgroups would on a live mixing console. But if you want you can tweak your tracks further on the group level with added compression, parallel processing, or saturation.

Create at least one buss for reverb and a second one for delay. Use sends to control how much of each track is “sent” to those effects.

Question 5

Sweeten Your Mix

Answer 5

At this point it’s time to make sure every moment of your mix sounds amazing and engaging. Go from the intro to the final note and listen like a listener, not an engineer.

If transitions seem underwhelming, make adjustments to the arrangement through mutes or edits. Add one time effects or virtual instruments to the mix. Whatever it takes.

Skip this step at your own peril. A perfectly polished static mix means nothing if the listener gets bored after one verse and chorus.

Question 6

Automation

Answer 6

Much like sweetening, automation is that final icing on the cake that will give your mix life and character.

Systematically go through each moment of the song and make any volume or pan changes needed through the use of automation.

Also this is where I like to do any vocal “riding” by automating the volume fader so that each word and phrase is heard perfectly.

Question 7

Premastering

Answer 7

You’re at the end! You should have a great sounding mix that you love at this point. Our final step is to simply get the volume up to commercial standards and do any final tonal balance tweaks.

Use a brickwall limiter on the master fader, set the max ceiling at ­.5db or so, and then simply bring the threshold down until you start to see ­3db to ­5db of gain reduction on the biggest peaks (usually snare or kick drum).

Also, consider bringing in a reference track of a pro mix and comparing its tonal balance to yours. If you need to make any slight adjustments consider using an EQ on your master fader and doing subtle changes (1.5db or so) to open up the top end or carve out some mud for example.

If bouncing down to a 16 bit wave file or MP3, be sure to insert a Dither plugin as the final insert.

Question 8

The six steps to The REthink Mixing Cheat Sheet

Answer 8

STEP 1 - Create Your Static Mix

STEP 2 - EQ And Compress In Mono

STEP 3 - Enhance Your Mix With Busses And Effects

STEP 4 - Sweeten Your Mix

STEP 5 - Automation

STEP 6 - Premastering

Question 9

Bus mixing

Answer 9

Create AUX tracks for routing. Send group tracks : band, drums, vocals.

Question 10

Bus mixing : pre faders vs post faders

Answer 10

Pre faders : you can mute the instrument without muting the bus.

Post faders : if you mute one instrument, the bus is affected.

Question 11

Parallel Processing with bus for drums!

Answer 11

For parallel compression, mix an overly compressed track (drums for exemple) with it’s non compressed track

1) create a bus (PDrums)
2) Send your drums to the PDrums
3) Overcompress this track
4) Ajust the fader (from 0) until you get the fatness you want from your drums.
5) Don’t like the cymbals being crushed or too loud? Remove thmen from the Pdrums bus so you get the best of both worlds, easy fix!

Question 12

Parallel processing for the bass.

Answer 12

You can use the bass fuzz technic to create the mids that you bass needs in order to kick in small speakers.

1) create a buss for bass and route as prefader.
2) add a distortion or fuzz plugin to that buss and take out the unesessary low from this bus so it don’t add up
3) See if it adds a texture to the harmonics.
* *Take those concepts to be creative and analytic. There’s no solution or technic, only tools to play with!*

Question 13

Reverb and delay on bus.

Answer 13

PS : wet = far away! + you can use reverb for RX or to make natural sense of space in your mix. *Dry = close

Create an AUX for reverb, have one reverb for all tracks.

Create a SLAP delay AUX channel. You want to create an effect of distance with this delay that feels like it’s hiting the walls of a room. You can send tracks to this buss to make them distant and place things in the mix the way you want them to be.

You can ajust the frequencies on you reverb plugins. For exemple, remove hiss in the reverb is you want.

Question 14

What do you need to check when mixing instruments that are recorded with more than one mic / close mics?

Answer 14

You need to check is it phases.

First (drums, for exemple), turn to mono.

Than, solo (the overheads for exemple) and see if they sound fuller when you invert the polarity. Make sure to choose the one that sound fatter (with more low end).

1) Overheads
2) Kick
3) Snare

4 ) Toms (high to low)

If it phases, you can invert the polarity of the tracks. See if they sound better or more fatter if you invert the polarity. If it does, keep is that way.

Phase is a sign of poor mic placement. (if mics are too close together)

Question 15

How to avoid phase?

Answer 15

The distance bettween mics must be at least three times the distence bettween the mic and the source (instrument)!

Question 16

What are the steps to mixing drums and bass?

Answer 16

1. In mono, check for phasing issues
2. Do a rough balance
3. Solo the core instruments (guitars, pianos etc.) and balance with the drums
4. EQ (clean-up the overheads, make sure the kick sounds thight and that the attack is great, remove the lows we don’t hear to make thighter and remove the muddy sounds, cut out the bad from the snare)
5. Compression (bring out the fatness of each drums)
6. Remove the backgrounds of the close mics and remove pops and clicks. Just clean stuff basicaly!

*if something is missing, consider saturation or distortion to add harmonics*

Bring in the bass and make sure to remove the muddy stuff and the unessesary low end. Make the attack correct and if something is missing in the mids, consider saturation so that the bass kicks in in small speakers!