5 Tips To Instantly Improve Your Mixes!

Written By: Eric “Realistic” Michael

Whether you’re an engineer, producer, or an artist, knowing how mixing works & improving your skill set can be beneficial. It can save time in the studio, help overall communication with the people you’re working with, or even just make your demos/rough mixes sound better.

 These 5 tips will instantly improve your mix quality & give you an overall better sound AND the best part is all of these can be accomplished no matter what your setup is! Even if all you have is some basic essential equipment & stock plugins.

1. Create Enough Headroom.

We put this at number one because this can be the one thing that instantly turns a bad sounding mix into a good sounding one. When your session doesn’t have enough headroom, it can create lots of unwanted artifacts like crackling, hissing, bad clipping, & exaggerated frequency clashing.

 The standard recommended headroom is around -6dB, with -3dB being the maximum. The best results will come from having the headroom going into your mix sum or master channel rather than turning down the fader on those channels. That’s because those faders are post inserts & all of the damage that lack of headroom can cause will be going into the channel & all the plugins.

2. Listen To The Song A Few Times First.

This one may seem off-setting as to why it can improve your mixes but listening to the song a few times before grabbing an EQ or compressor can allow you to hear what’s really going on with the overall sound, identify problems areas, clashes, balancing, & just a sense of where the mix should go. You may even hear some cool FX in your head that you can add to spice it up.

When you dive right into mixing without hearing the track, you can start to micro-manage each track & lose sight of where the overall sound should go. Give the track a listen a few times & take notes or mental notes beforehand.

3. Mix At Low Volumes.

Mixing at low volumes is one of the true gems of the mixing process. It’s good to reference your song at louder volumes occasionally; however, the majority of the mix should be done at low volumes. By the way, we mean just turning the volume down on your interface so your studio monitors aren’t blasting loud levels. Some people think we mean turning down the master fader inside the session & that’s not the direction to go.

Louder volumes can be misleading because everything sounds like it’s hitting hard & cutting through. It’s also hard to tell what tracks need volume balancing.

Mixing at low volumes will point out what tracks are too loud or too quiet. You’ll even have an easier time hearing what the compressors are really doing & if they are squashing the tracks or are just right.

Mixing at lower volumes also gives you the benefit of less ear fatigue & will allow you to mix for longer periods of time.

4. Balance Volumes.

For a lot of us we want to reach for an EQ or compressor to make changes first, but it can be beneficial to start with adjusting the channel fader of an individual track before using EQ or compression to fix it. The track may still need EQ; however, after getting the balance figured out, your EQ needs will be different. Lots of times a track just needs to be turned up or down rather than EQ’d or compressed. We recommend adjusting your track volumes, mixing with your plugins, & then one last round of adjusting the volumes after you’ve added EQ, compression, saturation, reverb, etc.

5. Take Breaks.

Believe it or not taking a short break & walking away from the mix for a little bit can really reset your ears & allow you to hear brand new issues when you come back or even point out things you could do better or differently with your current mix. It’s good to take a few breaks when mixing a song the same day & also coming back to it one more time the next day before you send it out to your client or audience.

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Realistic Production - Engineer

Realistic is a Producer/Engineer located in Atlanta, GA specializing in Hip-Hop, R&B & Pop music. Realistic has been involved in the music industry for over 15 years & has an AAS in Music Production & Engineering. He has worked on projects for Musiq Soulchild, NBA 2k, Atmosphere, Brother Ali, Rhymesayers, Hamburger Helper, & Pharaoh.

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