Practical mixing tips #1 - Turn It Down!

On the internet you will find many complicated articles about gain staging, noise floors, digital headroom etc.. In this post I aim to provide some practical tips anyone working on their music at home can employ right away to get their stuff sounding great!

So here we go. Imagine this scene, you’re mixing away in your DAW working on your new hit single. You want more bass, so you turn that up. Now the drums are too quiet, turn them up too. Crap… now the vocals are buried… let’s turn that up as well. All of a sudden several channels are peaking and… terrifyingly the stereo out channel (the most important one) is clipping! This is obviously a problem as it sounds bad, and leaves the mastering engineer, or whoever works on it next, zero room to add limiting, compression or other fun stuff to your track.

The remedy - just turn it all down!

I would say 90% of stuff I receive from people looks like this: numerous instrument faders way past unity gain, channels peaking, stereo bus turned down to compensate and master fader god knows where. I mean no disrespect to those I’m receiving tracks from, many folks who create amazing and beautiful music don’t have the desire to read technical articles about gain staging.

To fix this, the first thing I do is employ the reverse hockey stick mixing technique. (The hockey stick mix being when the local sound tech at Stinky’s bar(tm) takes a hockey stick to push up all the faders when your band starts playing). To do this, select every fader in your DAW (except for aux channels, stereo buss or master fader) and turn them down a whole bunch. The goal here is to set the stereo buss and master fader to unity and have the final volume outputting at around -12 or so. Now you have more headroom to work with and things will immediately sounds clearer.

There are various theories on what your output volume should be, but most mastering engineers don’t care how loud something is as long as it’s not past zero. I shoot for a final product to be no louder than -3, this gives the mastering wizard/sorceress room to add the final sauce! Starting your mix around -12 or less also gives you lot’s or room to add gain, compression and makes exiting moves like slamming the snare or guitar solo super loud when they need to be.

Hope you find this helpful!