Practical Home Mixing Tips #4: Working Faster = better mixes

Doing a great mix is obviously something that takes time, but taking too much time can kill your creativity and make you lose perspective. This applies especially when you are mixing your own stuff but also when working for someone else.

Over the years I’ve developed a workflow to bang out a descent mix in about 8 hours, and make tweaks based on the artist’s feedback after that. As a side note, this timeline is only possible if you get really good reference mixes from the artist and have a very clear idea of how they want it so sound, but the art of referencing is probably a topic for another post….

Here are a few tips I’ve picked up that will have you cranking out better mixes in less time!

Committing to Takes

Most DAWs nowadays will let you stack up multiple takes within a single track. This makes is too easy to decide which guitar solo, vocal take or drum fill you like better at a later time. Kicking this decision making down the road creates a lot of future work and takes your focus off the business of purely mixing. Instead, try to commit takes at the time of recording if you can. It can of course be good to save some alternate takes on an older version in case you find mistakes later on, but by the time your are doing the real mix you should only be dealing with final takes.

Committing to Sounds and saving favourites

Another problem created by DAW’s is the truly insane amount of options they provide for creating and shaping sounds. For example Logic X must come loaded with somewhere between 100-200 different reverbs (I’ve never counted). There are honestly maybe 5 favourites I end up going back to, but I’ve definitely spent hours scrolling through the different options, wondering if “Empty Church #5” the best, or maybe it’s “Large Cavern #3”. Instead, figure out what works for you, and don’t be afraid to stick to those. No one will ever complain to you “Hey isn’t this the same “Reflective Chamber” verb you used last time?”

The same applies for creating sounds. Guitar amp plugins let you choose the amp, the cabinet, the style of EQ (vintage, british, modern american…), the microphone and the mic placement even! I often find that while tracking using a ribbon mic simulator is really juicy and warm sounding, but when mixing 90% of the time I end up switching back to an SM58, which just seems to sit better in the mix. This goes for synth plugins, keyboard sounds, the list goes on. You can really spend hours going down the garden path trying to get THE_PERFECT_SOUND.wav

The remedy for this is to just bounce any midi or plugin laden track to an audio file the moment you get a good feeling about it. This will stop you from tweaking for ever, since you are now working with a plain old audio file with no midi, plugins and other junk. You can go back to an older version if you really need to, but there is usually a good reason you chose a particular sound in the first place. Capture the initial magic, don’t tweak for 2 hours!

Make faster mixing decisions

When it comes to the nuts and bolts of mixing, making faster general decisions about volume, EQ, and PAN faster can save a lot of time and keep you thinking creatively. With panning especially there are certain rules that always work. Here is a very useful list by Leigh Walker on standard pan positions for certain instrument types. Check out his site it’s great!

https://www.teachmeaudio.com/mixing/techniques/panning

You can of course play around with this as needed, but these are a perfect starting place.

A great trick to get things in shape quickly is to put everything in place with only volume and pan before you start to use compression, reverb and your other favourite effects. You may be amazed by how much you can effect the shape of the mix with only these basic tools!

Use one kind of EQ

Aside from using a graphic EQ to solve technical audio problems (See blog #3 which goes into depth on this), I like to pick just one analogue simulating EQ for every track when using EQ for character. This also gives things a nice sonic glue to things by adding the same EQ characteristic across the board. It will also save you the time of scrolling though all the plugins you’ve acquired over the years.

Use Master FX channels

Instead of putting effects on every channel strip or every instrument, try setting up an aux channel for the effect to live. The most common use is setting up one master reverb for the whole tune. You can now send the desired amount of signal from the vocals, percussion, guitar or whichever sound to the aux channel. This allows much better control for the overall reverb of the tune, and saves tons of time when you don’t have to remember or dig around to find out what is happening on 10 different reverb plugins.

In blog post #2 I go into detail about this if you want to know more on the mechanics.

Use Aux Channels to Group Sounds

This is also gone over in detail in blog #2, but take time to learn how to use the aux channels so you can group sounds together. Having the entire drum kit on one channel is amazing and saves tons of time. Also try grouping all the backing vocals, all the rhythm guitars, all the percussion or even less conventional things like putting the drums, bass and rhythm guitar on one channel, or acoustic guitar and percussion one one channel as they sometime serve the same function.

Bottom Line

Lastly, I’ll just say this: always trust your instincts and try not to second guess yourself. If you have a strong feeling that the guitar solo needs tons or reverb, or the drums need to be super dry and close sounding for the vibe you are trying to achieve, then there is probably a good reason you hear it this way!