Mixing

Preparing the session#

The amateur way: "Wow, a multitrack." Open the mixer, solo the kick, compress it. No. First I prep the session. I name the tracks, then bus them down until you see the song at the highest level: drums, bass, guitars, vocals. Imagine you're in a helicopter over a city. You see the river and the skyscrapers, not what's on someone's dinner plate. A symphonic metal session with 300 tracks can still be just five buses.

Gain at the source, and mixing into a limiter#

If you play a raw session with every fader at unity, it's often far too loud. Turning down the master would be poor gain structure. This is why starting with all the faders pulled down and with a limiter on the master with a 10 dB boost is a good idea. Your gain structure is more likely to be sensible from the start.

And because this limiter boost forces sane levels, bypassing that instance leaves the mix at the right level to bounce when sending to a mastering engineer.

Listening for what is deficient#

My process:

Listen to the whole mix and ask: what is deficient about this? Why can't I send it off to be mastered right now? Find the problem, fix it, and then listen again.

Soloing, EQing and compressing are not steps in that process. We don't process stuff because it's fun. We process it because something is deficient. One of my mentors taught me to use the least processing for a given job, and to understand what I'm trying to achieve before throwing processing at something. Good defaults help, and arbitrary rules like "always high-pass everything" don't.

There are two ways to mix drums#

With rock, whether that's Led Zeppelin or the Foo Fighters, the overheads plus the room mics are the drum sound. The kick and snare close mics only support that core sound. If you get carried away turning up kick, snare and everything else, that is indistinguishable from turning the overheads and rooms down.

If rock drums sound small, the room mics often need to be louder or more compressed with fast time constants.

With a more modern metal sound, the kick and snare are the sound - often reinforced or replaced by samples. The overheads are "cymbal mics", almost an afterthought. If you mute the kick and snare, you've muted the drums. Processing the kick and snare almost always require samples or clever gating.

There is no maximum amount of EQ#

The idea that you should do a maximum of 3 dB or 6 dB, or some other arbitrary number, is wrong. It depends on the source. If it sounds good, it's quite possible that it's good.

Sometimes the fix is taking something away#

If you listen to "Royal" by Deftones after the three-minute mark, the riff comes back and it is heavier and darker, yet all they did was stop playing the keyboard part.

The mixer matters far more than the gear#

How a track is mixed is roughly a 9 out of 10 factor. What it's mixed with is roughly 1. If your mix sounds weak, cold and narrow, it's probably not because you're missing an analogue summing mixer. It's probably a skill issue, or your monitoring. A good console plus a reverb covers almost everything, and much of the greatest music was made with a compressor, maybe an EQ, a plate reverb and a limited amount of tracks.