Mixing, part 1: Basics

So, at this point most folks have finished the majority of the recording for their songs. Now it is time to turn our attention to mixing...

Mixing is the second part of the process of producing a professional recording. This is where an engineer (usually not the same as the one who did the tracking) takes all the raw tracks and fine tunes everything to make the song sound as powerful, polished, and interesting as possible. Really successful engineers get popular because they have a unique "sound" that they bring to the music they work on.

Different genres of music tend to have different styles of mixing.
For example, most pop music (including most rock and hip hop) tends to use a lot of processing in the mixes to make songs sound LARGER THAN LIFE. Listening to pop music is almost like watching a movie. Like, Kanye West basically wants you to believe that his music is the product of a superhuman badass, so the mixing on his songs reflect that: everything hits really hard, there are lots of FX, etc.

With other types of music, like jazz and classical, the goal is to make everything sound as realistic as possible. You're trying make the listener feel as if he or she is right in the club or concert hall where the performance is happening. You don't want to add anything that sounds like it was artificially produced in a studio (even though the mix is happening in a studio!).

So, considering that most of you guys are pretty much making various forms of pop music, and most of your instrumentals were created "artificially" with software, which approach do you think you'll take?

When you're ready to mix you have a lot of ways you could approach it, but here is a simple formula for you to follow:

1. Pull down all of your faders and then bring them up, one at a time to build a good basic balance of all your instruments. Especially the melodic instruments (synths, samplers, guitars, saxaphones etc.). If you have a couple different instruments playing at the same time, then you have to decide which one is the most important and turn the other ones down, relative to that one.

*Note* Main vocals will almost always be THE most important thing in the mix and must be loud enough to be CLEARLY heard over the other instruments.

2. Pan all instruments at least a little bit to the left or the right. The only exceptions are kick drums, snares/claps, bass, and main vocals. Try to get a balance, so that instruments are spread out evenly between the left and right sides.

3. Clean up your tracks. Get rid of all the stuff you don't need, like the parts on the vocal tracks where the vocalist isn't performing. In Pro Tools, use the trim tool to get rid of the extra bits. Make sure you're either trimming to the zero-line crossing or using fades to avoid pops and clips! Use crossfades in the parts where you're sticking two regions together. I also often use high pass filters (HPF) at this stage just to get rid of super low frequencies that I don't need. (See Mixing, part 3).


4. Use compression to smooth out the volume levels of certain instruments and make them sound punchier (see Mixing, part 2 for more details). In a modern professional mix, almost everything will have at least a little compression on it. Most important things to compress: vocals, drums (esp. kick and snare), bass, guitars.

5. Use EQ to balance out the frequencies of all instruments (see Mixing, part 3). Possibly the hardest aspect of mixing to master. Good mixers know how to find specific frequencies from different tracks that clash with each other and then
dip or boost them to make certain instruments stand out, and put others more in the background.

6. Add FX to add space and interesting textures to certain tracks. The two most common FX are reverb and delay. Both of these add "echo" and make things sound like they are in a real acoustic space (a church, for example). More extreme types of FX include flangers, phasers, distortion, etc. As a rule of thumb, less is more when it comes to these. Check them out, experiment, but use them sparingly!

7. Automate tracks to give the song more flow and movement.
Figure out where it might help to bring the volume of certain tracks down. For example, maybe a certain synthesizer would be good to be low in the mix during the verses, but at the hooks you could bring those up to make that part hit harder. You can also automate panning and pretty much anything else to create interesting movements in the song's flow. Again, less is more!

8. Bounce your final mix out of Pro Tools!
Remember to bounce to whatever format the final tracks are going to be collected. For this class, bounce at:

Stereo Interleaved
Format: WAV
Resolution: 48,000 Hz
Bit Depth: 24 bit