FIX YOUR MIX

Mixing is traditionally the role of some elusive deity-like genius. A super-hero with supersonic powers. If they can spare the time, and if you can afford them, they appear with a thunderclap before you in a small crater, and blinded by the ethereal light of their plasma sphere you fearfully take a step towards them to hand over The Files…

You wake, as if from a dream several days later to the ping of your email and, trembling with anticipation, you download the file, take it to your ‘system’ and hit play. It sounds amazing. The bass! The space! The drumsound! The vocal! And it’s the same in the car. And your earbuds. And your mate’s Bluetooth speaker. Perfection!

In the absence of Spike Stent or Andy Wallace though, you’ll have to do this all by yourself. And maybe you’re not very confident, as your mixes never seem to sound good other than on your own speakers, and even then they sound sh*** compared to How Deep Is Your Love by Calvin Harris. Why is that?

It’s true that some of the best sounding mixes are made in studios with big analogue consoles and outboard to die for, but it’s also true that some of the best bangers have been squeezed out of a laptop on a tour-bus. In reality most good mixes are achieved somewhere between these two extremes and are usually the result of following a few simple rules.

Whether you’re fully ‘in the box’, hybrid or analogue, these rules are universal, and together with a bit of attention to your working environment give you a good shot at creating a solid mix that will translate to the outside world and hold its own against the tunes you love.

This feature will take us through the entire mixing process from multitrack to final mix.

We’re using a gentle tech house remix of Morning Light by Western Disco as our volunteer session, starting with the raw files, using Logic Pro X as our DAW, and the fabulous and free plugins from our own collection.

We’ll talk about what we’re doing, and why, so you can translate the techniques in question into your own world, and rest assured, we’re staying fully ‘in the box’, so no £2,000 analogue mix bus compressors or prohibitively expensive outboard DSP plugins here.

Let’s dive in!

Sort the multitrack

Let’s assume you have your room set up as best you can (see Your Mix Room box). Now you need to get the session mix ready. There’s a great argument for flattening your session before you start. If you have a ton of instruments and plugins already eating up your CPU, RAM and USB or Thunderbolt bandwidth playing back complex sampler instruments then why not commit to these sounds as they are and move on.

You’re about to mix the track, you’re committing then right? So bounce the tracks in place, or render them or do whatever your DAW does to render each track as an audio file. Your computer will thank you for it when you start piling on mix plugins. You can always come back to the pre-mix session and grab whatever you need. So go on… commit!

If you really want to get ‘Pro’ about it you could bounce a set of wet files (with all the plugs), and a set of dry ones (without them). You can solo and bounce tracks one at a time if they’re using shared effects on aux sends, eg a reverb, or you can preserve the same effect send and return setup you were using up till now in your new mix session. The dry files can live on another playlist for easy access in case you unearth a nasty edit or bum note that’s gone under the radar. Check your sample rates! If you’ve been working in 44.1 kHz don’t be afraid to up-sample your bounces to 48kHz for the mix, especially if you do happen at all to be using a hybrid setup that includes some outboard equipment.

Start with the wet files as they’re going to give you a starting sound that’s closer to the rough mix. Bring the stereo rough mix file into your session and line it up with the multitrack. If possible, send the rough mix out of a second pair of outputs into a second return to your monitor controller if you have one. It’s a great idea to be able to A/B between your mix and the rough mix so you