Mixing is one of the most fundamental necessities to making quality-sounding music. In order to obtain a super clean song and make everything sound cohesive, it must go through the mixing process and have all of its individual tracks tended to in relation to each other so the resulting sound is pleasant, balanced, and makes sense to the ear.
Your mixes will improve the more you practice, so without further ado, here are 5 key mixing tips that can help you understand how to mix better and achieve more professional results at your home studio.
1. Think of Your Mix as a Physical Space
When figuring out how you want your song to sound, close your eyes and picture yourself listening to it in a room. Where do you want each element of your song to sound like it’s coming from? Think about all dimensions – width, height, and depth; distance from you, and whether it is left, right, or center.
The type of song you’re making should inform how you want your mix to sound. Listen to songs you like and try to imagine what space or room they’re in. You’ll notice a pattern – singer/songwriters tend to lean towards an intimate sound, which can mean that everything sounds pretty close together, and close to the listener. Other songs, particularly movie soundtracks or ballads, sound grand and vast, like you are in a big open space that resonates well. Study the genre you make and take note of how large of a space you want to fill up – this will help you with panning, EQ/filtering, compression, and reverb/delay choices down the line.
The more you visualize while listening, the better you’ll be able to place where you want your sound sources to be. Typically, main vocals are in the middle, harmonies and adlibs are on the far left and right, and instruments are placed depending on genre, role in the song, and personal preference.
2. Leave Enough Headroom
In audio engineering, “headroom” is the amount of space between the level a track is in compared to the volume it will clip at. In layman’s terms, it is how much space you’re leaving between a track’s set volume and the volume it turns red at, in decibels.
Leaving enough headroom is key to having a proper mix, and your mastering engineer (or AI) will thank you for it. The mastering process involved lots of limiting and compression, but can only work well and make your mix sound louder if it has the room for it. No headroom means a greater likelihood for distortion and clipping when the mastering engineer boosts levels.
So what’s a safe amount of headroom? We recommend a minimum of 3db difference, but the more the merrier. If your tracks sit at a healthy -6db, your song may sound quiet during the production process, but will sound amazing once the mixing and mastering is done.
3. Cut Unnecessary Frequencies
Every single sound has a specific frequency range. This means it has a presence in those ranges, and if too many elements sit in the same frequency areas, sounds will clash and it will be hard to make out each one. For this reason, every individual track of your mix should be EQ’ed of filtered.
EQs and filters allow you to boost, cut, or adjust the volume of certain frequencies. It is very important to know which parts of the frequency range you need and which you don’t, because messing with the wrong ones can significantly alter the sound of an instrument or vocal (don’t worry, this is reversible by bypassing the plugins).
If a sound lives primarily in a higher frequency range in your song, you can cut the low frequencies entirely to make space for your kick drum, for example.
Pro tips:
- Cut the low-ends when possible and use high pass filters to leave room for your kick and basses
- Cut frequencies you don’t need instead of boosting the ones you want to stand out
- Put a high pass filter on your master when mixing the mid and upper frequencies
4. Use Panning Strategically
A good mix needs panning to create space. This is important because having multiple instruments placed in the same area can cause them to compete and sound muddy. Bad placement can also completely erase a quiet element if it is paired closely with a dominant one, and background vocals won’t sound very “background” if they feel like they’re closer to the listener than the lead.
Use panning to move elements left and right, EQ and compression to move things up or down, and reverb/delay effects or levels to change perceived distance. When leaving everything in the middle, your track will very easily sound confused, so separate instruments that use the same range of the frequency spectrum to clean up your sound.
When panning, do not hesitate to drastically drag instruments or vocals to the sides and play around with placement. This works for everything except the lowest frequencies instruments which should stay in the middle.
Also, remember to listen to the mono version of your track once you are done with panning (lots of sound systems in clubs are using mono signals).
8D audio is great example of how panning can affect how we perceive a music source’s placement in space. If you have headphones, give it a listen!
5. Stop Soloing Tracks
Mixing is all about how your individual tracks will come together. Soloing a track during your mixing process is rarely helpful, as changes need to be made in relation to the other tracks. Try avoiding it as much as possible and only solo a track when necessary.
Adding effects and changing levels while isolating a track will result in more work down the line – it will not sound the same with vs. without its surrounding elements.
What About Mastering?
You can check out our article about mastering here. We advise you to have a look to the platform LANDR which offers an intelligent mastering service on top of access to plugins, samples, music distribution… It’s worth exploring!
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