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In this article...
Mix Mistakes Introduction
1: Dodgy Timing/Tuning
Feature 2: Mix Tonality Misjudgements
Mixing / Production 3: Phase Misalignment
By Mike Senior 4: Mix Mud
5: Unhelpful Arrangement
We explore some of the most common causes of mix failure we've tackled in 6: The Wrong Reverb
our monthly Mix Rescue column. Banish these demons and you're most of the 7: Harshness
way to a devilishly good mix! 8: Buried Details
9: Weak Payoffs
Over the years, I've listened to piles and piles of amateur 10: Inappropriate Processing On The Mix Bus
mixes from home studios, including thousands of productions One Song, 100 Mixes!
submitted by SOS readers to Mix Rescue, Studio SOS, Demo Monitoring
Doctor (the predecessor of the current Playback column), and Mix Referencing
the My Sound Files section of the SOS forum. On top of that Further Reading
lot, I've heard almost as many mixes again from students and
teachers working in small college studios. What I've learnt SOS Competitions
from all these mixes is that some problems crop up much
more often than others. Win! JZ Microphones Black Hole
Win! Lauten Audio Atlantis FC‑387 FET
What really crystalised this opinion for me recently was microphone
listening to over 100 mixes of the same raw multitrack files in
order to adjudicate a recent 'mix‑off' contest. Because
everyone had worked from identical source material, the
submissions clearly demonstrated that the same issues were
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undermining people's final results time and time again.
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The purpose of this article, then, is to reveal the most common
of these recurring mix nightmares — and thereby help you to avoid them in your own projects.
There's only so much that text can tell you about mixing, though, so to make things clearer I'm On the same subject
going to refer to the aforementioned competition mixes by way of real‑world audio illustration
Remote Music Production
— see the 'One Song, 100 Mixes!' box for details of where you can listen to them. I've actually
Warren 'Oak' Felder: Recording & Producing Demi
just completed my own mix of that track, which will appear as a forthcoming Mix Rescue Lovato's 'Sorry Not Sorry'
feature — so watch this space if you're keen to know how I approached the track myself! I've April 2020
also trawled through various articles in the SOS archives at www.soundonsound.com to create The Psychology Of Mixing
an on-line list of useful further reading, including several past Mix Rescues, which offer copious April 2020
example files, as well as links to useful software resources. See the 'Further Reading' box for Inside Track: Selena Gomez 'Rare'
details. But now, without further ado, let's reveal and rectify the most common rookie April 2020
mistakes... Mix Rescue: Andy Zuk
April 2020

1: Dodgy Timing/Tuning SIGN UP TO

This is probably the single most common SOS NEWSLETTERS
weakness of home‑brew mixes. Like it or not,
the public these days are used to unnaturally Latest Videos
tight tuning and timing. A genuinely laid‑back
feel is one thing, but sloppiness in this
department is one of the quickest ways to
Here's the waveform from a live drummer's
make your mix sound like a demo.
kick‑drum mic. Even though the part was recorded to
Unfortunately, a good 90 percent of the a click track, you can see that it naturally (and
amateur mixes I hear fall at this hurdle, simply desirably!) deviates a little from the metric grid.
because too little care has been taken over
such matters during rehearsals, tracking, overdubbing, and editing. Furthermore, of those
home recordists who do actually apply some serious elbow grease here at the edit/mix stage,
only a small proportion actually end up with really decent results, simply because it's so easy to
mishandle the available tools.

Now, I realise that some people take a pretty strong stance against the use of corrective
measures like these, and probably the most frequent complaint is that such tactics kill the Universal Audio LUNA - First Look
emotion in the music. My response is that good corrective processing shouldn't do that, as it 1 week 2 days ago.
will only target the inaccuracies that undermine the music, while leaving alone those that
support it. To put it another way: just because a few nutters go round stabbing people, it
doesn't mean we should ban knives entirely! Clearly, you need to be careful not to push your
corrective mix procedures too far, but my own experience suggests that the vast majority of
home‑brew productions are in absolutely no danger of straying over that line. Here are some
tips and tricks to help you get things right:

Timing correction isn't about quantising

everything to your sequencer's bars‑and‑beats
grid. It's more about tightening up
disagreements between the available parts in
your arrangement. As such, your drum Oak Felder - Recording Demi Lovato's 'Sorry Not Sorry'
waveforms are usually a better visual guide for 1 month 1 week ago.
editing purposes than software bar/beat
lines.Fully automatic pitch‑correction will
almost never achieve an acceptable
combination of tuning accuracy and musicality,
so be prepared to spend some time manually
finessing the action of any pitch‑correction
utilities you choose to employ.For timing Here you can see a small section of the lead vocal
part from SOS January 2011's Mix Rescue mix, in
purposes, the end‑point of a note can be
Celemony's Melodyne Editor pitch/time‑processing
almost important as where it begins, especially
software. Although notes look out of tune, you can
when you're dealing with bass lines.Whether listen to the remix to confirm that they don't sound
you're adjusting timing or tuning, avoid the that way in the context of the track.
Microphones: Designing The Future
powerful temptation to trust your eyes over
2 months 2 days ago.
your ears. Although looking at software waveforms and pitch displays can help speed up
corrective editing, it's not at all uncommon for them to show some notes as 'correct' even when
they're still audibly awry, and vice versa.It's particularly easy to lose perspective while editing
timing and tuning, so take frequent breaks and make sure to listen to the track at least once all
the way through (preferably without looking at your computer screen) before signing off your
edits.

Example Mixes: Although a majority of the contest submissions leave tuning pretty much
untouched, there are nonetheless some mixes (17, 20 and 39, for instance) that make a pretty
respectable job of it. None of the mixes quite tightens the timing enough for me, though, which
underlines how few small‑studio mix engineers realise the importance of this, for rock
productions in particular.

2: Mix Tonality Misjudgements

Anyone who's ever had their portable music
player in shuffle mode should be aware that
there's no standardised quantity of lows, mids,
or highs in a commercial mix. That said,
though, it's rarely sensible to endow your own
production with an overall tonality that makes
it feel out of place alongside comparable
commercial tracks. As such, it's as well to do at
least some comparative checks against
stylistically similar releases during the mixing
stage to avoid any obvious tonal mismatch,
even if you have the luxury of a good mastering
engineer to refine this aspect of the sonics
Don't compare the overall tonality of different mixes
post‑mixdown — you don't really want them at just one volume level. Give that monitor level
applying drastic master EQ, simply because it control some exercise to get a more informed
will almost certainly upset your carefully perspective.
crafted instrument balances.

Although I don't consider what I've just written

to be tremendously contentious, it still
surprises me how often home mixers allow
overall tonality problems to stymie their
efforts. To some degree I suppose it's
understandable, given that both the vagaries of
low‑budget monitoring and the real‑time
adaptability of the human hearing system can
heavily disguise a skewed frequency response,
preventing it from reaching the forefront of
Plug‑ins such as Melda's MAutoEqualizer can
your attention. Those seem like flimsy excuses
measure the overall frequency response of your
to me when there are so many cheap and easy whole mix, and then compare it with that of any
remedies on hand. Here are some useful commercial release. Although you must always
pointers: carefully evaluate the results of any such software
analysis by ear, it can be a useful reality check.
Import several commercial mixes into
a fresh project in your sequencer alongside
a stereo bounce‑down of your own mix, and
then switch between them instantaneously
 using the track solo buttons, so that you
throw the tonal differences into starkest
relief. Use the track faders to compensate
for loudness differences between the tracks.
Compare mixes on more than one listening
system, if possible, and at different playback
volumes, to lay bare as many different tonal
facets as possible.
Get hold of some kind of high‑resolution
frequency-analysis tool to provide you with
extra information about the frequency
spectrum. Voxengo's SPAN provides decent
free spectrum-analysis in plug‑in form, but if
you've got any budget available at all, I'd
certainly recommend investigating some of
the more sophisticated tools that allow you
to capture a tonal fingerprint averaged over
the whole track — tools like the Melda
MAutoEqualiser and Voxengo Curve EQ
plug‑ins, or the off‑line Har-Bal software.
Whatever any software tells you, though, be
very wary if it contradicts the evidence of
your own ears.
Fixing a broad tonal imbalance in your mix
can be as simple as inserting a high‑quality
EQ plug‑in on your master channel.
However, if you find yourself using more
than three or four EQ bands, applying more
than 3‑4dB of gain per band, or using
narrow filters (Q>1), it's more than likely
that your per‑channel EQ settings need
some reassessment too.

Example Mixes: There is a huge tonal range to the competition mixes, despite the band having
provided a detailed list of commercial reference productions. Compare the HF crispiness of mix
43 with the stifled highs of mixes 35 or 58, for example, or line up the powerful low end of mix
32 with the slimline low frequencies in mixes 23 and 29. Mixes such as 19 and 43 have over-
prominent mid-range, while others, such as 12 and 48, are recessed in that region. All that said,
it's worth pointing out that even the mixes that feel most successful to me in this respect
(mixes 04, 20, 31, 61 and 63, for instance) there is still a good degree of tonal variation — every
mix doesn't have to sound exactly the same to tick this particular box, and there's certainly
some room for personal preference.

3: Phase Misalignment
If you use more than one mic to record any
instrument, there's always the danger that
minute time‑delays between the recorded
signals will cause a type of frequency
cancellation called comb‑filtering when the
mics are combined at mixdown. Similar
difficulties can also arise when combining mics
with DI signals; when summing stereo mic pairs
or send effects to mono; and when triggering
samples alongside live parts. Most
home‑studio folk underestimate the
importance of dealing with phase mismatches,
leading to mixes with hollowed‑out sounds and
poor mono compatibility. However, there are now so many ways to address phase issues in
a typical MIDI + Audio sequencer — fine delays, audio editing, polarity inversion, all‑pass
filtering, phase rotation — that there's really no need for comb‑filtering to rain on your parade.
For better results, try these tools and techniques:

Listening to your mix in mono is a quick way to check if any stereo signal in your mix
harbours phase problems. Although summing the left and right stereo channels of a mix will
always cause a certain degree of tonal change, you need to be on the lookout for any
dramatic alterations that stand to make a nonsense of your mix balance. If you do find
phase gremlins, try applying phase‑adjustment techniques to one side of the offending
stereo channel to improve the situation.
There are a number of dedicated phase‑adjustment plug‑ins worth investigating, including
commercial products such as Audiocation's Phase, Voxengo's PHA‑979 or Littlelabs' IBP
Workstation (for the UAD2 platform), as well as freeware such as Betabugs' Phasebug and
Variety Of Sound's new preFIX.
 Be careful when layering several bass parts
or low drum sounds within a single
arrangement. Allowing such layers to slip in
and out of phase with each other is a recipe
for frustration, because it'll cause the
combined tone to change sporadically
throughout the timeline in a way that's
almost impossible to fix with normal mix
processing.

The simple act of switching your monitoring to mono

can reveal all sorts of hidden phase conflicts in
a stereo mix.

Example Mixes: The multi‑miked guitar parts in the competition multitracks caught out a lot of
contestants, who chose to pan the individual mic signals across the stereo field without
phase‑aligning them first — compare mixes 36, 43, 58 and 59 in stereo and mono, for example,
to hear what I mean. Phase cancellation between the left and right overhead mics caused
mono‑compatibility problems too, as in mixes 33, 56 and 61.

4: Mix Mud
The lower half of the mix is frequently
something of a battle zone. Pretty much any
track can contribute low‑end energy, but unless
you're careful about which tracks you allow
through in this range, it's very easy to end up
with a gloopy‑sounding mess that blurs the
definition of your bass parts. The widespread
use of close‑miking techniques is partly to
blame for this common problem, because of
the artificial bass boost (called the 'proximity
effect') that most directional microphones
impose under such circumstances. However,
many synthetic sounds and samples often
contain much more LF than is actually required
in a mix, too, so programmed arrangements There are several great plug-ins for adjusting phase
are no safer from this pitfall than live relationships, so there's really no excuse for letting
comb filtering wreck your sonics
recordings. Try some of these tricks and see if
things improve:

Apply high‑pass filtering to any instrument

that doesn't actually require low end for
musical reasons. This will ensure that DC
noise, traffic rumble, mic‑handling noise,
and any other low‑octave rubbish doesn't
interfere with your main bass parts.
When setting filter frequencies, make sure
to listen within the context of the mix. You
might be surprised by how far up the
spectrum you can go before the sound
starts to lose warmth in context. Be
careful with percussive sounds, though, as
these can lose subjective punch well before
overall tone seems to change.
Try to funnel your different bass
instruments into different frequency regions
using pitch and EQ controls. The more these
parts have to fight for the same space, the
trickier it'll be to avoid murkiness.
Be wary of delay or reverb effects that take
ages to decay at the low end, because they
can quickly make an unpalatably thick soup
of your sonics. In typical pop, rock and
electronica work, you can usually afford to
high‑pass filter most effect returns well
above 100Hz, as well as applying additional
LF shelving or peaking cuts in the couple of
octaves above that.
 One of the most powerful weapons in the
fight against muddy mixes is also one of the
simplest: high‑pass filtering.

Example Mixes: Although mix muddiness tends to be associated with a mix tonality that's
heavy in the low-mid range, as in contest submissions 09, 54 and 58, say, brighter mixes such
as 21, 22 and 36 are by no means immune to the same kind of clarity problem. Compare these
to mixes such as 20, 31, 51 and 63, which handle this area of the spectrum much more
effectively.

5: Unhelpful Arrangement
The roots of many a mix problem can be traced back to the musical arrangement, and this
simple fact renders many of the budget productions I hear effectively unmixable. If your song's
verse has more guitar or percussion layers than its chorus, you're likely to face an uphill
struggle if you want the chorus to arrive with a bang. Likewise, there's no sense in having
different guitar and keyboard sounds competing in the same pitch register if you want to keep
any separation between them in the mix. And unless you create some sense of build‑up in the
arrangement itself, it's unlikely that you'll hold the listener's attention all the way to your final
chorus. Here are some quick ways to make improvements:

Try to avoid simply replicating the same arrangement for any similar sections of your track.
Dropping a couple of parts from the first verse, for example, can help make the second
verse feel a lot fresher and more engaging when it arrives.
If you're having trouble disentangling parts in your mix, try altering MIDI parts to different
chord inversions or pitch‑shifting audio parts to different octave registers, to give each a bit
of clear space in the frequency spectrum. Alternatively, put one part's notes in the time‑gaps
left between the another part's notes.
Sometimes adding surreptitious overdubs
or samples at the mixdown stage (or even
editing out whole sections of the song!) is
the best way to remedy an arrangement
problem, so don't rule out this kind of tactic
at the mixdown stage.

Rich reverb decays can quickly swamp your mix,

especially in modern upfront chart styles, so try
shortening the effect's decay time if your mix is
beginning to feel undesirably murky.

Example Mixes

Although a lot of people did stick within the parameters of the multitracks provided, there were
many instances where contestants applied creative rearrangement techniques to tackle the
mixing challenges presented by the supplied multitracks. Some mixers (most notably 03, 22, 27,
39 and 42) wielded the razor blade to increase the overall pace of development and to bring in
the vocals earlier. Mixes 18 and 52 wheel out a variety of more extrovert mix effects as ear
candy, while mixes 03, 18, 56, 59 and 61 make use of additional synth/sample textures to fill
out the chorus texture or add extra atmosphere during the verses. Vocals were frequently
flown around to other parts of the mix and treated with pitch‑shifting to generate synthetic
harmony parts, as you can hear in mixes 05, 26 and 40, for instance, plus there are some
interesting larger‑scale arrangement 'drops' showcased in mixes 27, 28 and 56. The most
successful combination of all these different approaches for me, though, can be heard in mix
20 — a version that only just missed winning the contest outright.

6: The Wrong Reverb

Reverb can do so many things in a mix: gelling sounds, changing timbres, simulating an
acoustic environment, lengthening note decay. As such, one of the important tricks to using
reverb successfully at mixdown is to concentrate on preventing it from doing things you don't
actually want! Most home‑grown mixes have difficulties with this to some extent, with the
result that too much or too little reverb is typically applied. After all, it stands to reason that if
you try to blend a sound into the mix with a reverb that's not good at blending things, say, then
either you're going to stop short of the amount of blending you need, or you're going to turn
the effect up to a point where its sound becomes overbearing in other ways. The following tips
provide a useful guide to getting your reverbs
right:

Natural‑sounding reverbs will tend to be better

for blending sounds together and giving them
a sense of space. Unnatural‑sounding reverbs
(such as plates, springs and quirky algorithmic
digital devices), on the other hand, will tend to
offer more scope for creative enhancement of
instrument timbres.Bright effects usually
sound more obvious at a lower level, so be
If the layout of audio in your DAW's main window
prepared to roll off the high frequencies of looks anything like this, with lots of simple repetition
effect returns if you want your reverbs to keep of arrangement textures, then you'll almost certainly
a lower profile.The length and level settings of struggle to build up a sense of tension or momentum
a reverb are interdependent. If you misjudge in the mix.
one of them, you'll struggle to find
a satisfactory setting for the other.When you're
close to completing your mix, bypass each
return for a few seconds during playback. This
can really help you to gauge whether each
effect is set up right, especially in terms of To give you a little more perspective on your effects
overall tone, level and decay time.If you're settings during the final stages of a mix, try muting
looking for a more up-front sound, using each effect return for a few seconds before returning
it to the balance. Once your ear has got used to the
heavier compression or adding in things like
mix without the effect, it's a lot easier to judge
synth pads can both reduce the need for whether it's actually optimised for its purpose.
reverbs in a mix. Tempo‑sync'ed delay effects
can also provide a more transparent substitute for reverb in a lot of cases.

Example Mixes: Mixes 17, 23 and 27 all have

long reverb treatments that are rather too
prominent in the balance, presumably in an
attempt to gel the instruments and vocals
together — a task that's usually more
successful carried out with shorter,
If your EQ settings look anything like the ones from
ambience‑style patches. (The reverb tails are
this Mix Rescue submission, your mix is very likely to
also quite bright in these three mixes, which suffer from the same harshness problems, because
only reinforces the sense that the effects are of the repeated emphasis on the 2‑5kHz region using
being artificially generated.) Mix 16, on the comparatively CPU‑light processing.
other hand, has the opposite problem, in that
it's using too much short reverb to try to enhance instrument sustain and to create the illusion
of a larger space. Here, a few longer delays or reverbs would have been more effective,
allowing the blending treatment to assume a more natural‑sounding background role. Mixes
06, 10 and 23 also use too much reverb for me, and I think that stronger use of compression
would have been a better alternative, not least in fattening the drums and keeping the mix as
a whole clearer and more upfront.

7: Harshness
Any part of your mix that's rich in the 2‑5kHz frequencies
will normally sound closer to the listener, not least because
the human hearing system is most sensitive to information
in that region. Little surprise, then, that so many home
recordists pile masses of 2‑5kHz on everything — vocals,
guitars, drums, cymbals — with the result that the mix as
a whole ends up sounding harsh. However, it's not just
frequency response that can make a mix feel abrasive,
because untamed high‑frequency transients can be another
crucial factor too. Here are some easy ways to avoid
harshness in your mix:

Try to avoid boosting in the 2‑5kHz region, especially

with CPU‑light digital equalisers, which can occasionally
sound a bit crunchy up top. If a given instrument isn't
coming through well in that spectral area, apply some
cuts to competing channels instead.
Every home studio should have at least
Avoid EQ'ing in solo, because most people instinctively one dedicated transient processor, if
try to give every track a 'forward' sound if they work like only because they can deal with overly
that. It's what your tracks sound like in the context of the spiky acoustic recordings so
mix that really counts. transparently. There are now plenty of
plug‑in options to choose from,
If you want to move synth or electric‑guitar rhythm parts
including SPL Transient Designer,
out of the harshness zone, try using pitch‑shifting or Stillwell Audio Transient Monster, and
distortion to move some frequencies into a different Voxengo TransGainer shown here.
part of the audio spectrum.
Be careful with the Attack Time control if you're
compressing percussive material heavily, because slower
 settings can allow high‑level transients through the
processing before the gain reduction has the chance to
take hold.
To tone
down
overly
spiky
piano or
acoustic‑guitar tracks, experiment with some of the
dedicated transient processors now available, such as
SPL's Transient Designer, Stillwell Audio's Transient
Monster, Sonnox Transient Modulator and Voxengo's
Transgainer. Because these don't rely on a threshold
system to work, they tend to deal with the problem
more 'musically' than traditional dynamics units.

Example Mixes: Given that the competition multitrack combined thrashy drums and heavily
overdriven electric guitars, it's little surprise that many of the submitted mixes suffer from
harshness problems. Take mixes such as 13, 27 and 54, for instance: despite the considerable
variance in their overall mix tonalities, they all share the kind of upper mid-range emphasis that
quickly becomes a bit grating on the ear, especially when the extra guitar layers hit during the
middle section. Overly sharp snare transients are also a bit hard on the ear in mixes such as 24,
34 and 56.

8: Buried Details
Even in cases where the mix tone is free of
muddiness and send effects have been applied
appropriately, musicians who mix at home
rarely present their material in the best light,
simply because they don't actively direct the
listener towards the music's most appealing
aspects from moment to moment. Yes, the
bass part might be dull as ditchwater most of
the time, but that doesn't mean you can't push
up the fader for its one little fill if there's
nothing else more thrilling happening at that
time. Any and all parts can benefit from micro‑level fader rides like this, but few tracks more so
than lead vocals, where riding up the details can mean the difference between the listener
understanding the lyrics and not. Here are some useful tricks to focus on all those lovely little
details:

Whether the main part in your mix is a lead vocal, instrumental solo, or some other hook,
it's not unusual for it to have the odd lull — a comparatively featureless sustained note, say,
or a gap between phrases. Whenever you hear one of these, have a quick hunt amongst the
rest of the backing tracks to see if there's anything else that might briefly poke out of the
texture to provide some welcome diversion.
Turning down a couple of backing parts underneath a lead vocal line can help reveal more
of the singer's subtle vocal inflections without recourse to nuclear‑grade vocal compression.
It's standard practice on a professional level to carefully automate lead vocals in order to
maximise the intelligibility of the lyrics, so don't forget to give that process the time it needs.
While you're at it, try fading up the ends of some of the note tails — you'd be surprised how
often they contain characterful little bits of hidden phrasing that can really make
a performance seem more emotional.

Here you can see a section of the Mix Rescue remix

project from August 2009. Notice how the piano
(blue) backing level is being faded up between the
vocal phrases (red) to help direct the listener's ear in
that direction whenever the vocal interest wanes.

Example Mixes: When someone's using detailed automation carefully, it's usually tricky to hear
what's going on in absolute terms — in other words, you shouldn't get an active sense of faders
being waggled about if the engineer knows what they're doing! What you should get, though, is
a sense of the music being easier to follow and more engaging from moment to moment,
something which is most apparent in mixes 20, 31 and 63, all of which made my own shortlist.
However, to be honest, none of the competition entries really shone in this area, which only
serves to highlight how commonly the importance of micro‑level automation is
underestimated.

9: Weak Payo s
Anyone who's ever mixed a song will at some
time have come up against the problem that
their choruses sound underwhelming
compared with their verses — or, to put it in
more general terms, that some section of the
arrangement isn't delivering the required
emotional payoff. There can be lots of reasons
for this kind of 'long‑term dynamics' problem,
but the most fundamental one is failing to pace
the mix's build‑up correctly, such that the
sonics peak too early. In this situation, the
temptation is always to try to push the These two screens show the level of detail that goes
subjective 'size' of a mix's climaxes beyond the into vocal automation on today's commercial chart
point where they sound their best, thereby productions. The lower, right-hand screen is from
introducing all sorts of potentially unmusical Fraser T Smith's mix of Tynchy Stryder's 'Number
One', and the upper one from Greg Kurstin's mix of
processing and distortion side‑effects. Here are
Lily Allen's 'The Fear'. That's what you're up against!
some ideas to help you achieve the impact you
want from a tune:

If you feel that a section of your song is still

failing to deliver the goods, even after
you've taken its sonics as far as you
reasonably can, why not try working
backwards? See if you can make the
previous section smaller‑sounding, in some
way, than it currently is.
Remember that different songs, and
different mix sections within a song, may
demand different sounds from the same
instrument. A ballad's solo piano
introduction, for example, will probably
require a much fuller sound than the piano
vamping tucked into a full‑band rock
rhythm workout. Splitting your recordings
across different tracks with audio editing
(sometimes referred to as multing) is Any important instrumental or vocal part in your mix
may well require different mix treatment to cater for
a simple way of implementing this idea, as
the balance demands of different sections of the
you don't need to automate all the musical arrangement. If so, then 'multing' the
processing, simply exercise the mutes! recording, by editing sections of it to separate tracks
in your DAW (as shown here), is a simple way to
manage the practicalities.

Although applying low midrange boost to a lead

vocal, as in this screenshot, can give it a warm and
intimate character, the danger is that it can also make
the rest of the backing track sound small, so any such
boost needs to be handled with care.

Both the level and the timbre of your lead

vocals will be critical to the perceived power
of the backing arrangement. In particular, if
you fade the vocal too high up in the
balance, or give it too much lower mid-
range, the chances are that it will start to
make the rest of the production sound
small.
Example Mixes: Managing the long‑term dynamics of this particular mix was probably the
greatest challenge presented by the competition multitracks, the crux of the matter being that
the middle section, with its strident additional guitar overdubs, tended to make the onset of the
subsequent final chorus feel like something of a letdown — as in mixes 21 and 64, for instance.
Increasing the chorus vocal levels is the tactic taken by mixes 17 and 28, but this isn't actually
that successful, as it makes the band sound rather small by comparison with the singer. Mixes
22 and 33 thicken the chorus texture using additional distortion and widening effects
respectively, but fall slightly foul of harshness and mono incompatibility into the bargain. More
successful, to my ears, are mixes such as 38 and 46, which seemed to deliberately restrain the
middle‑section's guitars (so that the chorus can still trump them in some way) or those which
surreptitiously inflate the final chorus with extra textural layers — mixes 03, 07, or 20, for
instance. There is also some excellent lateral‑thinking from mixes 20 (in its second version), 27,
and 58, all of which use edited‑together arrangement drops as a means of partially
side‑stepping the whole issue.

10: Inappropriate Processing On The Mix Bus

This one is a bit of a tightrope, because there
are two different ways you can come a cropper.
On the one hand, it can be impossible to
achieve the necessary degree of mix 'glue'
and/or aggression in certain modern styles
without a generous helping of dynamics
processing over your master channel; but on
the other hand, you can get into all sorts of
difficulties if you effectively try to master your
production while you're still mixing it. Follow
this advice and you should get better results:

Try to get the overall balance of your track It's tempting to try to improve your sound by
working before you start applying mix‑bus applying mastering‑style processes, such as multi-
compression. Although you may band dynamics or loudness maximisation, to your
subsequently need to adjust some faders in output bus during mixdown, but it's seldom a good
idea in practice! This kind of processing usually
response to the bus dynamics, in my
confuses most mix decisions completely, and you
experience it's easier to do this than to have end up chasing your tail — so while they're useful
the compressor's gain‑reduction action tools, it's better to leave them alone until you've
interfering with all your initial balancing finished the mix!
decisions.
Steer clear of using multi-band dynamics
processors or dedicated 'loudness
maximisers' over your main outputs during
mixdown. Although these can be useful as
part of a separate mastering stage, they do
make it very difficult to judge what's going
on when judging level balances, channel
processing, and effects settings.
If you're deliberately driving a full‑band
compressor hard to generate obvious
gain‑pumping effects, consider using
a processor with a wet/dry mix control so
that you have the option to reduce any
transient‑smoothing side‑effects of such
heavy treatment.

Where you're using buss compression to achieve

more aggressive effects, then try one which has
a built‑in parallel processing option or wet/dry mix
control — it'll often let you get more obvious gain
pumping with fewer negative side‑effects as far as
the fidelity of powerful kick/snare mix transients is
concerned.

If you're in any way uncertain about the

validity of the master‑bus processing you've
applied, do make sure you bounce
down a version of your final mix without it,
to hedge your bets.
Example Mixes: Many of the competition mixes didn't seem to use enough bus compression to
suit the aggressive musical style — mixes 05 and 30, for instance, or even the overall contest
winner, mix 63. In the circumstances, something more along the lines of mix 31 or 33 feels
about right to me. There were also inevitably people who drove their master processing
considerably harder, though, such as in mixes 26 and 52, both of which feel rather overbearing
as far as level pumping is concerned, while introducing undesirable transient side‑effects and
distortion products. Mixes 50 and 58 are also over-compressed, for me, because their
fast‑attack processing irons out much of the short‑term dynamics excitement and dulls the
transient definition. Mix 42 is pretty much ruined by its heavy‑handed multi‑band dynamics,
which is a shame, as it turns out that the unprocessed version subsequently submitted has
a lot to recommend it.

One Song, 100 Mixes!

The competition mixes I've used as audio
illustrations in this article were carried
out in March and April this year for
a contest at www.Mixoff.org, a site that's
home to a family of mixing collaboration
forums. The song 'Blood To Bone', by
a talented alt‑rock band called Young
Griffo, was provided in raw multitrack
form for anyone on the forum to
download, and I agreed to provide
a detailed critique of any mix submitted
within the first couple of weeks. In the end, more than 100 mixes were supplied, of which
I critiqued around 60, and I've since consolidated them all to a dedicated web page, so
that it's easy to listen to any of them and read the critiques alongside. You can even still
download the raw multitracks if you fancy having a crack at them yourself!

www.cambridge-mt.com/YoungGriffoCompetition.htm.

Monitoring
Monitoring is a big issue when it comes
to mixing, which is fair enough — you
can only really mix what you can hear.
That said, it's perfectly possible to create
decent‑quality mixes on comparatively
modest equipment if you play your cards
right. First of all, whatever you plan to
spend on monitor speakers, I think you
should try to plough the same amount of
money into acoustic treatment to make
the investment worthwhile. If you need
A specialised single‑driver mixing speaker, such as
suggestions for acoustic treatment, Pyramid's Triple‑P shown here, is one of the best
check out the web site archive of Studio equipment investments you can make if you're
SOS columns, which offer dozens of mixing at home or in a small college studio.
real‑world examples of affordable
speaker and acoustics setups.

My second suggestion is to get hold of a small, single‑driver mixing speaker (such as

Avantone's Mix Cube, pictured, or Pyramid's Triple‑P), and use it to listen to your mix in
mono. The additional insight into your mix balance this kind of monitoring provides in
home‑studio environments is extraordinary, and well worth the additional outlay,
especially if you don't have the budget for proper nearfields and are thus obliged to carry
 out your mixing work primarily on
headphones.

As far as monitoring technique is

concerned, the main thing to remember
is to listen at a variety of different
monitoring levels, and to take regular
breaks to keep your ears as fresh as you
can. Switching between different
monitoring systems while working can
help improve your objectivity too.

One of the most powerful mixing tools available may

already be sitting on your shelf!

Mix Referencing
One of the best mixing aids is probably already sitting on your shelf: your own record
collection. About the cheapest way to improve your mixing is to take the time to line up
your favourite commercial productions against your own work (matching the loudness if
necessary, to enable a reasonable comparison). What amazes me, though, is how few
home mixers take the time to do this in anything more than a cursory manner.
I dedicated a whole article to this subject back in SOS September 2008
(/sos/sep08/articles/referencecd.htm), but the most important thing to remember is just
to take your time selecting suitable reference tracks, so that you set yourself the most
challenging goal. Although the reality of continually struggling to reach such a high
benchmark may feel a bit depressing at times, there's nothing to beat it when it comes to
ensuring that you always achieve a solid quality level.

Further Reading
There's only so much I can cram into an article like this, so on the SOS web site I've
placed a list of useful SOS articles that go into much more detail about how to tackle the
10 'mistakes' described here. This includes a number of Mix Rescue features, complete
with audio examples.

/sos/sep11/articles/mixmistakesreadinglist.htm

BUY PDF VERSION Published September 2011

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