22 tips to enhance your mix free ebook from behind the speakers

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Tips To Enhance Your Mix (Without Spending A Dime!)

22 Tips To Enhance Your Mix

There’s a good chance that you have all the gear you need to craft an exceptional mix. The following twenty­two tips will help you enhance your mixes without spending a dime. Enjoy! ­ Jason Moss, ​Behind The Speakers

1. Use Fewer Plugins

Many mixers think the more plugins they add, the better their mixes will sound. However, it’s crucial to know when to leave a track alone.

Whenever you add a plugin to a track, ask yourself why you’re doing so. If you don’t have a clear answer, ditch the plugin. Learn to use less, and you’ll get more out of your mixes.

2. Optimize Your Studio’s Acoustics

If you can’t trust what you’re hearing, you can’t make the right decisions. While most equipment manufacturers will tell you the solution is to buy better speakers or converters, the truth is that the room you’re mixing in has a much bigger impact on the sound you hear. Get your room acoustics right, and your mixes will improve by leaps and bounds.

Ethan Winer’s article on setting up a listening room​ is a great place to start. So is ​Bob Hodas’ interview on Pensado’s Place​.

3. Listen To More Music

To become a great mixer, you must develop great taste. The answers are hiding in your record collection.

Study the records you love, as well as the ones you hate. Go back several decades and explore the sounds of a different generation. Soak up the lineage of recorded music like a sponge, and your mixes will assume a whole new depth.

4. Use Less Limiting

With the infamous Loudness War now ​in our rearview mirror​, there’s no longer any reason to be crushing your mixes. Back off on the limiting, and your tracks will benefit from more punch and impact.

© 2016 Jason Moss / Behind The Speakers | ​behindthespeakers.com

5. Use References

I’m a big proponent of ​referencing other mixes while you work​. This practice helps me establish proper tonality and balances. It’s especially helpful when hopping between different genres, as it helps retune my ears to a genre’s unique trends.

6. Focus On Your Flaws

It’s important to focus on improving your weaknesses, instead of just doing the things you already do well. For example, if you’re great at mixing drums but struggle with vocals, spend a week focusing solely on vocal mixing. By focusing on your flaws, your mixes will improve.

7. Listen At Quieter Volumes

While we all enjoy the visceral experience of cranking our speakers, mixing at lower volumes is much more effective. Turning things down will allow your ears to zero in on the crucial midrange frequencies (​due to the Fletcher Munson curves​). This will help you craft balances that translate across different playback systems.

8. Watch An Episode Of Pensado’s Place

Top­tier mixer ​Dave Pensado’s weekly web series​ is one of the best resources available for aspiring music­makers. Watch an episode to brush up on your mixing chops, get to know key players, and learn from a master.

9. Evaluate Your Mixes On Different Playback Systems

Take five of your best mixes and listen to them back­to­back on various different sets of speakers. Take copious notes.

Ideally, your mixes should sound similar to the way they sounded in your studio. If they don’t, you may need to optimize your studio’s acoustics (see tip #2).

While this process can be incredibly frustrating, it’s the easiest way to uncover deficiencies in your studio monitoring chain. Ultimately, this will help you create mixes that translate more effectively across a wide range of playback systems.

10. Meditate

Critical listening requires you to maintain focus for extended periods of time. If you find that your attention frequently wanders while mixing, daily meditation can help train you to stay on track.

For beginners, I highly recommend ​Headspace​!

© 2016 Jason Moss / Behind The Speakers | ​behindthespeakers.com

11. Get To Know Your Tools

Take a track and process it with a couple of similar plugins. Compare and contrast. Determine each plugin’s strengths and unique characteristics. Think of a reason why you might reach for it over another. And if you’re just starting out, get to know your DAW’s stock plugins before investing in third­party offerings.

Ultimately, you want your plugin library to feel like a box of crayons. There should be no question about what to reach for when.

12. Use Headphones

A high­quality pair of headphones can be the perfect supplement to studio monitors.

Headphones will give you a more accurate representation of the frequency content in your mixes, because they aren’t subject to the effect of room acoustics. While I still find I get the best results when I do the majority of my mixing on speakers, I find headphones to be invaluable when tweaking the low end of my mixes.

13. Automate

If you open up my mix sessions, you’ll see copious amounts of automation. Often times, this is what brings a mix to life.

There are countless ways to incorporate automation into your workflow. I use it to help me create contrast, enhance transitions between sections, and highlight important parts of an arrangement.

14. Ask For Feedback

If you’re trying to improve your mixes, it’s important to seek feedback from people who know more than you do. However, be careful when soliciting feedback from strangers (especially in online forums). While many will offer comments, it’s crucial to know who’s worth listening to and who you should ignore.

15. Mix In Mono

Mixing in mono will force you to work harder to create tonal separation between different tracks in your mix. Make a mix sound good in mono, and it will usually translate better across different playback systems.

© 2016 Jason Moss / Behind The Speakers | ​behindthespeakers.com

16. Train Your Ears

Ear training will help you identify frequencies without resorting to the “boost and sweep” method that so many engineers rely on.

For starters, import a few of your favorite mixes into your DAW (you can also use white noise), strap an EQ across your mix bus, and sweep a boost up the spectrum. Listen and internalize the sound of each area of the frequency spectrum. If you’re looking for a more robust solution, try ​TrainYourEars EQ Edition​.

17. Use Subtractive EQ

This technique has made a greater impact on my mixing than just about any other. If you want to learn how to incorporate subtractive EQ into your workflow, ​my how­to article​ is a great place to start. ​Dave Moulton’s website​ has a great tutorial as well.

18. Learn To Play An Instrument

If you don’t already know how to play an instrument, it’s never too late to start! This is a great way to develop an intuitive understanding of musical phrasing and articulation. Most mixers are musicians (though there are ​notable exceptions​).

19. Stop Soloing

It doesn’t matter how a track sounds in isolation. All that matters is how it sounds in context with the rest of your mix. Resist the urge to solo tracks, and your mixes will sound much better.

20. Spend More Time Prepping

Take the time to prepare your sessions properly before you start mixing. While color coding, labeling, and creating markers might feel like a chore, these things will help you move more efficiently through a mix.

21. Take More Breaks

Every time you press play, you become more attached to the way your mix currently sounds.

This is bad news, because it means that over time, things that need to be improved will start to sound acceptable.

While we all listen to music for pleasure, mixing is not the time to do so. It’s best to remain focused on finding flaws during a mix. If you notice your focus is starting to wane, take a short break. By making every minute of listening as productive as possible, you’ll remain more objective and make better decisions. © 2016 Jason Moss / Behind The Speakers | ​behindthespeakers.com

22. Take Notes

Legendary mixer ​Bob Power​ once told me that every time he returned from a listening break, he would force himself to listen to his mix from beginning to end. Instead of stopping playback when he heard the first thing he didn’t like, Bob would keep listening and write down each problem he heard. Only after making a complete pass through his track would he start addressing each note.

Bob taught me an important lesson about valuing my objectivity. Whenever you are approaching your work with fresh ears, it’s an opportunity to hear your mix in a new way. Make the most of these moments. Be fully present and engaged during playback, and listen from beginning to end. By doing so, you’ll move more quickly through the mix process, and ultimately craft better mixes.

© 2016 Jason Moss / Behind The Speakers | ​behindthespeakers.com