Even the most experienced mixers need to practice!
Audio mixing is a muscle and it needs to be exercised when not in use, and with the nature of freelance work, the flow of work can be up and down. As a fledgling engineer, practicing your mixing can be a great way to impress those first few clients, and as more experienced engineers, it can also be good to keep those neurons firing when audio mixing work slows down.
Here’s a few tips for keeping those skills sharp!
Faders only
This is a great exercise and will have your mixes started on the right path. All too often we’re excited to start using our favourite plugins and hardware, and we’ll begin patching in effects and battling our mix decisions as we go.
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Starting a mix with just balancing, i.e. using only faders, will help to ensure at a foundational level, the mix still works. You’ll get faster and faster at this, helping you quickly identify what sounds might be masking other sources. Once the balance is right, you’ll need to do less work to carve space, as you’re not fighting anything to retain the character of the mix. This exercise is all about volume, and you’ll be surprised how close you can get to a ‘finished’ sound, even compared to a mix with your full suite of plugins, hardware and effects. Faders only mixes help to retain the character of the original recording, as well as the artist’s original vision.
Further processing will have more of the effect you’re after if the balance is right!
Subtractive EQ
Another handy audio mixing exercise is to use only subtractive EQ to mix a song. Again, we’ll often get excited to start boosting frequencies, driving them into compressors etc, while leaving behind mud, low end rumble and other errant frequencies that aren’t really helping.
Obviously after balancing, try to finish a mix only but taking frequencies away, never adding. You’ll find quite quickly how clean your mix can get, immediately high-passing sources that don’t play a part in the low end, leaving only space for sources like kick and bass guitar. You’ll also need to do less than you realise!
Take a guitar for example, it might get muddy and lost in the mix; and we’d be forgiven for wanting to boost mids and high frequencies or turn the volume up. Instead, listen for what sources might be making the guitar sound so lost, usually doing this by muting groups until the guitars pop forward and becomes clear. In addition to sources masking each other, frequency areas within a source can also make it appear muddy, and you can use subtractive EQ to remove problems to make way for sources to shine. Try to do an entire mix with only subtractive EQ, and again, you’ll be surprised how far you can get. Once you’ve carefully carved away space, you’ll be in better stead to compress and boost areas you want to highlight!
Fixed auxiliary sends
This is a fun one, and harkens back to the days of analogue workflow. Mixing consoles would often only have a handful of auxiliary mixes, usually intended for use as headphone sends for artists, but also used as ways to send multiple tracks to something like a reverb, delay or chorus before it returns back to a fader on the console. Because of this limitation, mixes would often only use a handful of effects, much unlike the modern digital, in-the-box approach that allows for pretty much limitless options and possibilities.
Even within the box, limit yourself to say—four auxiliary sends? What effects you send them to is up to you, but your choice will dictate the sound of your mix. Take a reverb for example, if you’ve got ONE reverb for the entire song, a roomy sound makes sense for depth, right? You could send the entire drum group to the reverb, sending plenty to sit the drums back in the mix, and you could send the guitars as well, though sending a little less to help the guitars sit a bit more forward. This goes for keys and bass, sending as much or as little as you like, and helps to place the entire band within the same space, rather than using different or multiple reverbs, sends and effects that can actually sometimes make things feel less cohesive and a bit unnatural.
Other effects that are handy to have available are delay and/or chorus, or you could choose to use multiple reverbs like a short decay, medium decay and long decay to place different instruments into different spaces, or at different positions within the same space.
Top down mixing
This is an interesting one to approach and a good way to experiment with a new way of working. Some mixers choose to take a “Top Down” approach, beginning with their mix bus processing and audio mixing into any compression, limiting or EQ they’re using. From here, you can work backwards to instrument buses and then onto individual tracks.
Begin with a rough balance, and place whatever bus processing you think will benefit the tonality and colour of the mix. You can even use a limiter to add loudness, and from here you can continue to mix through the lens of your mix bus processing, your moves being clamped by compressors and EQ moves accentuated by whatever EQ you might have on your mix bus. This workflow is reasonably common, though not for everyone, and this is a good way to check it out for yourself!
Don’t solo
This one is probably the toughest of the lot, because it’s so tempting. While it can be incredibly helpful to solo tracks and hear exactly what’s going on—no one will ever hear those tracks solo’d, so you might be doing yourself more of a disservice than not!
It can be great exercise to mix a song without using the solo button, as you’ll always be hearing the sources in context as you mix them. Soloing feels like you’re revealing the track to hear it more accurately, though once you bring back in other elements, you realise a frequency you’d cut wasn’t quite right, or maybe you’ve gone too hard. Keeping tracks in context helps you to ensure every move you make is made with the full mix in mind; ultimately this is the only thing the audience and band will ever hear, so who cares how it sounds in solo!
While these tips are great as general exercises, they’re also a good way to think about your audio mixing. You can start faders only, get a really good balance, until you can’t do anything more except begin to EQ. Move onto subtractive EQ only, carving space for tracks instead of boosting and bolstering the songs. This will have you in great stead to start compressing or boosting EQ where you see fit, and all on a really solid foundational core of a well balanced mix.
It’s also good practice to keep your effects and send simple, if only for your own sanity, and try not to solo too much even when you’re doing proper paid client stuff!
Keep reading about subtractive EQ from our friends at iZotope.