A good workflow for mixing someone else's song
One of my mentees just got her first gig mixing a song that someone else recorded! SO exciting.
And of course the impulse is to mix mix mix mix mix, and then to send it to the artist asap. There are lots of reasons for this impulse. Excitement! Anxiety! (Is there even a difference!) A desire for validation for something you’re not super comfortable doing yet! All extremely valid.
Mixing someone else’s song is a lot of responsibility, and that responsibility, and the desire to do well, can be a vulnerable and scary place to sit in for an extended period of time. I get it. I have been there. Literally hundreds of times.
So here’s a good workflow, to help you work through the anxiety and deliver an excellent first mix in a measured way!
Do the mix! Do it as best you can, until there’s nothing you want to change.
Set it aside for a day and work on something else. For like literally a whole other day. When you finish the first draft of a mix, you’re too close to it and you can’t hear it objectively any more. This helps you get your perspective back.
On day 3, do the Spotify listening trick to reset your ears. And then put on your mix, and listen straight through with a pen and paper, noting everything that sounds weird that needs addressing. Then go down that punch list and address everything.
Then set it aside for the rest of the day, and do the same thing the following day — reset your ears, listen and take notes, and address the notes.
Continue doing this, each day, until you arrive at a day where you listen to other people’s stuff on Spotify and then you listen to your mix and you have no notes. And then — only then! — send your mix to the artist.
By working in this way, and taking the extra time to make sure your mix sounds proper, you are doing your mix client a huge kindness. Because, instead of pushing all the corrective notes onto them by nervously sending them the mix too soon, you are dealing with the stuff that needs correcting yourself!
This is great for the artist, because it makes it so they don’t have to have the experience of having to figure out a kind way to be like “The vocal sounds weird,” or whatever the case may be — because you have taken the time to identify the issues yourself and fix them. This means that they can focus more on the artistic and creative side of things, which after all is their job — the technical stuff is your job. And this is a great way to approach the technical stuff in a disciplined and measured way.
Wearing hats — jamie