Centering play in your mixing practice
I want to step back for a moment and consider how we frame the task of mixing.
I know that personally I have spent a lot of time overthinking mixing. Taking it too seriously, getting all up in my head about the technical side of it. I mean: I used to write detailed to-do lists about all the sounds in a song that I was starting to work on, and what I thought each one might need. “A little boomy in the low end — HPF?” I would solo all the sounds and listen to them and I would make my little list. Before I listened to the song, even!
In retrospect, this was crazy behavior. I do think it was helpful for me at that time, as a way of ordering my thoughts? So I’m not speaking poorly about younger me; I was doing the best I could, trying to bring some order to what felt like a very intimidating and opaque process.
But I’ve learned a much better way since then — and I wanted to share it with you, in hopes it might spark some ideas.
I’ll typically set up my master bus before I get going — saturation, compression, EQ, and limiting — and then I put the entire song on loop repeat and press play.
I play with just the faders on the first pass through, experimenting with relative volumes and roughly how hard sounds good to push into the master bus. I also move my tracks around and give them their appropriate track colors; it’s important for me to get the track order and colors set early on, so that I can start as soon as possible to think of them as having personalities and locations. A red track on the left isn’t the same as a blue track over toward the right!
And then I slowly start experimenting. Usually one sound catches my ear and I’ll kind of zoom in on that — again, while the song continues to play on loop. (If I need to loop a specific part of the song to focus on a particular thing the sound is doing that feels important or representative, I will do that. But I’m still always listening on loop, to encourage a spirit of play.)
When a sound catches my ear, it’s my instinct to want to try to enhance whatever it is that caught me in the first place — and I mean emotionally. On the song I’m mixing tonight, the drum machine track caught my ear at first. It’s a recording of the output of an actual physical drum machine, so all the sounds are together on one track, with the relative drum instrument levels baked in.
As I was playing with the drum machine volume to get the overall level roughly right, I noticed that one particular sound jumped out a lot. Which was cool, but it was a little, I don’t know … pokey? I have no problem with sounds being loud and attention-grabbing, but it didn’t seem like it was quite gelling with the other sounds. So I started looking for ways to mangle it — oftentimes saturation or clipping or tape can help contextualize the pokier parts of a sound.
My insight was that overall the sound could stand to be a bit edgier and better defined, so that sent me down a “digital tools” path.
The first thing I threw on was a plugin that emulates the AD/DA sections of an old Akai S950 sampler; my experience with that is that the slightly lo-fi characteristic this imparts can help both clarify a sound and sit it in a particular place in the mix.
It was good, but it was still a bit static. So next I threw on the Apogee Soft Limit plugin, which acts kind of like tape but also kind of like a clipper, but also with sort of a compression artifact if you hit it hard? It’s awesome. The Apogee Soft Limit technology was so hot 25-30 years ago in the beginning days of computer recording … people have mostly forgotten about it these days, but it still sounds killer, in a slightly lo-fi but aggressive way that can give sounds a subliminally late-90s vibe.
Soft Limit got the drum track to a much cooler and more dynamically interesting place, and it also helped clarify for me what role the drums should be playing in the mix. This is one of the ways I know I’m on to something with a treatment: the sound starts to feel like a specific character, as opposed to part of an undifferentiated scrum of extras.
I’ve shared this little beginning of a mix journey because I want to underscore the idea that I view myself, even when I’m wearing an engineer hat of some sort, as participating always first in a musical exercise. Mixing — engineering — thought about one way, might predispose one to think of one’s role as primarily technical. And that could lead you to push aside creative thoughts, and to elevate and center technical thoughts, and to try to focus one’s mind in that direction.
But I think that, for me, engineering works better when I approach it not from a technical point of view but from a perspective of play. There will be time to cross your t’s later — but maybe don’t start there!
I would encourage you to approach mixing like a kid approaches the afternoon — play first, then homework.
But mommmmmm — jamie