Mixing Workflow

Anyone who has ever put together a piece of furniture from IKEA knows how important it is to have a workflow, that doing things in a particular order makes the difference between a set of working drawers and a pile of useless wood.

The same applies to your mixes.

I want to share with you my general workflow and why I complete specific tasks in a particular order when mixing, but first let me make a disclaimer:

You cannot foresee every last challenge you will run into during the mixing process, and you will sometimes need to complete tasks “out of order.” As long as the finished product accurately represents your goals, the way you got there doesn’t matter. You will not mix every song in exactly the same order. And why would you want to? Variety is the spice of life!

That said, you will save yourself a lot of time and energy by completing tasks in a particular order, so without any further ado, here are the rules that govern the workflow I have developed over the years and over the course of dozens of mixes:

Make sure the song is fully written and properly arranged before you start mixing.

Imagine you’ve spent hours adjusting levels and carving out particular frequencies on particular tracks. All of a sudden, you realize the song is missing something.

Now, I’m not saying I’ve never done this, but the problem with adding a new instrument late in the mix is that all of your prior decisions will be offset by the existence of a new sound with its own levels and its own set of frequencies.

You might have set your levels and EQ’d the rest of your tracks very differently if that new instrument had been there all along, and you might therefore find yourself resetting certain plug-ins and starting again from scratch.

You could have saved yourself the hours you spent making all of the adjustments you made before the addition of a new instrument, if you had only thought to add it before you started to mix.

This is why I try to decide on the composition and arrangement of every aspect of the song before I really dive into the mix. For reasons I explain in another blog post, this includes panning. I also include the application of certain plug-ins, like prominent delays and tremolos, in the composition/arrangement phase.

Get your levels right before you use any EQ.

Again, imagine you’ve spent a lot of time carving out particular frequencies on particular tracks. You realize that one of your tracks is too loud or too soft, and you make the adjustment only to realize that your EQ decisions were largely based on the prior level of that particular track.

Once I’ve composed and arranged a song, I begin the mixing process by focusing on volume. I first set the levels of my tracks so that certain instruments sit further “forward” or “back,” depending on their role in the song.

I then apply compression to tracks that have too much dynamic range. Vocals, for instance, tend to go from too loud to too soft throughout the course of a recording, even if the singer is experienced enough to manage his or her distance from the microphone as he or she gets louder or softer. Compression will help to close this gap.

I complete this phase of the mixing process by applying volume automation to the tracks that still have too much dynamic range after I’ve applied appropriate compression. Automation can be a tedious process, but only once your tracks are at the “correct” relative volume throughout the song can you make the appropriate decisions about the tone of your tracks.

Carve out the tone of your tracks before you start applying additional effects.

Once more, imagine you’ve got a track that you’ve spent a lot of time on. Maybe you’ve bussed it to a reverb track or applied a chorus to thicken it. At some point you realize there are particular frequencies that aren’t working with your mix, so you grab an EQ.

The problem is that any cuts you make to the tone will then go through the plug-ins you’ve already applied, and this might require you to go back and adjust those plug-ins. This is why I try to get the tone of my tracks to sit as well in the mix as possible before I start adding any reverb or additional “sweetening” effects.

Think about what plug-ins like reverb actually do to a track. If there are frequencies in the sound of that instrument that don’t work well with your mix, adding an effect like reverb will only amplify and elongate those frequencies, in addition to the part of the tone that sounds good. By carving out the tone of your tracks first, you can ensure that additional effects won’t add much, if any, of those nasty frequencies you’ve worked so hard to remove during the carving/EQ phase of your mix.

Don’t forget to use make-up gain to compensate for any EQ cuts (or boosts) that drastically change the overall volume of a track. This will keep your tracks close to the levels you chose earlier in the mixing process and allow you to properly assess whether or not your EQ decisions are beneficial to the overall mix.

“Sweetening”

Inevitably, your mix will still be “missing” something. Adding a little bit of reverb or delay at the end of your mix can help emphasize where things are sitting on the z-axis, how “close” or “far away” things are.

It can also help to thicken certain tracks that just aren't cutting through the mix. Snares, for instance, often sound better in the mix with a little bit of a tail.

Given how powerful tools like EQ and compression can be, however, this should be the most subtle phase of the mixing process. If your song is well-written and arranged properly, your levels have been adjusted, and the tone of your tracks has been carved out, it shouldn’t take much to get your mix to that next level.

If you find yourself pushing a reverb pretty hard, for instance, you might want to ask yourself if it should have been added during the composition/arrangement phase. Again, this will happen from time to time; just make sure you touch on each phase of the mixing process once more if you absolutely need to add something significant, like a new instrument or a prominent effect, late in the mix.

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You might have noticed by now that each phase of my process informs the next. Having a complete arrangement gives me a better idea of where my levels should be. Having balanced levels gives me a better idea of how to carve out the tone of my tracks, and having EQ’d tracks gives me a better idea of what I need to do to sweeten my mix.

Again, there is no right or wrong way to mix, but I’ve found that this particular workflow saves me a lot of time that I used to spend performing the same tasks over and over again.

You might complete these tasks in a different order, but it’s important that you simply have a workflow, whatever the order might be. An experienced artist will rarely paint the foreground before the background. You should think about which tasks to perform in what order, as it pertains to your music or the music of your clients.