The Top Mixing Tips from a Pro Engineer

The dark art of mixing has mystified budding engineers for generations, and it’s really easy to get hung up on all the wrong things. In an attention economy, snake oil salesmen are allowed to thrive, and every green engineer with spare change is being promised a shortcut to Lord-Alge level mixes if they purchase this “one game-changing plugin.” In reality, like any art form, for a while there is a gap between what you want to achieve and your output. For myself, the journey to achieving mix satisfaction was a long and arduous one. Here are a few of the most crucial mixing tips I’ve picked up on my travels. 

Mix with your ears, not your eyes

Back in the sixties, mixing was almost a live art form, with engineers performing their mixes onto tape. It was instinctive, driven by what sounded right, and as a result sometimes quite experimental. That’s why you’ll hear a mono drum track panned hard right on a lot of early Beatles recordings. The generation of engineers that came before us were figuring it out as they go, getting lucky in the process. As technology has evolved, and reel-to-reel was replaced by DAWs, a new kind of approach has emerged. Spectrum analyzers, and powerful plugins with slick UIs have allowed engineers to see the sound they hear, and apply an unprecedented level of precision to their mixes. 

It can be incredibly tempting when you’re first starting out to rely heavily on the visual cues that are given to you by most stock EQ plugins. While this is somewhat useful, it’s really important to be able to hear what you’re cutting, rather than just cutting what you think you should cut. If you want to get out of the habit of this, or find yourself doing it too much, I’ve got a few recommendations:

Use Vintage EQ Plugins

Semi-Parametric EQ Plugins modeled on analog equipment won’t have as much precision as your average stock EQ with a visualizer. When mixing with these, you’re more likely to rely on what your ears hear rather than following what a spectrum analyzer tells you. You’re also bound to experiment more and get to know a plugin very well. It’s a great way to train your ears, but also learn about some of the classic hardware a lot of these plugins are based on! 

Close your eyes

Maybe a bit of a weird one, but it helped me! When I was starting out I found I was being tricked into hearing differently based on information being given to me from my DAW. Closing my eyes sharpened my ears and put me in the shoes of the target audience. Your average Spotify listener hearing a weak vocal won’t have a screen in front of them telling them that enough “recommended” compression was applied to make a vocal part ‘punchy’. They’ll just hear a weak vocal. If it sounds like it needs more, add more. If it sounds right, then it’s right. 

Use Reference Tracks

I know I just spoke about not mixing with your eyes, so please excuse the metaphor, but mixing without reference tracks is essentially mixing blind (See ‘The Problem of Perception’). You need something to ground you in reality and tether you to the sound you or your client want you to achieve. Beware of referencing plugins that claim to be able to tell how much dynamic range or how much compression has been applied to each frequency band across a mix. 

I’ve found that I’ve at most needed to put the reference track in a spectrum analyser every now and again just to give me a rough initial overview of which frequencies are key, then I remove the plugin and use my ears. 

I have a Spotify playlist with some of my favourite mixes, but every time I’m working with a new client, I get a small playlist together of the tracks they are inspired by, and have it on repeat while I’m doing stuff around the house, walking to the shop etc. It gets your ears used to hearing common mixing and production tropes, so when you go in to mix, you’ll do things based on what you’ve been hearing the most of. 

Bonus tip: If you’re someone who doesn’t like to listen to pop music, and you only listen to avant-garde Nepalese proto-fart-rock mixed in a dungeon on a bluetooth speaker, then you’re in trouble. The best mixing engineers are mixing the biggest tracks that end up in the charts. One of the best things you can do for your mixes is listen to what the best engineers are doing and apply it to your craft. Even if it means listening to music you aren’t particularly fond of. 

Your Space is Everything

“If I just spend thousands on speakers, and all this money on plugins, I’ll finally be able to mix like a pro.” 

Not if you are mixing in a small, square room with no furniture, and large speakers right up along the back wall. Your room is your most valuable asset and treating it will make a night and day difference to your mixes. It’s not particularly sexy, but when you hear the difference between a mix in a treated room and a mix in an untreated one, you’ll understand. 

Brush up on your acoustics and audio theory knowledge, learn about how to treat a room based on its characteristic and size, and do a before and after test of your room with and without acoustic treatment. Then, if you still need the fancy speakers and plugins, splash the cash.

Cut more than you Boost

Okay, somewhat contentious one here. If you weren’t meant to be boosting certain frequencies, there wouldn’t be an option for you to do it. Like I said earlier, mix with your ears rather than your eyes or what you’ve been recommended to do. However, there are a few things to remember when it comes to boosting as opposed to cutting. 

• If a significant, drastic EQ solution is required then cutting is the best bet. When I’m mixing vocals there is often a frequency that sits between 2-3k which always, without fail is an issue. I employ a very narrow Q and then carve out the problem frequency that way. I’d often remove it entirely, and I wouldn’t boost everything around it.

• Boosting should be done in gentle, broad strokes. If I felt like a guitar part needed a little bit of twang or sparkle, I’d gently bring up the high end using a parametric EQ and wide bandwidth tonal shaping, just by a couple of dB. I wouldn’t use a narrow Q and bring up loads of specific high frequencies.

• Again, the most important lesson of the day: If it sounds right, it’s right. These are general rules to keep in mind, and best practices. There’s nothing stopping you from doing the complete opposite if you are going for a specific sound. The worst thing I ever did for my mixes was to not listen to my own ears. 

Mix Quickly

Once you’ve decided to mix, you have to move quickly and get things finished before you end up overmixing or being paralyzed in indecision. If you’re a producer who is mixing your own tracks, this tip is especially important. 

If you mix slowly or listen to one of your demos over and over again, then when you come to mix the track all your changes will sound unnatural and foreign to the sound you have grown accustomed to hearing. Our ears are great at plastering over the cracks in our mixes, which is why we trust their initial judgment and don’t let them get too used to a track when mixing. 

Mixing is an art, and the most impactful art is never intellectualized into existence. It comes from the heart and the gut, and what feels right. 

Listen on different systems

Ah the dreaded car speaker test! If you want to be humbled quickly on your mixing chops then this is a great way to get out of your comfort zone.

The whole point of the mixing and mastering process is to make a track sound incredible across a range of mediums and from a variety of sources with different audio quality. It’s easy for a mix to sound fantastic on great speakers in a treated room. The hard thing is making a mix sound great on awful, tinny speakers in a crowded, untreated space. At the end of the day, this is how most people hear music daily. They are listening to music passively, and the mix needs to be doing most of the work for a listener, bringing to the forefront the frequencies and instruments that matter. 

One of my mentors swore by testing all of his mixes on a cheap bluetooth speaker & DAB radio that he knew was used in a lot of coffee shops and offices. I typically do a bluetooth speaker test and sometimes a headphone test if I’m feeling brave. Find a few speakers or places to test your mixes and give it a go for yourself. 

Take Breaks!

Mixing fatigue is real, and it can happen to you too. Take a break every hour for five minutes or more and come back to your mix with a fresh perspective. If you’re mixing tired at 3am, your mixes will sound terrible, and this is a sign you’ve lost yourself in the mix, which can lead to overmixing. 

A great rule of thumb is to stop when you’re making the same tiny changes over and over again without any progress. If I find myself changing the volume up and then down again by 2dB, then I know it’s time to rest my ears.

Your ears are your greatest asset and I can’t recommend this one enough. It will also stop too much mix apathy from creeping in. I’ve definitely gotten sick of a project in the past and just ham-fisted my way through the final parts of a mix, which always leads to work I’m unhappy with. 

Know your frequencies

Okay, so I might have said not to mix based on what you’re recommended to do, but sometimes knowing where to start can often be a really daunting process. After all, how are you supposed to break the rules if you don’t know them?

Having an idea of which instruments occupy which frequency bands can give you a foundation to build from, and make your mixing decisions quicker and more instinctive, which can speed up the mixing process (crucial). 

A live sound engineer I knew used to train his ears using sine sweep tests across the frequency spectrum so he could quickly cut problem frequencies when they arose at a gig. If your ears can tell the difference between mud and sizzle, and what frequency each one takes up, it’ll help in the long run. 

Never Stop Learning

One of the most important tips I could give anyone, for anything. Never stop learning and expanding your knowledge base. All of the most prolific and successful engineers have been able to incorporate new techniques, software and ideas into their practice and as a result stayed relevant over many years. If you’re unsure about mixing a certain genre or style, then you’re never too experienced to brush up on what you already know. 

The worst that could happen is you end up learning about something you already know, but in most cases you’ll end up a better engineer for it. The Soundtrap blog is a great place to start, with some incredible engineers giving out knowledge for free! In an age of subscription models and hidden costs, it’s a welcome break to find free resources so readily available. 

About the author

Max McLellan is a composer, songwriter, and audio engineer with credits ranging across film, TV and radio. He provides composition, mixing, and mastering services through his company MKM Audio.