creative mixing
Although sound design, sample selection, composition and arrangement
all form the artistic content and structure of your music, it’s the way these parts come together and interact that will ultimately define your own unique production aesthetic. The all-important final stage of mixing multiple tracks together into one cohesive whole is your chance to impart a distinctive sonic stamp over the end product; a way to not only maximise the potential of your disparate elements, or help the core musical ideas engage the listener as they should, but also to inject your unique personality and spirit into proceedings. Of course, a great mix can’t save a terrible track, but a creative mix can certainly elevate a track with potential into another league of sonic individuality.
In the fledgling years of your journey as an artist, the first goal is to simply mix tracks to a competent standard. A record mixed by an amateur will sound thin, unbalanced and just plain ‘wrong’ in comparison to the best commercial releases. With time though, by equally dividing your focus between targeted learning and practical application, you pick up the necessary mixing chops required to balance a mix to an acceptable level. It becomes second nature to filter out undesirable bass and treble, level out spiky parts with tactical compression, and use flavoursome processors such as saturators and modulation effects to help gel and smooth.
Get creative
As with any new skill, once you’ve committed the basics to muscle memory, it’s time to get creative and play around with the defined parameters within the style you’re working in. This is a good time to really deconstruct your favourite commercial mixes – import them into your DAW, then take a good look at their frequency content on a spectral analyser. Use mid/side decoding to audition the references’ mono and stereo components in isolation; pick apart panned and widened elements, and the frequencies contained within. Are the drums heavily compressed or saturated? How loud is the vocal in comparison to the lead guitars? How are the different elements interacting dynamically? Answering questions like this will help you realise exactly what goes into a professional mix, and help you understand the level you need to reach. Plus, once you’re comfortable with the ‘rules’ that other mixing professionals abide by, you can start breaking them in your own way…
Have a gameplan
Once you’re comfortable at basic mixing, and you understand the lofty levels your mixes need to reach, it’s time to decide exactly what your chosen sonic aesthetic will be. Much of this will have already been determined at a much earlier stage, of course – after all, mixing is really all about making the most of a track’s musical potential and using the tools available to highlight the most important track elements at any given time. For example, if you’re an all-out bass junkie, it can be assumed that you’ll want to pack as much bass into a track as is humanly possible, which is a stylistic decision that will heavily dictate your mixing approach – as a knock-on effect, you’ll have to sacrifice some level and brightness and treat other elements accordingly. On the other hand, a desire to create a sparkling stereo experience for the headphone listener will place upper frequency control and stereo placement at the top of your mixing agenda. We’re heavily generalising here, but you get the idea – overall, have a sonic gameplan in mind, and your mixes will come together much easier from the start, instead of you having to shoehorn elements together that simply won’t fit.
The final rung on the ladder to mix individuality is experimentation. In the adjacent six-step tutorial, we employ some unorthodox approaches in the search for a unique mix. Check out our techniques and give them your own spin!