How I make a mix 😵‍💫

I've been working on a TON of new mixes the last couple weeks. I've made lots of progress and I'm feeling good about how things are going, but I know there's still a lot of work to do if any of these songs are ever to see the light of day.

For me, there are lots of stages to making a good mix. Every mix is a little different, and I'm constantly tweaking the process and experimenting with new ways of getting a mix started. I find that changing up the building blocks you use early-on can have a really big impact on the final mix and sets you up for different successes/challenges later.

Typically, for a lot of songs that actually do get successfully completed, once I feel like I've settled on a structure and the lyrics are at least 80-90% there, I go for a scratch track that's just piano or guitar and vocal, recorded together (or sometimes I just import a voice memo if I already have something I really like). I want these scratch tracks to be super rough and exaggerated with lots of feeling. This scaffolding informs the flow of energy in the song and gives me a framework to follow once I start adding more parts. After I get a decent scratch going, I spend a little time going over it and tidying up anything that feels *really* off beat, or that I think might mess me up later.

Then the fun part. I add... and add... and add... and add... I freely improvise over that scratch take about 4 or 5 times with my synth (any more than 5 takes and feel like I'm burried in editing later...) While I'm recording these tracks, I follow any little ideas or motifs I want to bring out. I let each track be informed by and respond to the track that came before it. I think of each track as a different character listening to and responding to the mix it arrive into. I start to think about how these tracks will develop into a mix that gets wider, brighter, and more energetic as the song unfolds. The scratch track is often a guide for where, and when the synth should really start to drive, but sometimes it's nice to let the synths surprise me, and bring something out of it that I didn't fully expect. My synths at this phase are typically all monophonic, which I feel gives me more flexibility in editing later, and really lends itself to thinking of each track as a character.

As I start to hear things come together with the raw synth tracks, I'll sometimes grab an electric guitar and give that a few takes over a moment that I really want to emphasize. If the mix feels like it calls for it, I might do something crazy with some live percussion tracks (cymbals, floor toms, etc...)

Before I start making balance adjustments, I scrub every track as clean as I can and buff out any mistakes or hiccups in my playing. This process takes AGES. I edit them in the order they were recorded and chop out sections I don't like, fix notes that I missed, and make subtle adjustments to timing and volume. If I feel like I understand the sonic space that this track is going to have, I'll start doing a little equalizing and compression here, but they usually stay pretty raw at this phase. I also use this opportunity to iterate and play around with some of the takes- repurposing things that I think are interesting but don't really fit, or hard-editing some tracks to bring out new ideas that come to me as I sit with the song and start to understand the flow of the the mix a bit more.

Once that initial pass is done and everything has been tweaked into shape, I'll start to deliberate and cut things. Now that I can see everything at once, I get to zoom in and decide what parts art interesting and fun versus what parts feel distracting or wrong to me. Often this is where decisions about the structure and arrangement start to get made. I shuffle things around, sidechain tracks against eachother, add compression, turn up/down brightness/warmth, until everything starts to feel like a cohesive organism, and each of the tracks feels like it has a reason to be in the song.

Either after or during that process, I start to dive into percussion... For most of my mixes, the percussion is almost all sample based. I feel like there's such an interesting flexibility and playfulness to what you can do with purely sample driven percussion. Most of the time I don't even use a drum machine or anything at this phase. I dive into a few folders I have full of sampled snares, hats, kicks, noises, etc, and start dropping things in. I typically let my mix play in the background while I'm picking out a few samples to start with- just so I have some idea if I'm picking a sound that blends well and/or fills some kind of sonic niche in the mix.

I don't usually think of percussion as 'beats' or rythms when I start dropping things in. In a lot of ways, I think of them more like just another layer, playing along and responding to the song, rather than driving it. I usually don't start at the beginning, but instead jump in wherever I feel like I have a solid idea and/or the new sounds would be welcomed. In order to keep things from ever sounding too mechanical or stale, I typically start out by tapping markers onto the mix as it playes and dropping my samples onto those, instead of putting them right on the beat. As that goes on, I start to hear a beat in my mind and/ or start to notice some patterns emerging based on what I've started to set up. I try to run with this and develop it a bit more, sometimes repeating and iterating, sometimes just continuing to build forward an not worry about wether the next section is at all similar to the last...

Usually I don't get percussion right on the first pass. I often end up putting everything from the first attempt in a bus called 'perc 1,' and just muting it, lol. Then I carry on and try again with 'perc 2', which is usually a bit more structured and less ambitious than my first attempt. After a little while, if perc 2 also feels wrong, I might mute that and give it another shot with 'perc 3'... By the time I get to perc 3, I feel like i've typically learned what *doesn't* work for this song, and settled on some ideas that do feel like they could work... at least that's the hope. After I give it another run, if I still feel like it's not sitting right, I'll just unmute all three iterations and let them play together... I find that this percussion soup contains all the successes and failures of each of these brainstorming sessions, and I can usually find some common ground. Of course, I have to then balance these buses against each other and make some tweaks, but with 3 complete passes going at once, I feel like I have lots of material and ideas to work with.

After I get all that relatively balanced and sitting right in the mix at about -20db VU, It's time to go back to the beginning get some better takes of the live instrument (guitar or piano) and the vocal. I mute the scratch track and make a full render of the song without any vocals or instruments. Then I sit down with my microphone. I typically start with the instrument, giving it a handful of takes, making sure to nail every part least once or twice for good measure. I typically want a combination of live takes that run straight through the whole song, and takes that start/stop to zoom in on specific sections to get details right.

Often I do vocal takes in the same recording session as instrument. This is the moment with the lyrics need to be DONE. Any changes made after this point will be significantly more tedious to fix. I start with the main vocal and give that as many takes as I feel like I need to, to get something I can work with. Then I move on to harmonies and more colorful 'character' vocals. This is where the vocal really comes alive. I get to give it 110% of whatever the moment calls for and do things that are silly, weird, bad, dramatic, dumb- you name it. I want to make sure I'm having fun with it and staying loose at this point. Drink lots of water to make sure I don't throw my voice out yelling or doing something silly. Most of these takes will get cut, but often they supply the raw material for background layers and interesting moments in the vocal performance. Everything I do here is going to end up being layered and edited a lot, so it's okay to try things that don't work.

In the next day or so I sit down with the new vocal and instrument track and start comping. I find all the best moments of each section from each take and splice them together. I typically start with the instrumentals, then go in and make a few mixing/compression decisions. Then I unmute just the main vocal and comp that as well. I'm looking for takes that follow the energy of the song, I'm also making a note (sometimes a seprate track) of takes that stand out to me as particularly energetic or smooth and clean sounding.

Once I feel like I have a vocal comp that will be serviceable, I start to comb over it and manually adjust the pre-fx volume to sit at about the same level for the whole track... This takes hours, but it makes a huge difference on the sound and polish of the vocal. This is also a great opportunity to do manual de-essing. Once that is done, I can start doing the fun work of adding compression and coloration to the vocal. I typically end up making 2 or three copies of the main vocal and running different effects on each of them, something for space, something for color, and something for punch. Some or all of these might contain some tuning or pitch correction- it all depends.

As that's happening and I'm feeling out the flow of the song, I start to unmute some of the more colorful 'character' vocals and harmonies and pick out moments where I really like what they're doing. I like to get playful and figure out how those should sit in the mix texturally as well as sonically. Often, I end up keeping some of the more dynamic takes in the song as a super distorted layer and blending that into the mix at certain moments for extra energy or coloration.

Once that process feels like it's mostly done, I go back to the master mix and import all the tracks I worked on in the separate project where I recorded the vocals and instrumentals. Now I make my final adjustments to the mix. I tweak things that I might have made notes about while listening to the render in the other project, and I balance the vocal and blend it into the mix with the synths and percussion. I typically end up doing some subtle side-chain compression to help keep things balanced that might compete for space with the main vocal. I often have to do some side-chain compression of the instrumentals against a synth or vocal to keep the new track from getting too loud and poking through or drowning things out too much at some of the bigger moments.

And by that point, I usually feel like I've given the mix all I can. I know my mixes aren't perfect, and there's still more work that needs to be done. But, by the time I've done all that, I feel like I've at least realized the track better, and I'm in a position to know what to say to a real mix engineer and help them help me get everything out of the track that I intended. This process leaves me with a a mix that is usually about 30-60 tracks deep, with lots of layers and coloration tracks and separation of parts for different effects processing.

I'm glad I took the time to write this down while I'm in the middle of it, and can specifically articulate the process as I'm going through it. And maybe my explaination of my process illuminates something for you, too!