Mixing---How do YOU know when to stop!?

mikeyhasnobones

mikeyhasnobones

"stop dropping my mics."
alright folks, i am definitely looking forward to your replies to this one:
with sooooo many options available to you in digital recording and mixing, how do you know when enough is enough? i will spend all night sitting and fine tuning a guitar sound, then wake up in the morning, sit and listen, and end up working on it more and more. not really making it over processed just trying out different things. just curious to know, where do YOU draw the line? thanks all!
 
mikeyhasnobones said:
alright folks, i am definitely looking forward to your replies to this one:
with sooooo many options available to you in digital recording and mixing, how do you know when enough is enough? i will spend all night sitting and fine tuning a guitar sound, then wake up in the morning, sit and listen, and end up working on it more and more. not really making it over processed just trying out different things. just curious to know, where do YOU draw the line? thanks all!
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When it sounds good ;)
 
You have to know what sound you are going for. Tweaking for days on end can be fun and you can learn a lot from doing it but it doesn't lend itself to finishing anything.

If the guitars don't sound the way you want them to, why didn't you record them differently? Did you know what you wanted them to sound like, has your expectation of the guitar sound changed? Or is there no plan for the song and you're fiddling with it until something sounds "right?" That isn't mixing, its playing with your DAW: home recordists get the 2 confused all the time.

I don't fiddle much anymore unless I'm getting to know a new plugin or piece of gear. Even then the goal is to get the know the gear and not finish a mix. When I'm wiriting and recording a song its a different process.

I usually record a demo kind of quick and dirty- its well recorded in case I get some incredible performance but its not intended to be the final recording. This is where I work out all the parts and arrangements. While tracking I already have some idea where I want it to go, but that usually shifts as parts are added or removed and the creativity flows. I'll do some heavy tweaking here to wrestle the sounds around and see if the ideas are working. Eventually the "final" form of the demo emerges and I know what each instrument's part and sound is going to be.

Then I make an mp3 of the mix and listen to it for a while to see if it really works. Give it a few days to see what rubs me the wrong way and what I really like about the arrangement. If it still sounds good I get ready to record the "real" song.

This is much more painstaking. I know what sounds I'm looking for so I record them that way. I know the arrangement so I play the parts straight through- and practice them so that I can play them well before I even start recording. The hardest part is keeping the feeling going and keeping the performance alive- so parts of the demo that do have that energy are sometimes brought in to help keep the energy flowing as long as the tempo is the same.

Mixing is then fairly simple. And it might be done when the song sounds like a kickin' version of the demo. There are usually things that come up- great ideas that you didn't have before- that shift things around but that's the fun part of mixing. Then you have to be honest with yourself and know when you've done the best you can for the song at hand.

If its a tune that I intend to release on my next CD then I usually don't mix it myself. I'll do a reference mix for the mixing engineer, but by that point I am way too saturated in my own clever ideas to be objective about the song. I schedule some time in the studio, fly over and its done (whether I think its perfect or not) when the scheduled time is up.

And even though I say "whether I think its perfect or not" it invariably sounds better than if I had stayed in my studio tweaking it. Thanks to the joys of the DAW, fed ex, and fast internet connections (as well as waning pro studio demand) there are really good mixing engineers out there that will mix your tunes for fairly cheap.

If that's not in the cards, though (and for most of us it isn't) there is the Clinic. :)
 
mikeyhasnobones said:
... i will spend all night sitting and fine tuning a guitar sound, then wake up in the morning, sit and listen, and end up working on it more and more. not really making it over processed just trying out different things. just curious to know, where do YOU draw the line? thanks all!
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Ah yes. The time pit. Sucks you in.. you know it. But still we go... :p

What you are saying here is more like what everyone must go through to some extent in the learning discovery process (both at the person's level or for 'the mix') And while it's be valuable for experimentation and playing with the minutia, it likely (often?) plays out as being stuff with low impact. In other words not so much about whether the song or track 'works' or not.

So, you can have; Strong tracks that 'work' pretty damned well just by bringing them up -less need (or desire caused) to futz with them, fewer places needed to look for that special thing' to make it happen.
Then we have our own skill level that plays hard into this -way back to initial track quality, to the how and where to go with the 'what if' stuff at mix time.

One last. There's this thing at play that sort of goes; Too much polish can= boring (vs when some rough/edge/quirk = character!
This can play into that 'forest for the trees factor'.

In other words, we must get the hell away from microscope mode to 'get it' again.
:D
 
Have an end-game in mind and stop when you get there. Otherwise, you're just guessing (time and time and time again).

I'm not saying not to have a little fun and experiment... But you should have an idea of what it's "supposed to sound like" from listening to the raw tracks. Do what it needs to get it to sound that way. After that, start hitting "Save As" instead.
 
Thats an easy one, about one hour per track.


For the first 57 minutes I eq, compress, limit, de ess, delay, reverb and double the track to near death. Then, at the 58th minute, I hit the FX bypass button and realize how great it sounds with nothing. Then at the 59h minute I add back a light compression to take out some peaks, add back a small eq to bandpass the extreme highs and lows, maybe dip out some mud. Then, send a little to a verb.:D

Then I move to the next track.:cool:
 
VSpaceBoy said:
... Then, at the 58th minute, I hit the FX bypass button and realize how great it sounds with nothing. :D
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Ah, you like the quick roughs too? ;) IMHO there's something special about the raw side that will never make it through to the end. At some level, it's pretty much all down hill from there.
 
This is where a good producer can really help, and why they usually don't, and shouldn't sit there through the whole mix process. They should maintain that forrest perspective.
Too much massaging is definitely too much sometimes, and a classic story is Joan Jett's "I love Rock n Roll". After many, many hours of mixing that song to death, perfecting the chorus, etc, and nobody being happy with it, the engineer threw up the ruff mix he had thrown together right after tracking, and everyone exclaimed "That's it!". Then they pulled the receptionist, the janitor... everyone in the building in to the studio and did a very un-professional one take of the chorus. It works perfectly.
 
ill mix a song untill it sounds right. sometimes it only takes 15 minutes...sometimes a whole hour.

but after 1 hour, if i find my self still tweaking....thats when ill walk away, have a break.........and let my ears refresh.

cause if im still tweaking after 1 hour, that song better have over 50+ tracks, cause if it doesnt.....im probably over tweaking it at that point.
.
.
.
......then ill listen to it again in the morning, another day.............just to double check myself.
 
i dont know, i do hip-hop music, goin thru a simillar issue as the threadstarter, but i've realized, that my problem comes from overprocessing......... and maybe trying to be too much of a perfectionist failing to realize that i'm not gonna get the pro-results with my very minimal experience.....

so i just bring up a practice session and play with that for hours on end.......... its fun, kills spare time, and gives me more motivation to finally get some damn headphones so i can start recording again :cool:
 
INteresting thread....as I was working on this song last week, that I thought was good not great but it had this powerful sound from the vocal. I went over all the tracking last night and kept tweaking but somehow it lost that cut through the mix vocalizing and though it sounds smoother it just doesn't have those dynamics. I believe there is a magic that happens in the studio occasionally after all those times of mystery(?), that can't be explained.

For the small studio person, you have to keep the tracks clean and non-peaking but often you give up nice transients, oh well. Final note, forget all those fancy final limiters, TLS Pocket Limiter blew them all away, and we sat and listened to like 4 decent software ones, you surely know the others...nope, all added noise and in fact, the new Waves L3, I bought made so much noise even after tweaking, hunk of junk, another oh well. Keep up the mixing learning curve, we are all rounding the bend, psongman
 
Chris Shaeffer said:
You have to know what sound you are going for. Tweaking for days on end can be fun and you can learn a lot from doing it but it doesn't lend itself to finishing anything.

If the guitars don't sound the way you want them to, why didn't you record them differently? Did you know what you wanted them to sound like, has your expectation of the guitar sound changed? Or is there no plan for the song and you're fiddling with it until something sounds "right?" That isn't mixing, its playing with your DAW: home recordists get the 2 confused all the time.
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Massive Master said:
Have an end-game in mind and stop when you get there. Otherwise, you're just guessing (time and time and time again).

I'm not saying not to have a little fun and experiment... But you should have an idea of what it's "supposed to sound like" from listening to the raw tracks. Do what it needs to get it to sound that way. After that, start hitting "Save As" instead.
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I agree completly with these positions.

When one comes to the mixing stage, they are generally in one of two positions: either they also did the tracking or they are getting tracks to mix from someone else. Sometimes theres a combination of the two in one project, but the points for each remain the same.

If one is engineering or producing the project from the beginning, including the tracking, it only makes sense IME/IMHO to have at least a rough idea before you even hit the record button of what you want the final result to sound like. Then one sets up the tracking as needed to get as close to the result as desired, to minimalize the amount of work required in the mix (why give yourself more work than you need to? ;) ) Then in mixing, just do what is required to take it the rest of the way to get what you wanted from the outset. Sure, sometimes changes in plan or new ideas will happen along the way, but usually not to the point where the end result will be unrecognizably different from the original playbook.

If, OTOH, one is receiving tracks made by another and there is no agreed upon roadmap for the final mix (which is how most of my stuff comes in) and no producer breathing down you neck, then I like to let the music itself direct my mix. Give it a raw faders-up listen, listening to it the way a jeweler looks at a rough-cut diamond. Just the same way a jeweler decides before he makes his first cut a game plan for how to cut a particular stone to make the best out of it based upon it's own structure, strengths and flaws, I use that faders-up listen to decide before I satrt mixing how to shape the mix to make the best of what's given me, and how I it should sound when it's done.

Usually it's those with no such game plans worked out ahead of the mixing at some point that have a hard time stopping. It's kina hard to stop when you don't know where you're going.

G.
 
ecktronic said:
my god a whole hour to mix a song?! That means it would take you like almost a whole day to mix a whole album! :D

Eck
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That's what I was thinking. Most of the stuff I mix is very sparse (maybe 4-5 tracks, sometimes less) and I'll take a couple of hours.

And I don't like to do too much at mixdown.
 
lol....sometimes it can take me a whole hour, depending on the # of tracks in the song......and what needs to be done to them.

trust me....i love mixing those songs where its under 15 or so tracks.......those i can can slam dunk pretty quickly......

if the stuff is tracked properly/decent enough....mixing is definatly quicker and much easier.....as apposed to trying to save someones butcherd tracks that sounds like junk to begin with....
 
psongman said:
INteresting thread....as I was working on this song last week, that I thought was good not great but it had this powerful sound from the vocal. I went over all the tracking last night and kept tweaking but somehow it lost that cut through the mix vocalizing and though it sounds smoother it just doesn't have those dynamics. I believe there is a magic that happens in the studio occasionally after all those times of mystery(?), that can't be explained.

For the small studio person, you have to keep the tracks clean and non-peaking but often you give up nice transients, oh well. Final note, forget all those fancy final limiters, TLS Pocket Limiter blew them all away, and we sat and listened to like 4 decent software ones, you surely know the others...nope, all added noise and in fact, the new Waves L3, I bought made so much noise even after tweaking, hunk of junk, another oh well. Keep up the mixing learning curve, we are all rounding the bend, psongman
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yeah i usually add the L3 to my mixdown effects buss, but then i realized that it was too strong with the noise additions, i might still mess around with it, but then i have to use the X-Noise or the noise/hiss remover in my Auditions 2.0 to compensate for the extra's....

i 4get which one it is, but either the X-noise or Z-noise from Waves has a transient manipulator that lets you add or take away the extra's, it's very helpful especially when processing kills the sonic quality of a track...
 
HG answered this perfectly in an un-related thread. It was something like;

"When you listen to it the next day, and it still sounds as perfect as it did when you mixed it the night before."
 
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