Mixing is HARD!

Todzilla

Todzilla

New member
...and DAWs have, in a weird way, encourage it to be a lot harder (by indulging overtracking, undercommitting and over-reliance on mix fixes).

I'm a one man shop, from song writing to arranging to playing/singing to mixing down. I know it's not realistic to expect fantastic results without relying on dedicated professionals at each of the aforementioned steps, but I have to say, of all the steps involved in making music, mixing is the hardest for me.

I think I'm okay at it, but the ability to hear sounds as they're tracked and accommodate their capture, knowing how the individual tracks will aggregate in a mix is just an elusive, mysterious art.

Maybe recognizing one's weaknesses is the first step to overcoming them, but I continue to mix, remix, sometimes overmix the life out of a song, then repeat furiously with different listens on car stereo, ipod, home stereo, computer speakers.

I'm afraid I'm just going to cycle through my 14 songs for my CD until I get to the point where diminishing returns meets getting sick of it all, then hope the mastering process can make up for gaps.

Am I cynical?
 
Sounds like you need to give yourself a break! :drunk:

Mixing should be hard but also fun and it seems like you might be pushing yourself too hard on each track. If you aren't on a deadline for your album it seems like it would be best to work on a track, then take a break from it for a few days. Meanwhile, continue referencing a commercial album leisurely so your mix has a guide.

On the other hand, the more you mix, remix etc, the more experience you are gaining and figuring out how you like your music mixed. Though it may take longer and is frustrating, ultimately you'll take something away from it and be better off for it. Imagine (if you survive) how much better you'll be the 14th song.
 
Todzilla said:
...and DAWs have, in a weird way, encourage it to be a lot harder (by indulging overtracking, undercommitting and over-reliance on mix fixes).

I'm a one man shop, from song writing to arranging to playing/singing to mixing down. I know it's not realistic to expect fantastic results without relying on dedicated professionals at each of the aforementioned steps, but I have to say, of all the steps involved in making music, mixing is the hardest for me.

I think I'm okay at it, but the ability to hear sounds as they're tracked and accommodate their capture, knowing how the individual tracks will aggregate in a mix is just an elusive, mysterious art.

Maybe recognizing one's weaknesses is the first step to overcoming them, but I continue to mix, remix, sometimes overmix the life out of a song, then repeat furiously with different listens on car stereo, ipod, home stereo, computer speakers.

I'm afraid I'm just going to cycle through my 14 songs for my CD until I get to the point where diminishing returns meets getting sick of it all, then hope the mastering process can make up for gaps.

Am I cynical?
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Outside ears are the bomb. Use them often.
Also, I used to severely overmix projects....until I discovered my room was crap. Once I sorted that out, then mixes were much less problematical.:cool:
 
The last concert I recorded was about a hours worth of music. It featured 9 tracks I think: 4 vocals, 2 guitars, bass, keys, and drums. Only me and the sound man did the mixing no other band members were allowed.

Total mix time was 5 sessions of about a couple of hours each, plus several random listens on my home stereo. All of this was spread over a 10 day period. It was my first attempt at trying to mix, I think if I had to do it again I could probably do it again in half the time.

So total work time on the mix was probably 10-15 hours with half of that spent at the DAW. The live concert had so much mic bleed overdubbing really wasn't an option.

I mixed all the songs one right after another, when I finished the last song I started back at the beginning and started again. I probably rinsed and repeated this 20 times. I really tried to avoid getting stuck on one song. I wanted all the songs in the set list to seem coherent.


I'm not sure if any of that info was helpful.

Racherik
 
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Todd,

I don't think you're being cynical so much as being clear-eyed and honest. Which puts you a step ahead of many of us ;).

Exactly why two different people find mixing hard is often two different reasons, and where you're particular stumbling blocks lie, I can only guess. But allow me to cast a couple of guesses in the dark and throw out a couple of ideas. It's up to you to decide whether they're helpful for you or not.

First, IMHO, the better of an idea that one can get earlier as to where they want to go with the mix, the easier the mixing will be. IOW, listen to the tracks you have in a raw faders-up mix and create your overall game plan early, as opposed to just taking one track at a time, making it sound "awsome" and then just letting the mix fall together as it does almost by default.

Second, and what has to go with the first one, IMHO, when you make that game plan, make it based on what you think can actually realistically be done with the tracks. Or put another way, plan the mix to go along with, and make the best of, the way the tracks "want to be" mixed. Don't try to force it to sound like some ideal that you have in your head that's honestly unrealistic based upon the tracks you have to work with. That results in the "never-ending mix from hell" where you're trying forever to take the mix to a place it just doesn't want to go.

Think of it like being dealt a hand of cards. You gotta play the hand for what it is, and not every hand can result in an inside straight, let alone a royal flush. If it only realistically is going to give you a pair of queens at best, then play for that pair the best you can with that track, and try again for that flush the next song or project.

HTH,

G.
 
Lots of great input, guys! Thanks for extracting positive questions out of my rant.

For the record, the biggest problem lies in the two fleshy appendages the protrude from my head. My ears have never had the precision needed for great nuanced mixing decisions. I've worked with folks who will listen to a whole mis and say "Lead guitar - boost the 1.5K about 3 db" which produces a subtle change allowing the mix to sound good on a number of play back systems.

I have a well treated room (OC703 and Ethan Weiner style bass traps) with high ceilings and a nice mix position. I have nice monitors - DynAudio BM15As, Audix 1As and an old Panasonic boom box with an Aux In. I pull in extra ears on a regular basis. I do have an end in mind, but I find it difficult to discern how each individual performance/mic position/signal change variation can be optimized to contribute to that gestalt.

I think the other issue is that I'm often overly ambitious at the tracking stage. It's no surprise that the simpler the constituent tracks are, the easier and cleaner the mix. When faced with a conglomeration of competing parts, finding detente between different tracks is a difficult issue.
 
I know what you're sayin man.

I'm still learning (do ya ever quit learning? ;) ) and sometimes I get overly ambitious in tracking too.
Ya know...the wall of guitars, the symphony style of crescendos and oomph, the big controlled booming drum stuff...:o

And the frequencies....ugh....I've looked at Glens page on interactive frequencies several times and started tweaking knobs. That helped to dial in the strengths and weaknesses and where to cut etc...
Most of the time when I'm trying to find "that sound" during a mix, I'll close my eyes to twiddle knobs or faders. It helps me to NOT lean on my eyes to get a sound I'm after.
That...and not being askeered to twist them knobs to the max and to the minimum.

And when I really get frustrated, I'll walk away...have a beer, watch a movie, smear peanut butter on the dogs nose...
:)

:drunk:
 
i love it...I never even thought of it before i started this but next to the finished project its probably my favourite part of the process..

Dunno what advice I could give Todd...I know I had a eureka mix around 6 months ago and Ive taken its template and applied it to most of my stuff more or less..

All I do is make sure all the tracks are organised before even starting (grouped, colour co-ordinated, buses, FX channels), give yourself loads of headroom, cut EQs rather than giving them gain, cut volumes rather than increase them, understand compression, keep your anchors in the middle, dont pan drums beyond 10 o clock to 2 o clock, and that panning should be applied with gusto...not just 2% to the left or 3% to the right.....

I still stuff things up and/or can get an instrument to sit right but its far less now, I can finish a track a week now...also if its just not happening even when youve walked away from it dont be afraid to zero everything and start again...sometimes you just have to


lol@mixmaster earl and his six months experience :)
 
kcearl said:
lol@mixmaster earl and his six months experience :)
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:laughings: Like you said though, you love it. We all love music, that's why we do it. I think we think it's hard because we want to be great at it. I want to be the best I can be at mixing so I set my standards really high.
 
There's nothing wrong with over-tracking a boatload of parts, but the discipline of selecting what NOT to use can be hard at first. But once one realizes how less can very often be more - and hears the results by actually doing the less is more thing a couple of times - it becomes a pretty easy idea to follow. It just takes getting past that initial hurdle.

It's like those of us who used to wear our hair long getting our hair cut short for the first time. The first time you're really nervous that your hair will get all f*cked up, but after surviving that first hair cut, from there on it gets easy. (I should know, I went from ponytail to buzz cut several years ago. It was a tough jump to make at first, but now I wouldn't go back if you paid me to. :P)

Here's one way that both helps cut down on the over-use of tracks and helps develop a particular helpful mixing trick at the same time: remember that for any given track, there's nothing that says that the whole track has to be used in it's entirety through out the whole song. Not every track is a lead track, nor should they be. Sometimes just a sprinkle of it here or there as a small accent, hook or fill can go a million miles. I've had tracks where in an entire track, I've used only a half-measure or less with the rest of the track muted. Others where they're only used in the bridge or third chorus as part of a crescendoing, and so on. But there's no need to keep them in for the whole song because the part is just really not all that special or only serves to busy things up too much.

Another way that the self-recording musician can approach it is to purposely start with just some core tracks - just a guitar and vocals, for just one example - and rough mix those before tracking more parts and adding them in one at a time. You'll often find that your mix will fill up and sound perfectly fine before you might otherwise think.

IMHO, YMMV, DARE, NORML, ETC.

G.
 
On deeper reflection, I think one of the reasons it's so challenging is that it's the part of the process where all our previous decisions/performances/dreams come to a head. During songwriting, tracking, rough listening, we're still injecting our hopes that this is the tune that will cause George Gershwin's ghost to haunt Paul McCartney and Lamont Dozier. But during mixdown, we confront the shortcomings of what's gone on before and confront the reality of what we have in the face of the Platonic ideal.

So, for me, when my mixdown product is pretty close to what I ideally had in my head, I know I'm coming close to not sucking narwhal.
 
Todzilla said:
For the record, the biggest problem lies in the two fleshy appendages the protrude from my head. My ears have never had the precision needed for great nuanced mixing decisions. .
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You're screwed and so is anyone else that listens to your music.

Mixing is the easy and fun part.
 
Mix it in a fix !

I don't think any two of millions of mixers would ever identically mix a song so in a real sense, there's any number of ways that a mix could go; so going 'the way the song wants to go' is largely a subjective imposition, although I do understand it {now....} and I think it's valid for the most part.
To be honest, what I may hear in my head will rarely, if ever, be what comes out because of the variables that come into play. So for me, each mix is kind of like trying to find my way to the middle of Scunthorpe with a car but no map. I know I will get there eventually, sometimes I may need to drive back to my beginning point and start over, sometimes it may feel like I'm going round and round and nowhere, at times a right or second left and suddenly I've struck paydirt and I'm on the home straight, other times I have a good idea of where I'm going before I've set off and at other points still, I'll make constructive use of happy accidents.
Todzilla said:
For the record, the biggest problem lies in the two fleshy appendages the protrude from my head. My ears have never had the precision needed for great nuanced mixing decisions.
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That's how I feel about myself and my mixing abilities/practice, with the key emphasis on the word "nuanced".
shorttonpro said:
Mixing should be hard but also fun
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Greg_L said:
Mixing is the easy and fun part.
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I don't think that it should be hard or that it should be easy but it obviously is both, depending on the individual and {sometimes} experience concerned. I do agree that there should be pleasure/enjoyment in it though, even if it's not overwhelming. Otherwise, for me, it's like having to clean foxes' shit off the stairs.
kcearl said:
i love it...I never even thought of it before i started this but next to the finished project its probably my favourite part of the process..
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From the moment that an idea for a song is conceived till it's playing on your whatever in it's final format, there's process involved. Different people get different bangs out of different parts of the process. I guess no part is an end in itself but I like discussing each individual aspect of the process.
 
grimtraveller said:
I don't think any two of millions of mixers would ever identically mix a song so in a real sense, there's any number of ways that a mix could go; so going 'the way the song wants to go' is largely a subjective imposition, although I do understand it {now....} and I think it's valid for the most part.
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Perhaps it might be less mystical sounding if one looked at it the other way around; don't try talking the mix where it doesn't want to go. That side of it is not so subjective.

"Talking it where it wants to go" perhaps is more like "taking it where it will allow you to take it", which can be one of a number of potential places, depending on who's doing the driving. At the same time, though, where it will let you take it is something you gotta figure out by listening to it and figuring it's potentials. You can't just decide; "OK, you're going *there*" unless "there" is a place that suggests itself to you after listening to it first.

G.
 
To learn how to mix well takes time and effort...you have to read as much as you can about the subject and use the things that work and forget the stuff that doesnt work.

Ive read somewhere that it takes 10,000 hours or 6 years to get good at something...It takes time.
 
"Mixing is HARD!"

Well, so is building rocket engines or performing brain surgery, but put the rocket scientist or brain surgeon in front of a song to mix and they would not be able to do it.

It's about training and learning, if it was easy we would not need to have sound engineers or producers.

You can give someone a toolbox but it does not make them a mechanic.

Cheers
alan.
 
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