Audiotip a day.

I get questions sometimes regarding mixes my friends are making. They are feeling it, but something is missing. It sounds good….but not great. It’s been well recorded and the takes are good but there is something lacking in the mix. That’s when some of your most critical listening should take place. When you have everything for a good song, but the mix is just so-so.

Here are a couple of tips to keep your mixes alive.

1. Try to make your mix flow.

• For example, if you have string parts or long sustained notes, try making them flow via automation, whether it’s volume automation or reverb swelling. Think of the sound as waves flowing from one place to another intertwining with each other.

2. Tweak the presets

• For new mixers it may be easy to just slap on a compressor preset and be done with it. It says snare compressor so that’s just what I need. No, tweak the preset and work the parameters according to your song. Maybe it needs less attack or more threshold. Whatever it is, fiddle around with it until it excites you. Otherwise you run the risk of it sounding generic.

3. Go through your reverbs

• Similar as the one before. I think reverb is such an important part of a mix that you should take special care in choosing it. Make sure your reverb fits in the song. It’s the glue that fits everything together and should primarily be used that way. Although later you can go and add reverb for effect on some tracks. But take care in choosing your reverbs and go through your banks one by one before settling one which one to choose. I have loads of convolution reverb pulses in Logic’s Space Designer I go through every time I’m working on a song. Sometimes that plate reverb I used on the last song for great effect sounds horrible on the one I work on later.

4. Don’t clutter

• In the same vein, don’t clutter up your mix with too much reverb or effects. It just clashes with the tracks and makes everything much less defined.

5. Find a point of interest

• Whether it’s the vocal, guitars or whatever, just try to find interesting stuff to lock the listener in your song. If it’s always the same and there’s no dynamics nor interesting production, the listener quickly gets bored.

6. Add simple effects

• If the song is just a basic song with a strong main thing, like the vocal you can always add little stuff to add interest yourself. Ambient sounds underneath, long reverb trails on selected phrases, tap-tempo delays, panning automation. There’s a lot you can do to a simple song to make the production or mix great.

7. Automation

• Automate, automate, automate. This sums up everything I’ve mentioned before. If you do a little bit of all the above tips and then automate them, you’re sure to have a better sounding mix by the end of it. Or at least a more dynamic and alive one.

That’s just a few tips off the top of my head. They’re the ones I try to follow when I mix a song and usually it works out nicely. At least I always end up with a cooler sounding song. Sometimes I forget and put way too much reverb or can’t be bothered to change preset settings, but most of the time, keeping these things in mind helps my work immensely.

What do you guys think? Do you have anything to add that works for you? Share it in the comments. Have a great weekend.