No matter what kind of music we're into, one of the major things recording musicians have in common is that we all need to mix our material. If you’ve got your own studio, you know how challenging mixing can be. There’s so much going on in a mix — so many possible ways to approach it, so many effects to choose from and so forth. I know I always appreciated it when I read or heard about some little tip or trick to help make mixing easier. This week, in the short space of my editor’s note, I thought I’d pass along a few.
One that's pretty basic but very important is to try to keep your monitoring level moderate most of the time. Crank it up occasionally, to see how the song sounds loud, especially if that's how it's going to be listened to mainly. But if you keep it loud the whole time, you’ll lose your “ears,” (aka your perspective) a lot more quickly. What's more, in the long term, regular loud (over 85 dB) listening sessions are not good for your hearing health.
Here’s a trick I learned from interviewing renowned engineer Charles Dye: If you have two sets of monitors, place your secondary ones perpendicular to your mix position, so you have to spin around in your chair to listen when you switch to them. Why is this good? Because their 90 degree difference in orientation means they’ll interact with the room acoustics differently, and give you a different perspective.
Finally, if you have a mix element that’s panned past 3 or 9 and you want to add some subtle space to it, route it via a bus to a mono aux track on your mixer with a 100-percent wet delay inserted. Pan the aux track opposite the instrument or voice on the track, and turn the bus send up ever so slowly until the delay is just barely perceptible. This "ghost delay" adds both ambience and excitement to the track without being over the top.
There you go. Three mixing tips to help you on your next project. If you’ve got tips of your own, I’d love to hear them.
Yes, Audiofanzine is using cookies. Since the last thing that we want is disturbing your diet
with too much fat or too much sugar, you'll be glad to learn that we made them ourselves with fresh, organic and fair ingredients,
and with a perfect nutritional balance. What this means is that the data we store in them is used to enhance your use of our website
as well as improve your user experience on our pages and show you personalised ads (learn more). To configure your cookie preferences, click here.
We did not wait for a law to make us respect our members and visitors' privacy. The cookies that we use are only meant to improve your experience on our website.
Configure my preferences
Accept all
Our cookies
Cookies not subject to consent
These are cookies that guarantee the proper functioning of Audiofanzine and allow its optimization. The website cannot function properly without these cookies. Example: cookies that help you stay logged in from page to page or that help customizing your usage of the website (dark mode or filters).
Google Analytics
We are using Google Analytics in order to better understand the use that our visitors make of our website in an attempt to improve it.
Advertising
This information allows us to show you personalized advertisements thanks to which Audiofanzine is financed. By unchecking this box you will still have advertisements but they may be less interesting :) We are using Google Ad Manager to display part of our ads, or tools integrated to our own CMS for the rest. We are likely to display advertisements from our own platform, from Google Advertising Products or from Adform.
We did not wait for a law to make us respect our members and visitors' privacy. The cookies that we use are only meant to improve your experience on our website.
Select all
Our cookies
Cookies not subject to consent
These are cookies that guarantee the proper functioning of Audiofanzine. The website cannot function properly without these cookies. Examples: cookies that help you stay logged in from page to page or that help customizing your usage of the website (dark mode or filters).
Google Analytics
We are using Google Analytics in order to better understand the use that our visitors make of our website in an attempt to improve it. When this parameter is activated, no personal information is sent to Google and the IP addresses are anonymized.
Advertising
This information allows us to show you personalized advertisements thanks to which Audiofanzine is financed. By unchecking this box you will still have advertisements but they may be less interesting :) We are using Google Ad Manager to display part of our ads, or tools integrated to our own CMS for the rest. We are likely to display advertisements from our own platform, from Google Advertising Products or from Adform.
Confirm my preferences
You can find more details on data protection in our privacy policy. You can also find information about how Google uses personal data by following this link.