What actually makes a mix better?

[00:00:00] Welcome to Mix Session number one here at the Mix Artist Academy. My name is Jan and this is the new domain on which I share, uh, everything I know. About mixing your music and, um, I've been in the industry for about 25 years, so I collected a lot of knowledge about how to get music projects to the finish line, as well as working as an, as an educator.

So I really hope that you get some valuable information out of me. In the mix Sessions block every week I would like to share a little nugget of wisdom. I typically pick a topic and then, um, spread out the episode for about. Let me start again. This was terrible.[00:01:00]

Let's go again.

Welcome to the Mix Sessions. Blog number one here at the Mix Artist Academy.

What was that?

Okay, start that again.

Take three. Welcome to Mix Sessions, number one. Welcome to the Mix Artist Academy and welcome to Mix Sessions number one. It's our weekly video blog, which is going to be available for you for free here on the Mix Artist Academy website. Let's get a right into it. If your mixes aren't improving enough, [00:02:00] that is not because you need more plugins.

This is an unpopular opinion, and I know it goes against the current marketing trends, but very rarely is more plugins the right answer. So. Despite the marketing noise and the temptation to just collect and buy more fancy looking plugins: don't!

You are probably looking in the wrong place, and there are other things that you need to straighten out first before you actually make the most out of your plugins. So stick with your stock DAW plugins for now. Sort out a couple of aspects that drive you towards wrong decision making first, and we are going through those in the next couple of episodes. So stay tuned and I really hope that you're gonna binge watch all of them.

So, first and foremost, if you go to YouTube. Search for how to mix videos. You will find an [00:03:00] abundance of great videos. As always, there's a lot of gold among, but also a lot of rubbish at the same time, and you don't always know which of the two it is so many of those videos start with a hot shot engineer, uh, showing some fancy tricks, usually pretty quickly involving some plugins and how they work a particular sound. Just be very careful. Nothing against those people. They're amazing human beings, but many of those videos are actually marketing videos for the plugin manufacturer, trying to get you to buy those same plugins because they try to instill the idea that you need to buy their product to solve all your problems in your mind, and that's probably not what you need. Okay. Stick with me because this is really important.[00:04:00]

When I go on social media, I typically find discussion groups about how to mix, and one of the most common questions is what is the best vocal chain for -and now insert hiphop vocals, r and b, vocals, uh, reggae bass, what have you- and people ask for the right plug and chain.

This is really something that I want to dive in a little bit deeper because it reveals the mentality that is not helpful, and I call this mentality the cooking recipe mindset. So what do I mean by that? I'm not a professional chef. My wife is, but I'm not. So if I try to cook a, a nice meal at home, I often start with a recipe.

I have no idea how to do it yet. I follow the recipe and add one ingredient after another in the right order. And by the end of it, hopefully I've got a delicious meal. [00:05:00] And the same thing, uh, seems to be underlying in the mindsets of people asking questions like that. So they have vocal. Then they have a certain outcome in their mind, and now they want to know how to get from here to there.

And ideally, they wanna solve this problem with the fastest way. And that is typically the plugin chain, but it could not be further from the truth. The responses in these forums is typically use plugin A from this eng, uh, from this developer, and then from that developer, you need this plugin. And, but.

Very few people actually talk about how to set those plugins. They often list the plugins, which seems to be a common thing in Yeah, the world we live in. Plug and craving and plug and collection seems to be something that is deeply engraved in as people, but it's not actually because we are focusing on the tool [00:06:00] instead of the sound, and that's really the mind shift that needs to change.

So instead of saying. By this plugin, by that plugin, by that plugin in this order and apply them, we need to ask how did the sound or the sound source sound to begin with? Was it a bright vocal or a dark vocal? Was it very dynamic? Those are really important things to consider, and based on that, you can now choose to treat them in a certain way.

If you have a vision in which direction you want to go to. But to apply a plaque and chain per default to any vocal is not a guarantee for a good outcome because it can literally be the wrong treatment for a vocal that maybe didn't even need anything. So it really depends on how it sounds to begin with.

So my teaching is all about forgetting about the plaques and tools. Focus in [00:07:00] on how it sounds. What does the signal actually need? The, the recording, how was it recorded? What are you envisioning and how do you creatively get it from where it is currently to where you want it to be? And you will be surprised that in most situations.

It's actually fewer plugins that get the job done. And you will also be surprised that in many cases your stock DAW plugins are probably all you need. So please hold your money and don't buy plugins. Resist the craving.

So let sum this up one more time. Plugins alone are not gonna make your mix better.

So at this point you might ask if it's not the plugins. So what is it then? Well, let's get down to it.

It is first and foremost your monitoring system, and for a lot of you, it might actually be rigged against you. [00:08:00] Then it comes down to mixing skills. And mixing skills is something that you will gradually build over time.

I'm very sorry, but there is no quick fix to get from no knowledge to highly skilled very quickly. You need to build this over time. You need to learn the science and the tools, the parameters of plugins, what they do, the physics of sound, and then of course you need to learn the skills that help you make creative decisions well, for music. To a large degree. It's also listening skills, so you need to train your ears to become good at detecting a problem or also if there isn't a problem, this is really important, and again, this will take a little bit of time. And then lastly, it goes down to the understanding of music and good decision making.

So when I do complete a mix, there's probably [00:09:00] thousands of decisions that happen along the line. And the underlying principle is that a good mix comes from many, many small decisions done correctly or done right, or done tastefully, that's the better word, done tastefully rather than hitting with a hammer and trying to get one solution that does it all for you.

This mindset, although it's often advertised through plug and manufacturers, is actually not. Really helpful. So the slap this plugin on that all your pr, uh, problems are solved mentality. I understand they're trying to push plugins in the market and sell them to you, but do not fall for it. It's not gonna work.

I'm sorry. But the true, honest answer is straighten out your monitoring, develop your skills of understanding, of mixing skills, the practical mixing skills, develop your listening. And keep doing it again and again and again. That's how you're gonna get there. [00:10:00] And there is no other way.

So in this context, let me just, uh, recap, um, a theory that I find really inspiring about getting to the absolute top of a discipline. It's called the 10,000 Hour Theory. You might have heard it before, and it applies to people who are at the absolute top of their game. For example, sports, it's sports athletes, people who compete at the Olympics.

They didn't start the week before. Of course, they've done it for a very long time and they probably spent about 10,000 hours. Pilots have done thousands of hours because they, before they even get to a, um, a, a cockpit, and they're not considered experienced until they have something like 10,000 hours of flying.

We could go further. Politics, business, whoever the leaders are the peak performer of a discipline. They've typically spent 10,000 [00:11:00] hours on it and mixing is not different in any way. So have I spent 10,000 hours on it? Yes. Probably much more than that. I didn't take time, I didn't stop the time for that, but I probably have, I've done it for over 25 years.

And here's the crazy thing about it. I'm still learning. I'm still not at the end where I've learned everything. There's still more to discover. So in other words, I still evolve as a creative, uh, as a mix engineer. And that's actually what keeps me going, and that's what I'm so excited about. So it's not about getting there to a certain point, it's about the process of moving in the right direction.

What I can tell you is that if I look back at my own learning curve is that learning is not linear. It's not like we start over here and we end up over there, and over the years there's a straight line of, uh, an increase of your skill. Unfortunately, that's not what it is. It's actually [00:12:00] very similar to learning a musical instrument.

Where you need to start to pick up the guitar first and really make your fingers hurt by just trying to get your f, you know, all the chords, uh, build the muscle memory and feel the pain in your fingertips. Those times you have to go through and you cannot expect a quick outcome. So you need to do it.

You need to do it again and again and again. Just like learning an instrument. In other words, the first mix you touch is not gonna be the best sounding one. Of course not. How could it, when I look back at the mixes that I did, I don't know, two or three years down my, uh, professional career, well, I got paid for it.

Everybody liked him, they got approved. But nowadays I see a lot of mistakes that back then I didn't understand I was making. And look, it's the same thing with musicians. If you take musicians who are at the peak of their career [00:13:00] and ask them to look at their very first release, they often see all the imperfections.

That's okay. That's part of learning. That's what drives us forward. So we look back at our past work, we see imperfections, and that drives us to do better, and that drives us to do better again and again. That's exactly like learning an instrument. Okay, so, um, what I learned over time is that the progression from a beginner to a skilled mix engineer was not a straight line.

Instead, it's a bumpy ride with a couple of dead ends. I tried. Different techniques that I picked up somewhere, tried them for time, then realized, okay, that was not the answer. Let's steer back. It's not the way I like, it's a sound, so let's not do that. Let's try something else. So that's Norman. I also found that I hit a couple of plateaus.

There were a couple of years when in retrospect, I don't think I made much [00:14:00] progress at all where hit a certain threshold and I couldn't get past it. Then usually something funny happened, um, I spoke to somebody who planted a new idea on my mind, or I tried a different, I let go of an old mindset and tried something new, and suddenly this elevated me forward.

That happened for me with compression. For example, even 10 years down my mixing career, I had revelation style moments where I saw somebody else applying a compressor in a way that I've never even considered. Using the same compressor that I had, but using it in a different way was said, aha, now that makes sense.

So those moments were moments when I suddenly I accelerated forward and by mixing gained a new dimension. So there were moments when I hit the uh, plateau and didn't move forward, and then suddenly there was a leap forward. So these leap forward moments, that's what I want to share here. [00:15:00] The mixed sessions, blogs blog in the mixed session blog in the mixed session blog.

That's really at the core of it, and I hope you get a couple of nuggets of wisdom out of it so that you don't actually have to spend all the 10,000 hours, but a little bit less. You see where I'm going with that? Okay, so before we move any further, let's first look at how the odds are stacked against us.

If you struggle with a mix, it might not be you. It could be external factors. So is there anything stacked against us? It could be that there is a problem with the source material. The recording signal might not be. Might be problematic. Maybe the microphones weren't aimed well, you caught too much spiel.

You might have traffic noise in the background. Maybe the microphone was, microphone was in the wrong place. Maybe it was the wrong choice of microphone. So are there any problems with the [00:16:00] recording, excessive bil on the voice, uh, too much noise, things like that? If those things are. What you start with, you already have the odds stacked against you, and you need to really ask yourself whether it's ready for mixing or whether it might be better actually to hand it back to the recording face and just do another vocal take or a tighter drums take or whatever take to get the raw signals to a place where they're ready for mixing.

In other words, don't start mixing something that isn't ready for it. We can take this concept further. It's not just recording quality. It could also be the arrangement. It might be that the arrangement isn't, hasn't fully settled yet, that there are still things that could be better. For example, there might be just a long intro of straight courts at the beginning and is not actually leading anywhere.

Those things are cool when you play life. When you take [00:17:00] time, but in a studio arrangement needs to need to be a little bit different sometimes, and it's very common for bands to tighten arrangements in recording and then play the long arrangement live. That's actually one of the cooler things about live shows, by the way.

So think about that. Is the arrangement working and you could take it further and talk about the instrumentation. Now, is the instrumentation giving you a complete picture or something missing? One of the things I usually really crave is, of course a great pulse. I call it, it's the beat. It's the one thing that, what makes me wanna bop my head.

Does the performance have. And if it doesn't, you need to go back and ask yourself, okay, maybe it needs, uh, extra drums to, to establish that. Or maybe it's got too many drums giving me confl conflicting information and we need to thin it out and decide for one, defining hat bobbing beat. [00:18:00] It could be the main melody, which is typically the voice, or it could be melody instrument.

Um. Has it got enough space or is there another element fighting for attention when we actually try to focus on the vocal? So those are instrumentation aspects and also arrangement aspects. And they should be solved in the songwriting stage and also in the recording stage or being refined on the recording stage.

But if, if in mixing, you still feel like you are not cutting through, those are the underlying principles that often work against you. So if. The recording signals aren't right, if the arrangement isn't ready and if the instrumentation is not yet fully developed. Those are typical signs that say, stop. I can't win this game.

I'm not gonna start the mix because the odds are stacked against me. Let's hand it back to the recording phase. So the songwriting phase, let's fix it there, and then [00:19:00] we bring it back to mixing. Okay? So pick your battles wisely, if that makes sense.

Other things that I need to bring up and now we look no longer at external factors. Now we look in, we turn the camera around and look at ourselves. Are we following good mixing workflow? In the next following episodes, we're gonna dive really deep into room acoustics, into your monitoring, into calibration.

Those are things that now, uh, you need to sort out as well. But if we move inwards, is there anything within you that prevents good mixing? And there are again, a range of different options. Number one, distractions. Have you ever tried to mix a song while Facebook is open on your screen and [00:20:00] you're scrolling?

Funny Cat, cat videos? Yeah, I guess so. If you've ever tried, that was not the best mix you've ever made. Of course not. The absence of distraction is a really core element. So when I mix, I protect my mindset. I wanna be in a little bubble. In other words, I block out the outside world. I'm close the doors, there's somebody mowing outside.

But there's a very good chance you can't hear a thing because this is a recording studio. Uh, I switch my mobile phone into airplane mode. I don't wanna be disrupted by any phone calls when I'm mixing or when I'm talking to you. Um, my internet is typically switched off. I have a internet power switch for the studio.

So when I'm here working with creatives, I literally cut the internet so nobody's on their phones. Uh, zombie scrolling. Instead, we cut this out so we can focus and I do the same thing in mixing

and then. We [00:21:00] need to gain clarity in our workflows, so we need to ask ourselves, what are we even here to do today? The tools we use today, a modern DAW is a fantastic tool because it can do everything for much cheaper than. People were able to produce music 20 years ago. Uh, we can be recording and mixing and editing and more mixing and mastering all in our, in our DAW on a laptop,

just because we can. That doesn't mean it's a good workflow. So workflow separation is the point that I'm trying to get here. If you don't wanna be in a mastering stage, going back to recording more backing vocals, it sounds like an absurd example, but because it actually is a problem that's a [00:22:00] friend of mine asked me for help with.

So those are examples of bad workflow. It is a wise idea to go back to traditional workflows where at first we really focus on recording. The performances, capturing the performances, aiming microphones, playing the instruments, midi, whatever it is, nailing the performances at this stage, mixing or mastering should not be on my mind whatsoever, so during this phase, I recommend to stay away from any mixed on plugins at all.

You know what? Personally, when I track here, I use pro tools like a tape machine. In this face, there is not a single plugin, maybe except for a click. Pro tools, I record as if there was no plugins. Once the takes are captured, I move on to the editing phase. And in editing it's a rather rational, uh, [00:23:00] workflow.

I like to look at all the takes, uh, chop them together. We do compiling, we look at, um, um, tidying things up and, you know, every once in a while a bit of performance editing. That's a big subject that we leave for another day. But when I edit re I know the recording is done and there's no chance to go back.

So today is the day we fix things. If it needs any fixing up in editing, only. Once editing is complete, I move into the next phase, which is now a mixing. And I will not start the mix until all the editing of the recording is done. It literally needs to be that way. I don't want to go forward and back between those stages.

So mixing means I now switch from a relatively rational, logical workflow that was editing into something that is hyper creative, which is mix. Mixing. As I said, it's not a cooking recipe that you can follow logically. The only way to mix is to really [00:24:00] feel it on the inside. And I will share a lot more about this in upcoming episodes.

It's something that you feel more than you actually, uh, think about it. Okay. So, and once mixing is done, we move it onto the mastering stage. Personally, I like to actually hand this over to a specialist, somebody who masters every day, and who is more experienced than me in mastering. So I consider myself a specialist for recording and mixing, especially mixing.

But you know what? Although I have mastered in the past, if clients really demand it, uh, but I don't really like to, I don't, uh, like it too much because I know it's not my superpower. My superpower is mixing and I wanna find somebody else whose superpower it is to master. Okay? So those are the traditional workflows we spoke about, recording, editing, mixing and mastering.

And resist the temptation to move freely up and down through those [00:25:00] because it will lead to a lack of clarity in your mind, what we're here for today. So this. Is now looking at ourselves. If you struggle mixing, think about it. There's probably something you can take out of that.

While we're on the topic, let's move into one more common mixing mistake that I've seen a lot of junior engineers end up with. It's called stacking plugins, and it goes along the lines of. Picking a signal of your choice. Let's pick a sne, a vocal, doesn't matter envisioning how it's supposed to sound and realize, okay, it needs to be brighter.

So we put a plugin on top, an eq, let's say. Then we want it to be fatter, so we add a compressor and we are still not there. So we add a saturation and we are still not there. So we add another EQ and now we put in something else and we always go one plug and further in. Be very careful with that, if that's you, if you find yourself in this workflow.[00:26:00]

Stop for a moment. If you can't achieve it in this step, it's really important to sometimes go back a step. That means if you couldn't achieve it with a certain plugin, take that out again and try a different one, or try simpler workflow. So rather than going this way, and I haven't reached it yet, so we get bit further that way and go further and further and further by stacking and more and more plugins, ask yourself, turn them all off again, and ask yourself, where did we come from?

And can I achieve that with fewer plugins? You will see that this methodology alone will lead to be better mixes, cut it back to what the signal actually needed. Not all that you can add, or all the workflows that somebody used on on YouTube. Good, so let's bring it back. If you've been struggling with your own mixes.

Then there are some external factors and some internal factors that probably contribute [00:27:00] to that. It's not you per se. It might be that external factors are stacked against you internal. It might be that you are following the wrong workflows or workflows that are not advisable, that don't work for you.

And of course on a learning curve, you might also find yourself on a plateau. So now it's time to look for new solutions, so you make a leap forward, and I really hope that I can provide some of those moments here for you in the mixed sessions Blog. Don't fight uphill battles. That's the big message. In the end, we want to end up in a situation where mixing happens.

Effortlessly in a happiest mindset, it should feel blissfully. It should take a little bit of time. It should take the time it takes, but no more. It doesn't have to be hours and hours and hours. It should never feel tedious or fighting an uphill battle. So ask [00:28:00] yourself, how do you feel when you mix?

Because I also believe that the feeling that you have within you when you mix manifest itself in sound. That's again, exactly what it will when you perform. Yeah. If you want to perform and record the best take, you gotta be in a good mindset for that to achieve as well to to achieve great takes as well.

I hope that makes sense. Okay. Let's wrap it up for the day. Every Monday, I am going to share a new episode here in the Mix Artist Academy in the Mix Sessions blog. If you want to receive notifications whenever a new episode is out, have a look underneath. There's a field where you can leave your email, and then I'm going to send you an email every time a new episode is out. So you'll be the first one to get the mix sessions for free in full length here on the Mix Artist Academy.

Thank you very much for hanging out with me today. I [00:29:00] shall see you again in a week's time and happy mixing.