How to Mix Your Own Song

The plugins that came with your recording software are enough to make a record. This is not encouragement — it is a statement about the tools. The stock compressor in any current DAW is better than the hardware most classic records were made on. What you are short of is not equipment. It is a method and a rested pair of ears.

The order to work in

Mixing goes wrong most often because people start with the fun part. Work in this order and most problems never appear.

Balance first, with nothing else. All faders down, bring the drums and bass up, then everything else, until the song makes sense as a piece of music with no processing at all. If the song works here, the rest is decoration. If it does not work here, no plugin will fix it.

Then panning. Decide where things are before you decide what they sound like. Two guitars in the same place are a fight; two guitars in different places are an arrangement.

Then EQ, cutting before boosting. Most home mixes are muddy because six instruments are all occupying the same low-mid region. Removing what an instrument does not need is almost always more effective than adding what you wish it had.

Then compression, with a reason. If you cannot say what a compressor is fixing on a given track, take it off. 'Everything gets a compressor' is how a mix becomes flat.

Then reverb and delay on sends, not inserts. One or two reverbs shared by the whole song puts everything in the same room. A different reverb on every track puts your band in eleven different rooms.

The change that improves most home mixes instantly

Turn it down.

Mix at a volume where you could comfortably hold a conversation. Loud playback flatters everything — it makes the low end sound bigger than it is and hides harshness that will be obvious tomorrow. It also tires your ears within about twenty minutes, after which you are making decisions with equipment that is no longer working.

If you take one thing from this page, take this one. It costs nothing, it takes no skill, and it changes more than any plugin will.

Reference, and check it where it will actually be heard

Pull in a commercially released song in roughly your genre, drop it into the session, and match its volume to yours before you compare. Then switch between them. You are not trying to sound identical — you are finding out that your vocal is buried, or your low end is twice as big as theirs, in the ten seconds it takes to hear them side by side.

Then check your mix on the worst speaker you own. A phone, a laptop, an old car. That is where it will actually be heard. And check it in mono — collapsing to mono reveals phase problems and instruments that vanish, and a mix that holds up in mono holds up anywhere.

The four mistakes

Soloing. A track that sounds perfect on its own is usually wrong in the mix. Nobody listens to your song one instrument at a time. Solo to find a problem, then get out.

Boosting everything. If every track has been made brighter, nothing is brighter. Loudness and brightness are relative, and relative means something has to go down.

Mixing tired. After about ninety minutes your ears stop being a reliable instrument. The mix you save at two in the morning will sound alien at nine. Stop earlier than you want to.

Chasing a sound the arrangement cannot give you. Hours of processing are routinely spent on what is actually an arrangement problem — two parts fighting for the same space. Muting one of them takes a second and often solves it.

When to hand it over

When you have done all of the above, slept on it, fixed what the morning revealed, and it still is not landing — then a second set of ears is worth money, and it is worth it because you now know what you are asking for. Handing over a mix you have not wrestled with means paying somebody to make decisions you did not know you had.

Three pages on this site that carry it further: getting a good recording to mix, fixing the room you are stuck with, and plugins worth adding once stock runs out.