What To Do When Your Mix Ain't Working?

If you want to confidently finish your mixes and proudly release your songs, download the step by step Mix Finisher Formula at

This week's recap from our mix streams has a little bit of mix philosophy and technical tips to try out. I was using a song from a great band from Boston called 3 Parts Dead. Check them out here:

When you mix hard rock you may have a tendency to mix too hot from the start but unfortunately, that'll just force you to turn things down later. It might be better to just keep the levels tame from the start and turn up your monitor controller instead if you want to rock out.

Don't get too discouraged if a mix isn't working right away. Sometimes when the mix isn’t working you just have to give it a rest for a sec. Go to the grocery store, get something to eat. Change out of your work clothes, have a drink or whatever.

Also, as I say in Step By Step Mixing ( make sure you do the dishes before you start cooking in the kitchen! It's the same with mixing. "If you clean up your tracks before you start mixing you'll have a more enjoyable experience. You don't want noise from the vocal tracks creeping in during the solo.

So before you start mixing, do these two things:
• Trim the regions and delete the "noisy" silences between parts.
• Add fades to all the regions so they don't abruptly pop in.

Trimmed regions with fades to eliminate noise in between instrument parts
Going back to the “doing the dishes” analogy, if the kitchen is clean I know where everything is and I can grab it immediately. If I leave the dirty dishes in the sink, I'll inevitably have to scour through the dirty dishes to find that one utensil I specifically need for my cooking.

If you don't edit your tracks first, you'll run into similar problems. You'll notice an annoying click somewhere, a misaligned drum hit, or background noise you should have edited out. This hinders your workflow because you're constantly going back and forth between the mixing and the editing phase."

And finally, watch my gated kick drum trick with the transient designer to see how you can get rid of unnecessary low-end bleed from the decay of the kick drum envelope.

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