How To Get Better Mixes, Guaranteed

There is only one thing I know of that you can do to get better mixes guaranteed. It’s not complicated, it’s not expensive, and it has nothing to do with “golden ears” or magic plugins. Have you figure it out yet? It’s called: practice.

Via Mark Morgan Flickr

This Should Give You Hope

Too many people believe the lie that better, more expensive gear is the ticket to great mixes. Whether it’s an expensive plugin bundle or an analog summing mixer, we all tend to think we’re only one or two pieces of gear away from better sounding tracks. We believe this because it’s easier to blame our bad mixes on gear than on ourselves. We like that better.

The reality is, if your mixes don’t sound good, it’s because you’re just not a good mix engineer yet. Don’t be so hard on yourself, just admit that you need some more practice and get to it. This should actually give you hope because it means you can have absolutely zero budget, but if you put in the work and get after it, you too can get really good at this mixing thing.
 

You Improve By Experience

The only way any of my tips, tricks, or tutorials are going to help you is if you actually get off of the internet and go make some music using those techniques. It’s from trial and error that we grow. It’s from actually turning a virtual knob and hearing something change that our ears begin to learn what works and what does not.

If you really want to get better at mixing you’re going to have to do a lot of mixing. It’s as simple as that. Record and mix as much stuff as you can get your hands on. Spend more time mixing than surfing the web looking for mixing help. Trust me, you’ll get further ahead if you would stop debating which plugins to buy and just mixed more music.

Don’t Mix In Isolation

If I could give you any piece of advice it would be this: pick an album or song that represents the absolute ideal mixing quality to you and set it as your ultimate sonic standard. Every time you mix something, reference that track and try to match it. Try to match the drum sound, the vocal sound, the guitar sound, the width, the energy, etc.

You don’t want to mix in isolation, with no reference or standard. Otherwise you aren’t driven or pushed to beat something. Rather you’re just mixing to what you think sounds good in that moment, and until you’re a really good mixer you can’t really trust yourself to know what’s good in isolation. Pick your benchmark track or album and make it your aim to match it and eventually beat the pants of that mixing with your own.

The Guarantee

I have no idea how much talent you have for this thing, but I can give you one guarantee: if you practice mixing you will get better. It’s inevitable. Your second mix will be better than your first. Your tenth will sound better than your second. Just get off your butt and go mix something. And if you have nothing to mix, go record something so you can mix it. That’s what I did and still do to this day.