My Sucky Mixing

It’s a reasonably safe bet that every mixing engineer, even the big names, did a lot of ‘sucky mixing’ along their pathway to greatness. 

I'm sure they all started at the beginning; screwed stuff up, did their fair share of hatchet jobs on other peoples’ art, and in short, their mixes sucked. Maybe we forget that the big-name mixers are actually human, and had to work at it just like everybody else. Their unsavoury work from days-gone-by is overshadowed by their current awesomeness. The interesting question is, 'what did they do to improve and break free of mediocrity?' And for us mere mortals who don't have the benefit of working with big-name artists, 'how can we accelerate our improvement in the mixing game?'

Amos busy anguishing through a mix

As a musician playing lots of live shows over the years, I was always in awe of local artists who seemed to pop up out of nowhere into the local music charts. It was like they became great overnight. ‘How’d they do that?’ I would ask. Then some months later I would read an article that laid out the struggles and unimaginable life-challenges that the artist overcame to get to the top. From my experience, that’s a recurring theme; years of hard yakka is a much more familiar story than the overnight success.

I really feel that the secret is that there isn't one. People get good at doing stuff by putting in the hard yards; by rolling up their sleeves and doing the hours. Malcolm Gladwell said in his book, Outliers, that...

 "Genius is over-rated. Success is not just about innate ability. It's combined with a number of key factors such as opportunity, meaningful hard work (10,000 hours to gain mastery), and your cultural legacy. Random factors of chance, such as when and where you were born can influence the opportunities you have".

Having read the book (and it's an insightful read), Mr Gladwell emphasises that mastery on anything is mostly due to 'meaningful hard work', or put another way, 'doing your 10,000 hours'. The message for us mixing engineers who want to be great at our craft is to work at it continuously and meaningfully. But there are simple tricks to accelerate your progress, like finishing every mix you work on, working continuously, and educating yourself along the way.
  

I’ve been writing songs, recording, mixing, and producing for nearly 20 years (in fact I started in my teens with a Fostex 4-track, so that makes it longer!). Just like every other mix engineer, I’ve anguished over lack-lustre lead vocals, flat sounding snares, and my inability to take the veil off my mixes, and so on. But as soon as I sorted those problems, I found more stuff to angst over. My anguish about the quality of my mixes was always there, but it was this ongoing discomfort that motivated me to find solutions. I would dream about reaching mix nirvana; that state where everything I did was just awesome and without any challenge or remorse. I’m still working on that one.

But something that came clear to me some years back was this: mix-anguish is a good thing, as long as you can keep a healthy perspective. It works because it motivates you to keep improving and upping your game. You can also read that as, ‘keeping it challenging, keeps it fun, and keeping it fun, keeps it going.’ 

I can’t help quoting Einstein from time to time:

“The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.”

In my early days of recording and mixing, my challenges were reasonably basic: ‘how do I record a guitar?’ or ‘how does compression actually work?’ In more recent years, my questions have been things like, ‘how do I mix this band to make them sound better than they really are?’ or ‘what saturation and subtle colouration are happening to a signal as it passes through a Neve console compared to an API, and how can I get that sound without selling the house?’

A few months back, I got a little obsessed, reflecting on the reasons that my mixes used to sound terrible. I was trying to analyse my own path of improvement. I’m pretty happy with my mixing these days, so I was thinking, ‘when and how did that change?’ I started writing down all the reasons I could think of…it came to around 50! Then I went back and listened to a number of my earlier mixes, and the mistakes were blatantly clear: over-compression, lack of balance, harsh frequencies, and so on. I eventually wrote and published a book called, 44 Reasons Your Mixes Suck: A Mixing Engineer’s Guide. What I didn’t say in this book, is that it’s primarily a book of my own screw-ups - sssh, don’t tell anyone!

"Mix-anguish is a good thing, as long as you can keep a healthy perspective."

44 Reasons Your Mixes Suck

Here are a handful of key things that really stuck out to me about the reasons my mixes sucked over the years:

1. Every mistake matters 

From accidentally recording at a lower bit rate (and the rising noise floor), through to wondering why my $100 Joe Meek microphone didn’t sound like a C414. Even if I made only one error, it made my mix sub-par, but multiple problems had a cumulative effect and really got my mixes into the redline on the crapometer.

2. Good gear does make a difference! 

Cheap microphones are so often noisy and harsh and peaky in the upper mid-range. If you multiply this problem over an entire multitrack session of 20 - 30+ tracks, you’re stuck with a problem that’s almost impossible to fix. Also, cheap instruments, cheap monitoring…it all creates a situation that requires significant effort and skill to get a great sounding mix.

The experience of transitioning from crappy to classy has had an upside; I think I could get pretty good recordings and mixes with an economical studio setup now that I’m aware of the real challenges that poor gear brings to the table. I’m pretty sure if I locked Tom Lord-Alge in a closet with a couple of Behringer microphones, a laptop to monitor on, and Garageband, he’d come out with something great.

But, like most of the world, when you’re limited by budget, there’s not much you can do, especially when the cost of a U87 exceeds that of your current studio setup and your car, combined. Funny thing is that now I deliberately keep a little bit of cheap gear around for two reasons: some stuff has a flavour that I like, like my Joyo foot pedals and my MXL V67g. And the other reason: I can’t say goodbye to my Apex 180 pencil condensers; the overhead mics I ever used to record my first ever drum kit.

3. Trying too hard can screw things up!

This was my biggest problem in my early days. I was just trying too damn hard, and this lead me to continuously overdo it; excessive effects, in-your-face compression, overly-slammed drums, way too many tracks, super-hot gain structure, hyper-limiting my mixes, overly-complex arrangements…the list went on. Time, education, and just learning to relax and not push things so hard was a big lesson for me.

4. No mix will ever sound great if the performances are terrible

It took me a while to realise that people who listen to your music remember a great song much more than they remember a great mix. If I had the choice between recording and mixing a crappy song with world-class gear OR doing a fantastic song with a prosumer set up, I’d go for the latter in a heartbeat (actually, I’m a bit of a gear slut so I’d probably want to look through the ‘world-class’ gear list before I committed 😊).

5. The importance of knowing the vibe and sound I was chasing and the skills to get there

Again, this was another huge, ginormous biggy for me. During the early stage of the recording/production/mixing process, I do my best to get a feel for what the end product will sound like. If the band want that ‘Daughtry’ sound on drums, the lush backing vocals of Queen, and the face-melting flavour of the Foo Fighter’s guitars, that starts to build a picture. And we have conversations about the overall production vibe. They might be saying, ‘we want that slightly loose and live organic sound of Nirvana,’ or maybe it’s that more polished rock sound of the Foo Fighters. There are so many styles and vibes to go for, and each is unique, but once you understand where you’re heading, the picture becomes clearer about what and how to record.

So, if you care for a quick (and free) read, along with some of my ridiculous artwork, 44 Reasons Your Mixes Suck: A Mixing Engineer's Guide is an opportunity for you to shave off a few years of that screwing-up period and get on with the business of doing great mixes.

Hope you enjoyed my rant. Check in again soon. I’ve got some exciting topics coming up; one will be me multi-tracking an entire song with a small microphone the size of a 12-gauge shotgun shell, and another about going mad with re-amping to create colour and vibe in your mixes.

Till next time

Amos