Reworking on your mixes again, and again, and again

Maybe in the short term doing a bunch of mixes/masters over and over again is just a good way of getting better at it?

As many have said, we may have a keen interest in great sounding audio, but so many of our favorite records are ‘unlistenable’ from an audiophile point of view. A great piece of music with a great performance beats a pristine mix every time, which brings up another point…
Some of my least favorite mixes turned out to be some of my least favorite tunes. The best mix can’t really rescue a bad tune and it seems the reverse is true as well.
Working on music is still the best thing ever and engineering skills can be developed with time and practice. Have fun with it!

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To sum it up, you can’t polish a turd, right?

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I try and finish my music in one sitting. And I master another day. Plus, if a track isn’t the way I want it after that one sitting, I rarely go back…

Things to try:

Make your sounds properly from the start. Don’t just throw a drum into the mix and think you’ll EQ and compress it later. All sounds have artifacts that you aren’t going to want, and if you’re constantly creating sounds but not trying to get them sitting well right away, when you do get down to the mixing stage you’re going to dramatically change the frequency and density of your mix.

Don’t overlap or underlap competing sounds, know what frequencies you’re going to fill with a sound, know where one sound ends and another starts from a frequency point of view, so you don’t make your mix muddy by overlapping frequencies or leaving too much space in your mix, making it thin…

Make sure you EQ your sounds before you compress…

If a sound doesn’t work, take it away.

Use your ears and a spectrum analyser and don’t read too much about how to do things, making them sound good is better than a specific technique…

Most importantly, make sure your relationship between your bass and drums is tight, then add upper harmonics to the mix. Bass is hardest to get correct.

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You’re probably right, but I’d consider a compromise. It’s easy (for me at least) to get tunnel vision on certain aspects of a mix at the possible expense of other aspects. Once I feel I’m close to being finished on a mix I use some analyzers like Ozone’s Tonal Balance plug in. I check to make sure my tunnel vision didn’t get the better of me. In the end I may not agree with the analysis for what I’m trying to do, but it keeps me in check.

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Thanks for all the replies!

I think I’m aware of all the techniques you talk about, I guess my main problem is that I need to commit to my mixes once and for all and adopt the “next track will be better” philosophy :slight_smile:

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True words! Totally agree!!

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It could be fun just to make a cover, if the musical theme is interesting enough
Just export midi from the melody and chords and start from there :wink:

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What i did was, i went trough all of this, then i had other guy mix my tracks, and then i learned a lot from him in that process, and realised i wanna get everything right from the beginning, and just record that as stereo bus. And then you avoid lot of things, like ear fatigue, it is also really fun to do it this way, and you learn and discover new things a lot quicker. You also have to throw away 70% of what you record, but since you did not torture your self, you don’t attach to it, and it is not a problem. Also, on the other hand, if you really like something, it is so awarding, and you feel proud of yourself. Good luck!

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Its super annoying, I know.

Try to not listen to the track for a week at least. Then open up the project and remove all non-essential plugins on the channels. Listen again and possibly reset all channel faders. You will get spurred more creatively to do small tweaks where necessary, often a ton of plugins suffocate your song, so restartin this way has unlocked lots of songs for me.

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Interesting thread. I kind of find myself in two camps.

The stuff I do OTB, typically on my Octatrack, I don’t worry about mastering/mixing much at all. So that explains why everything often sounds like shit :joy: but, over the past 12-18 months since getting an OT2 I think my skills are slowly improving that my mixing on the device is much better than it was 3 or 4 years ago. Or, at least, that’s what I keep telling myself.

When I work ITB I find it incredibly difficult to let go. I rarely commit to audio and keep everything as midi tracks. I’ll occasionally bounce down a track to listen to on the go and make notes of things to tweak that I rarely actually end up tweaking anyway.

I’m far less bothered about it all than I used to. Over the past 6 or 7 years as I’ve gotten better at these sort of things and all the while I’ve also managed to shake off the embarrassment I used to feel about my music. It’s never been great but so what, I like it and that’s enough for me. So it’s easier for me to release tunes into the wild I guess.

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If you’ve mexied and remexied a bunch already, you need to do the following:

  1. a suitable hiatus from the material
  2. when returning to the material, try to change the arrangements rather than attempt to correct things by “mixing” first. You might find something you missed while being preoccupied in the earlier mix engineering sessions, concentrating too much on the technical.

Its really interesting how arrangement changes can change the mix

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Yeah, clearly it has an effect, but I think you should limite yourself to a limited number of reworks, or maybe let yourself work on a track for a limited amount of time if you allow yourself to change the arrangement too

Clearly, a less is more approach is beneficial when mixing in my experience, throwing every plugin you know and hoping it works is a problem, not a solution

Oh you mean you don’t multitrack and mix anymore? Just record the whole thing and if it’s shit you throw out and if it’s good you keep?

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This is also my process. There is something really rewarding about getting the mix down and just tracking the stereo bus from there. You start learning to better integrate each individual instrument into its own frequency space. Given if you mess up, there’s no real fixing it afterwards. I’ve had just a single handclap be a little too loud and ruin my entire mix. But guess what, next time I have a go at another track, I will make sure the handclap is at a reasonable level. This is basically how I’ve increased my skill level with mixing, getting it right from the get go.

With this approach you save time, you commit to audio, you prevent the endless mastering cycle. You sacrifice a ton of control over the song in post, but I prefer this method ultimately. Much more productive this way! My mixes probably sound crap though. :grin:

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I know this loop very well,

thoughts that help me:

  • this is not the last mix you ever make. The next one will be better. You get more experienced with each mix
  • this is not the last good track you ever make. It doesn’t have to be perfect. There will be better tracks.
  • a good track is a good track, even if the mix is not perfect
  • let someone with more experience and better room and monitors master this thing.

My goal is to finally achieve mixes within my elektrons or hardware only, that satisfy me enough to just record one stereo file. Jamming the arrangement. Only cutting some sections afterwards and add little eq and limiter.
I often do this for my youtube videos and like the mix, but then, instead of saying this track is finished, I start doubting it, record every single track into my computer , and start arranging and mixing it again with all the shiny plugins :slight_smile:

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Yes :slightly_smiling_face: , i do mix, but mixer and mixing is just the part of the playing the song. I decide if something needs to be done to sounds before i pres rec.
Tm

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I would also recomment to compare your track to reference tracks. Just make shure to listen with same loudness level, meaning to turn volume of mastered reference track down. You will instantly notice if your bassdrum is to loud or if your track has to much lowend or less presence in the upper frequencies … etc.

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I remember the last album I tried to do on a DAW. 10 years ago and I went right down the rabbit hole, overdid everything and turned a project with potential into something quite crap in the end. Part of the problem was the open field you have in a DAW and I lacked the discipline to focus on keeping tracks, well, focused and on track. It may be different now but I enjoy the workflow of live takes and trim the shite.

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My start-to-finish workflow is kind of slow, but in general I get good results at the end.
The generation of the main chunks of music is almost always fast. I like to record a minimal kit and really freak out with it, and then chop it up and chip away at a composition over weeks or months. Generally this means samples go into Octatrack or RYTM, and I build up songs from the couch.

When I feel like a song is ready enough to put down a decent performance, I hook up to the DAW and record a live pass. THEN the music goes onto my phone so I can listen to it in a variety of places and situations. I take notes, and then start chipping away at that.

With a “to-do” list of manageable and specific tasks the work gets done when it gets done. Then the music is almost done! Time off from a tune is very important, helps with perspective.

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