An Indie Musician's Diary Volume 4: Album two in the making

How I Get Stuck When Mixing Music - & How to Avoid Being Stuck in The Future

May 31st, 2022

There is a danger that, by being honest in the book, I am may seem like the only one who tells you how difficult mixing is, while everyone else is showing off how great they are at mixing because they want to sell you something. Well, I don't want to sell you anything. I just want to share with you how things really are. After all this is a diary...

When you build a house you have to go through many stages and in a logical order. You don't put new furniture on the plot of land before you're done with the house, right? Neither do you put the roof on the foundation without building the walls in between. This is true also of mixing music. There is a process and I need to respect that process and follow it more or else - circles!

Circles

I have been an indie musician and producer for a while now and I will ever be learning - mixing is such a massive territory to explore. Thank goodness it is so challenging or I otherwise would be bored to death. Mixing music is something I'll never master (pun intended!). But why am I still getting stuck in circles? Shouldn't I have learned by now how not to get stuck?

While mixing my latest song, I found myself, once again, stuck chasing my tail. It is so easy to do! All you have to do is go backwards to "fix" something and then you hear how that one thing made something else sound too loud or you now have to re-examine the gain flow through all the tracks plugins and now you hear a hiss here or a plunk there. If only...

If only I disciplined myself that there is a logical way to do music, in logical steps - just like building a foundation and then the walls and then the roof before I put in the furniture! Building a great mix effectively requires committing oneself to each stage of the process (like a project gate)and making up your mind to not turn back and fix those things unless it is absolutely necessary. Also you need to move fast and move on, mixing many songs and allowing yourself to get better each time around.

Prep: Order - preparing the ground

If you have built anything or ever renovated walls you understand that it is the prep work that takes the longest amount of time. When building a house, you need to remove trees and other plants and then level ground before adding the house's water pipes, electrical center and pouring the foundation. Then it has to dry and the frame is added....

In a mix, the organisation and components (plugins) of the template is a great way to build smart. Colour coding and subs are important here. I think I'm getting the hang of that. (I'm still working on a template for the Abide album based on Billy Decker's book). A lot can be said about this stage but I'll leave it at this. Use templates!

Recording - gathering building materials

Then there is the recording stage. Proper miking, practicing and warming up the voice before recording the vocals is very important. Taking enough takes of everything is great, too. This is an area where I believe I can develop massive improvement. I think that my editing probably would go a lot faster if the recording stage was better. For example, getting the right tone out of the guitar before it hits the interface. I am working on it.

Editing

Now comes another time-consuming, tough part - choosing the right takes to create great tracks. I was encouraged when I saw a teaser from Netflix about Billie Ellish and how they recorded about 80 takes for one vocal and sewed them together to make her iconic sound on a recent track. 80! It takes time to do that well - both the recording and the editing!

Editing each track -  drums, bass, everything, takes a heck of a long time if the recording wasn't good. Sometimes it's better to re-record a track if it is way off tonally, rhythmically or otherwise. You can also patch a track if the damaged area is small.

Also, if you are a perfectionist or just plain afraid to make mistakes and you, like me, spend way too much time editing specific notes you can waste your life away because you constantly search for pops, clicks and warped tones.

Mixing

Let's say everything is edited and you are done doing a rough balance in the mix at the loudest part of the song. If you didn't "build" properly before the mixing stage this is where the running in circles really begins to accelerate. You find a pop in a vocal track and go back to fix it and then "adjust the compressor" let's say. You see that that track also needs gain staging and fix that too. All of the sudden it's too loud/soft compared to the other tracks. You've changed the balance in the mix and done a detour that took you a long time to fix. It's like you have built the foundation and walls but forgot to bring in the electricity so now you have to tear out a wall and drill a hole in the foundation too. Never put the cart before the horse.

I think that these are the things that made me go in circles this time:

1. I had too much dead time between the original song and the new version* with English, and more complicated vocals. When I went back and listened to the original instrumental mix with fresh ears, I heard problems I hadn't heard before and decided to solve them without removing the automation. I found that changing the sound or tone of a single track can effect the balance of the whole mix and that led me to use excessive amounts of time to adjust everything.                      *= read why in some of my earlier posts/chapters.

2. New vocals: I had not edited the vocals completely before the break and there were harmonies missing at important parts of the song. Therefore I needed to stop and patch certain vocals. Then I started hearing tonal problems and went into balancing circles again. 

3. I got stuck on details..changed something here and there and each change made everything sound different.

UGH!!!!

No, the best way is to build logically - from the ground up.

I'm getting there but not yet. Patience is key. Practice makes perfect or at least better, each time I do a project.

My plan is to wrap up this song with all its imperfections, reference and master it by June 10th.

That is the plan. Wish me luck!

Until next time...