Some really amazing tips for mixing

I mentioned this video earlier in a thread…This is so amazing. There are a few things here that I’ve found have meant a lot to me over this rather difficult last few weeks.

From Dave Pensado…

  • You’re selling your taste. Not your skills. Focus on vibe, energy, and emotion.

  • Be patient with your progress. If you truly enjoy mixing you’ll get better without knowing it. Curiosity has guided my life and its something that has no downsides.

  • Mixing is not something you add to the production. Its what you do to finish the production. Ten years ago I would add my mix to the production. That’s no longer the way I work. I take what you give me, I start where you left off, and I finish the mix part.

  • Work with the most gifted talented people in your neighborhood. Learning alone was not as productive.

  • Study your hero influences. Not your heroes. If you study Andrew Scheps, the world doesn’t need another Andrew. But you can study his influences and be better in a different way.

  • Stop taking advice so literally. Its an opinion. Try to understand the concept instead.

  • The most misunderstood and under-utilized resource in all of audio is the teachers.

  • I started by mixing tracks I recorded myself. But I became better when I started mixing other peoples tracks.

  • Every mixer on the planet has had a mix rejected in favor of the rough. Its happened to everybody. Ask “what about this mix, that was made by a person with less skills than me makes it better?” And when you answer that question, then you become a mix engineer.

  • No one cares about the technical things. They care about energy, vibe, and emotion.

  • I would practice 2-6 hours a day by taking a song already recorded and seeing how I could make it better. Every once in a while, I’d make the vocals sound better, but everything else sounded worse. Or I’d try to make the bass sound like thunder, but then you can’t hear anything else but the thunder. It taught me how to fit things together in the mix. We forget its a plate of spaghetti - sometimes we celebrate the garlic when we should be celebrating the dish.

  • Commitment is an audio engineers best friend. If you don’t know how to start a mix, start by committing to something. Nothing happens until you commit.

  • I like see what my competition is doing. If I entered the hundred meter dash in the olympics…and someone blew by me…maybe I should have referenced. You’re not trying to copy.

  • Room treatment is more important than monitors. You can buy a $200,000 set of monitors, put them in a poorly treated room, and you’ll be very disappointed. Only in the last 5 years have I realized how important that is.

  • Use multiple monitors. If I’m still lacking confidence, I’ll listen in the car. And if I’m still lacking confidence I’ll ask one of my friends to drop by and help me out.

4 Likes

That can be a tough temptation to resist!

^^^^
This! All things being equal (skills), the difference between the mixes of two well-matched engineers is the subjective piece each brings to the mix, and how much of that they choose to insert into it. That’s one thing I find so appealing about mixing. In addition to the technical aspects, there is still a very creative piece to it as well. It’s not just a skill, but a craft.

Over the last few years and countless tutorials, I ran across this quote which has really stuck with me, and I couldn’t remember where I had heard it. Thanks, these are great points!

To extrapolate that idea a little further:
When your skills catch up to your taste is the point at which you become “good” at mixing.

To quote Ira Glass:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

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this is the hardest part for me. I know I am creative but so what. Being creative but unable to mix a decent demo is pointless