Top 6 Mixing Mistakes & How To Avoid Them PT 1

This week we are going to look at the first three of six mixing mistakes many of us make and a tip on how to avoid them. Let jump right in shall we?

1. Too Much Bottom End – a lot of home studios usually do not have the proper acoustic treatment to produce an accurate low end of a mix and that usually mean the mixer over compensates and ultimately they end up with too much low end.

TIP – Take great care to properly acoustically teat your mixing room and that will really help you dial in the proper amount of low end

2. Terrible Treble – On the other end of things a lot of mixers want a bit of sheen and polish on their mixes and they boost up the 7K – 10K range and that range of frequency’s will tend to add a lot of sibilance to a vocal and a bit of harshness to high hats.

TIP – Make sure you use a D-esser on both the vocal and high hats or cymbals if they are a bit harsh. This will help you add air to a mix with out becoming to harsh

3. No Dynamic Range – This comes up a lot when I work with clients. Everyone wants to have their recording as LOUD as possible to grab the attention of the listener. So the inexperienced mixer will add a master buss limiter and squash the dynamic range right out of the track to the point where the low end becomes very muddy. Having that much limiting will kill the sonic quality of your track.

TIP – Don’t over compress and the final PEAK level of your track AFTER MIXING should be around -6db to -8b. Give your mastering engineer some headroom to work with. AFTER MASTERING shoot for a RMS level of about -8db to -10db. This is a good healthy loud master and you will still retain your dynamics. 

Until next week........HAPPY MIXING!