Top Six Mixing Mistakes & How to Avoid Them PT 2

This week we are going to finish up from last week’s blog. Here are three more mixing mistakes you should try to avoid.

4. Lack of Panning – It’s really important to give your mix some demission by balancing your instrumentation within a nice wide stereo field. A lot of times I hear mixes that are very narrow sounding and everything is crowed in the middle of the stereo field.

 Yes, you want to keep the vocal, kick, snare and bass guitars in the middle but in order to clear out the middle of the stereo filed consider moving instrumentation like guitars, percussion, keys, strings off to the L/R side. This will give you mix a much wider sound and also provide a lot more clarity to your mix. Experiment with panning hard L/R as well as the space between the center and hard L/R.

5. Misaligned Tracks – You would think this is a no-brainer but I can’t tell you how many times I receive tracks and when I import them into the DAW everything is mis-aligned. When you sent stems (separated groups of tracks like drums, bass, guitars) make sure they all start in the same place.

For example, if your guitar does not come in until 20 seconds into the song then the stem should have 20 seconds of silence at the top.

6.  Not knowing how your room sounds – Before you start mixing for the day, especially if you are mixing in a studio that is unfamiliar to you; listen to some music of songs you like and know well while sitting in the mix position. Get a feel for how the speakers sound, how the room sounds and get comfortable with the overall environment. You will have a much easier time getting a great mix on the first pass or two.