There are only so many things people can get completely wrong about recording and mixing music, but I don’t think we’re seeing the end of that list any time soon.
We talk so much about fixing dense mixes filled with walls of guitars, stacks of vocals, and thick, punchy drums that it’s easy to forget the opposite end of the spectrum sometimes.
It’s too late. Tracking is over and you’ve lost your snare to hi-hat bleed. The drummer has gone home and there’s no budget to re-track drums. You’re probably sitting there wondering how such a rookie mistake could’ve happened when the snare sounded so good at first.
Whether you’re mixing for a local band or a major label, some things just don’t change. As the mix engineer, your tools are going to stay relatively similar, regardless of the session size or budget. While there are some obvious differences between a major studio’s outboard gear and the plugins on a laptop, we’ve only got a handful of processes that are used to create every single mix.
Do you struggle finding the right place to sit your bass guitar in a dense mix? It’s a tough instrument for a lot of engineers. While a lot of instruments fight for definition in the mid-range of the frequency spectrum, bass stretches toward the depths of your mix, encompassing frequencies shared with your kick drum, while still sharing a lot of its range with low-mid focused instruments.
Vocal production requires a serious amount of finesse from engineers. It’s one of those skills that can keep a steady flow of work coming your way and it’s easy to hear why. When you absolutely nail a vocal in a song, others will notice. Here are just a few of the places you can start to create a powerful, attention-capturing vocal:
In a dense mix, an electric bass track can get easily buried in the background. It’s not anything you’ve done wrong really; our ears are just naturally inclined to pick up the mid/high frequency content (especially when there’s a lot of it).