Make Beats - Ask The Producer

Q: Do you mix down separately drums, percussion, bass line, melody, vocals and than eq every track and then after that eq your mix down?

A: The general mixing process (how professional mix engineers work) is something like this.

First they get organized... You want to make sure the tracks that are going to be mixed are laid out across the board (analog or virtual) in an organized way. What does this mean? This means putting all the kicks together, drums ect... across the board. There is a pretty much standard order though at least for the drums and such.. If you were starting from Channel 1 on your mixer it might look something like this

Channel 1 - Kick 1
Channel 2 - Kick 2
Channel 3 - Snare Top
Channel 4 - Snare Bottom
Channel 5 - Hi Hat
Channel 6 - Tom 1
And So on.

Its important to get everything organized an together so this way you can look at sounds as individual sounds or a group of sounds working together. You wouldn’t want to be working on a mix wasting time scrolling back and forth across your window because you had one kick on Ch 1 and another Kick on Ch 23. It is very hard to get a visual representation of something your trying to blend when you get look at both levels the same time cause the faders at opposite sides of the screen or console.
Many people set up their mixes differently but like sounds or instrument families are always together. The same with FX and so forth as well. As a General rule FX are usually on the far right of the console.
Once your set up is better organized their are two ways of working.

The first on would be going through and soloing each sound by it self, then eqing, processing ect. till it sounds good. Then eventually trying to blend the sounds together after that. The down side to that is that a sound that sounds good soloed might not sound good with another sound playing at the same time.

The second would be working on the over all blend right from the beginning trying to make everything fits sonically, soling and eq ing and balancing till everything fits.

After a general balance and placement of things is together the automation gets turned on to bring certain parts out at different times in the mix and so forth. At this point Channels would also be automated to mute as when they are not playing. The same would go for FX. This is an important step on an analog board (unless you can use alot of gates) because the background noise from all the channels eventually adds up.

One automation is done... You listen to the mix and make sure you like it.
Then you record it to DAT, Bounce it.. what ever.

Last but not least you would make sure you notated everything you did incase you need to bring the mix up to make changes.. If your using only a program your pretty much covered by saving.. If you’re working in an analog environment you d have to right everything down on forms and diagrams called Recall sheets..

And just to give you an idea this whole process can take anywhere from 2 hours to a week. Depending on the amount of tracks, the artist, record labels suggestions and 2 hundred other variables. The good mix engineers usually pace them self at about a mix a day though. ( 8 to 16 hours a song )

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