No, this isn’t a lecture on keeping your room clean, but there are a lot of similarities between a cluttered mix and a cluttered closet. It can be really difficult to find what you’re looking for in your closet when it’s full to the brim and your favourite band t-shirt (mine’s Pink Floyd) is buried somewhere in the back. The same can be said with mixing. How are you supposed to hear everything clearly when there’s clutter in your mix? Besides a great arrangement and a nicely balanced fader mix, the most powerful tool you can use to clear up your mix is EQ.
As far as I’m concerned, EQ will make or break your mix. But a lot of us have a tendency to go nuts boosting frequencies left, right and center and that’s just like throwing things into an already full closet. If you’ve already got a busy mix with lots of tracks, it’s a recipe for disaster.
Now, you’ll probably think of a video you watched with one of your favourite mixers like Chris Lord-Alge adding huge boosts of 8-10dB on certain instruments or you might be thinking “there’s no wrong way to make a sound” and you’d be right! The difference is that CLA knows exactly where and when to make those boosts and everything he does is carefully measured. He’s also working with excellent source material that’s been written, arranged, recorded, edited and produced to a very high level, so all he has to do is get it to sound the way he hears in his head. Easier said than done, but it explains his liberal use of EQ. You’ll also notice that he doesn’t take this approach with every single track; it’s a careful selection process.
While I absolutely buy into using EQ boosts, I firmly believe there’s a time and a place for them. Someone like CLA – at the very top of their game – knows exactly when that time and place is. Indiscriminate frequency boosts near the beginning of your mix will do nothing but add clutter and potentially cause headroom and phase issues; especially if you haven’t level-matched your EQ.
The more measured approach is to clear out the mix, (just like you would your closet) to fine tune the clarity and balance. Once you’ve done that, you can check your mix against your references to see if you’re in the right ballpark and make some notes on what might need to be cut further or boosted. Again… just like our closet.. we’ll only add in new elements when we know we’ve cleared out anything that’s unnecessary.
So, the next time you’re at the very start of a mix and you’re getting ready to boost every frequency into the stratosphere, restrain yourself and think of that cluttered closet analogy and what you can first take out to clear it up.
Now, I’d like to know… are you a bit weird like me and apply everyday analogies to your mixes?
I love stuff like that, so if you have any, leave a comment below!
professional sounding mix every time...
Hi. Haven’t read it yet but looking forward to “The One Hack……” PDF Many thanks. Here is an everyday analogy I sometimes use. I call it the “wallpaper effect” If you have ever used wallpaper to decorate a room you will know it is near impossible to get adjacent sheets to match perfectly at every point along their total length. Worse still because you did it you know exactly where every little mismatch occurs. Now when you’ve finished and someone else comes into the room they usually look around the whole room and say wow that’s great. Now they are appreciating the “whole song” and we as mixers are (sometimes) focussing in on what we know are the “imperfections” Hope that makes some sense.
Hey George,
Thanks for downloading the guide. Let me know how you get on with it when you get some time to read it.
I absolutely love that analogy. Do you find you get caught up on those little “imperfections” or do you let them go after a while (like you would a decorated room)?
Thanks for sharing 🙂