Ever find yourself labouring over a mix that just isn’t working? You’ve tweaked the EQ, adjusted the compression, moved instruments around the stereo field, turned things up, turned things down. Yet somehow the mix still feels wrong. This has happened often to me mixing OLDER’s songs and other artists in Studio109.
When this happens, I often go back to a trick I learned in the analog days. I used to call it the “fader down mix.”
Back then, there were no endless plugin chains or unlimited undo options. My setup was a 24-channel mixing desk connected to a 16 track reel-to-reel tape machine. If a mix reached a certain point and still wasn’t coming together, I’d do something that felt slightly counter-intuitive. I’d pull every fader down and start again. Not because the original mix was terrible. Not because I wanted to remix the song from scratch. But because somewhere along the way I’d often become too focused on fixing individual problems without seeing the bigger picture.
Outside of music I was an electronics technician – when faced with a complex fault we engineers would often go back to basic principles because amongst the complexity the problem was often a simple one.
So I’d start a mix afresh- building up from the foundations. First the drums, get them sitting right. Then bring in the bass. Get the relationship between the drums and bass working. Then add guitars, keyboards, vocals and everything else one element at a time. What often happened was surprising. The thing I thought was causing the problem usually wasn’t the problem at all.
You can spend ages obsessing over a guitar sound when the real issue is a synth that’s masking the vocal. Or perhaps the bass has a frequency buildup that’s making the whole mix feel muddy, or clashing with low guitar frequencies. Sometimes the problem is nowhere near the place you’ve been focusing your attention. By rebuilding the mix from the ground up, you’re forced to make fresh decisions – possibly removing an issues that you introduced on the first pass. You hear things differently and very often the problem disappears before you even reach the point where it originally started frustrating you!
Of course, modern mixing is different. I don’t mix on a large analog console anymore, my desk these days mainly handles routing and inputs. Most of the work happens inside the computer but the principle still works. When a mix starts fighting me, I simply mute everything and begin rebuilding. Alternatively you could solo tracks from the ground up but muting works better because you can still solo a track with a few unmuted tracks. As each element comes back in, I listen carefully for the moment where things start feeling crowded, muddy, harsh or disconnected. Along the way it can pay to mute sends to bus effects to – especially delays that can introduce clashes. This process usually reveals where the conflict lays.
Sometimes it’s two guitar parts competing for the same space. Maybe a synth is masking an important vocal phrase. Maybe the bass is occupying more upper mid-range than I realised. The exact issue doesn’t matter. What matters is that starting over often reveals it far more quickly than endless tweaking.
The biggest hurdle is usually a psychological one as we don’t like undoing work. Going back to the start feels counter-intuitive and a waste of time. We convince ourselves that because we’ve already spent hours refining a mix, we should keep pushing forward. But sometimes the fastest route is actually to stop, reset, and rebuild because the errors were introduced early in the process. If you really struggle to get over the psychological step then maybe just treat it like a remix and imagine you are a different engineer!
So if you’ve got a mix that’s refusing to cooperate, try the old fader down approach. Be brave. Mute everything. Start from the beginning. You might be surprised how quickly the solution reveals itself. Sometimes the best way forward is to go back to where you started.
