Post Here When You Have a Mixing Revelation

For when you do something and have the thought "why haven't I been doing this all along, clearly I need to do this on every track now!" A repository of questionable, spurious, and possibly ingenious mix tricks.

My most recent thing was bussing all the guitars and most/all of the drums to parallel distortion tracks. I had done this before on occasion by bouncing something out and reimporting it to a new track, but now I started doing with sends (which I think is effectively identical, just faster?).

The main benefit being that I could go nuts with the saturation and distortion without having to worry about losing all the transients on the main tracks, and then very subtly blend it in to taste. Even when it seems barely audible, the harmonics seem to make everything so much more clear and rich in a mix.

My only nagging worry about this is the gain staging, because aren't I adding a lot of volume with all these doubles of tracks? Then I have to make sure I'm not upsetting the balance of the mix, and also to make sure I'm not falling into "it's louder therefore it sounds better" trap.

thought this was a cocktail thread

Thought this was about meeting people at church

But seriously, when I used to make more music, I became a bit obsessed with using parallel sends for pretty much every sound, especially EQ. I think Reason, as a DAW, actively encouraged this and it was fantastic, albeit also a quick way to make everything extraordinarily complicated

I've 100% fallen into that same workflow in Reason, using tons of parallels or triggers to supply anything that's "missing" from an individual track. Bass guitar needs midrange clarity --> distorted parallel filtered down to the frequency that should pop through. Kick has no weight --> trigger nearly inaudible low-end sample. Instrument wants interesting effect --> set up entirely in parallel chains and EQ/compress/image/automate independently. Need thickness or stereo width --> parallels with different treatments L/R or in separate frequency bands. Snare tails, room sounds, echo effects, instruments like Hammond organs where the ranges can behave very differently — it's tempting to carve every last thing out into a billion separate elements to handle them more precisely.

For gain staging and headroom I think it's potentially better, because you can carve unneeded energy out of each element (like not having excess low end building up in reverbs or whatever). I guess it does make the number of tracks and busses you're looking at complicated, but it feels much tidier and more managebale to me, in part because stuff is clearly labeled: the thing giving the bass its 1k presence isn't a dial on an insert buried deep in the rack, it's a big-ass slider that says BASS BUZZ.

That said, some of the next things I'm trying to get a better grip on are dynamic EQ, mid-side EQ, and multiband compression — all things that should make this kind of carving-up less necessary. There are definitely times when I'm just splitting a part into different frequency components to handle separately, when that can already be done by a single multiband effect.

I'm in a similar place. I've been using Trackspacer a ton for dynamic EQ, although I just now learned that I've got a native plugin (in Cubase) that can do it. Love it but it can be a bit hard to keep track of after the fact.

Have done some mid-side stuff, mostly to settle an argument between two tracks/instruments, but don't have an overall philosophy for it and it's not the first thing I think about. I know at least one pro engineer who rejects it (on the basis that he has spent his whole career thinking about eq 'vertically' and not 'horizontally', and the classics weren't made with mid/side EQ).

Multi-band compression is another weak point, I've only pulled it out as a corrective (say in a sampled guitar or synth arpeggio when only certain notes need to squashed a bit). But I wonder how often great engineers are using it as a first stop to shape things? I generally just EQ first and then compress, although I've had plenty of psychotic chains (just one more FabFilter instance to get one more little frequency cut!). Analog Obsession's Comper has been my go-to for awhile now.

Transients are a big focus for me right now, which is kind of embarrassing as a drummer. I was so obsessed with the sound of saturation and compression that I sort of didn't realize I was softening all my transients way too much, in a way that doesn't bother me when I'm mixing but really stands out when I listen back or compare to other music. I do have some transient shapers that can act as an easy fix, but I'm trying to get better about getting it right through compression settings and the parallel stuff.

Oh, that reminds me of one real "revelation" I had: that you can sometimes separate parts just by nudging something forward or backward so the transients don't hit at the same time. I thought that would only help for programmed parts that were genuinely triggering on the exact same beat, but I feel like it's worked with some live performances as well? (Particularly when arranging reverb/predelay to make it feel like one sound is just reaching you from slightly further away.) Works especially well if you match up compressor attack on the first thing with the lag on the second, like maybe a hat gets X milliseconds of transient and then squashes down right in time to let a shaker come through.