Mixing (Mixdown) Advice & Tips

Mastering a lot of different genres of music with various production styles gives me so much more of a clearer picture as to what type of tracks you can push excessively for loudness and ones that can only go so far before they just start to break up and not sound nice.

For example, music that is clean and that has a lot of hi hat energy at around 10k and above is tricky to push past -7 / -6 LUFS because it just starts to distort, and in fact, the tops in my experience starts to break up first on any pre-master that is being mastered, before any other area. Excessive lows can cause obvious issues too but IMO that can be easily remedied if it’s not too excessive. There is only so much corrective EQing that you can do…

Tunes that can be pushed really hard towards -5 / -4 LUFS usually have a lot of lower gritty mid energy - amongst other qualities which are geared to match that - which when mastered and pushed it can actually enhance it in a pleasant way and the excessive loudness becomes part of the tracks aesthetic. These type of tunes are not meant to be nicely mastered, they are meant to be slammed.

I always end up at around -7 LUFS with my own music which feels really comfortable to me. I have ruined and abandoned so much music trying to push it louder when in fact, it just isn’t that type of music that is meant for those loud LUFS.

Everyday is a learning day and I’m here to share my findings.

Drums in a track for any genre are in my opinion, the most important thing. They are the spine of any track.

Anybody can lay a pattern for a kick and snare but the shape and tone of them will determine as to how the kick and snare flow and bounce off one another. Sometimes you get lucky and you just stumble across a kick and snare that just communicate so well, and sometimes, you have to audition dozens if not more before you find ones that work together.

💡 Quick tip: if you do stumble across a kick and snare the flow well together, save them, and rinse them.

One thing I have got into the habit of doing is visually analysing both the kick and snare to see why they might work together so well. Don’t get too bogged down on this because it’s super geeky, boring, and it could mess up your workflow, but what you want to be looking for is the velocity of both the kick and snare, how the waveform looks and also, the length of the audio. It may even help to analyse the EQ curve too.

Once you get a kick and snare flowing nicely the rolls that you may want to add will work so much easier when thrown into the drum group. If you don’t get the kick and snare right then your rolls won’t flow and everything will just sound awkward. Even your hi hats will sound a bit stiff.

So to summarise - get your kick and snare talking to each other like two people who have each dropped a wrap of the cleanest Mandy in someone’s kitchen at around 2AM. That will be one hell of a conversation.

I had an example and a reminder of how a single closed hi hat can cause issues with your mix when it comes to mastering, if not treated. (I was going to say if not treated properly or correctly but to some it may seem subjective).

In this case it was conflicting with the sub bass. Although the frequencies weren’t clashing for obvious reasons, the hi hat was simply too loud and not balanced (with EQ) and it was played in the same pattern as the sub, and the transients were clashing.

Now prior to mastering this may not have been audible but when run through the chain and pushed to a certain level, it was noticeable. Now it’s not all about loudness but this track was balanced well enough in all other areas for it to be pushed a bit further but for this one issue, it had to be backed off and tweaks had to be made.

In summary, treat your hi hats with as much importance as the other elements in your track because they play a big role.