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Practical Mixing Introduction
Starting From Scratch
Tips To Help Improve Your Mixing Technique Gain Structure
Mixers Important Monitoring Facilities
By Hugh Robjohns Mixing In The Digital Domain
Optimising A‑D Conversion
Hands‑on advice to help you improve the fundamentals of your mixing Getting Your Fader Levels Sorted Out
technique. Input Conditioning
Setting Up Your E�ects Sends
Whether you own a simple eight‑into‑two mixer, or a giant in‑line multitracking console, the Working With E�ects
basic facilities and principles of their operation are the same, and knowing how to use a mixer Working In Stereo
properly can make the di�erence between a well‑recorded master track and something which Starting Work
You Live, You Learn
is distinctly substandard.
Referencing Your Mix

Starting From Scratch SOS Competitions

To start at the beginning, always make sure the mixer is Win! JZ Microphones Black Hole
'zeroed' before starting a new project. By that, I mean make
sure the input gains are at their minimum settings, the polarity
reversals and high‑pass �lters are switched o�, the EQ is set
�at and bypassed, the auxiliaries are turned down, and any
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group routing is deselected. In the case of a digital mixer you
could store this as a default memory from which to start each VIEW ALL ADS CREATE FREE AD
new project.

With the mixer in this kind of 'safe' con�guration you can start to build a mix coherently, On the same subject
without having to cope with unwanted signals turning up in all sorts of strange destinations. API The Box 2
There is nothing so frustrating, unprofessional and time‑consuming as having to hunt down May 2020
the source of the strange noises coming from one of your e�ects units! At least with analogue Hear Technologies Hear Back Octo
mixers the o�ending knob can usually be spotted quite quickly, but with assignable digital March 2020
consoles it can be a nightmare — hence the importance of always starting from a known safe Allen & Heath dLive
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condition where everything is turned o�. I have never understood why the purveyors of digital
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mixers seem to have a default condition with all the faders open at unity gain...
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Q. Why are my mixer's aux outs polarity inverted?

Gain Structure December 2019

The most critical aspect of mixing is getting your gain structure right. This means optimising From the same manufacturer
levels through each part of the signal path so that the signals are kept well away from the noise
�oor at the bottom, and below the overload point at the top — and it is especially important to Allen & Heath dLive
January 2020
allow su�cient headroom to allow peak transients through undistorted.
Stage To Studio: Audio Examples
December 2019
Something to bear in mind with budget analogue mixers is that headroom is often the limiting
Stage To Studio
factor, especially when working with digital recorders. The relatively low voltage rails provided
December 2019
for the electronics mean that it is simply not possible to output signals with peaks in the Allen & Heath SQ‑5
+24dBu region often required to fully modulate a professional digital recorder. And, just January 2019
because the mixer's meter is scaled to +10dB and above, it doesn't mean it is able to drive Studio SOS: Getting A Better Recorded Drum
clean signals that loud. It is worth experimenting with your particular mixer to see what it is Sound
July 2018
truly capable of, and aligning the input sensitivity of connected equipment accordingly.

By way of a personal example, I have a Mackie 1402 VLZpro — a very cost‑e�ective little mixer
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which I use in a compact location recording rig — which drives an Apogee PSX100 A‑D
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converter. Although the speci�cations suggest otherwise, this desk is not capable of driving the
peak levels required to fully modulate a professional digital recorder to +20dBu. However, by
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re‑aligning the Apogee to read +12dBu as the maximum digital signal (0dBFS), the Mackie is
never stressed to deliver peak levels and, as I only record direct to DAT and CD‑R, the noise
�oor remains su�ciently low for 16‑bit performance.

Another workaround I have used on many occasions to avoid stressing a budget mixer is to
connect the nominally +4dBu professional‑level output to the ‑10dBV input of
semi‑professional digital recorders. This e�ectively provides an additional 12dB of output gain
without running out of steam in the mixer.

Important Monitoring Facilities Audio Test Kitchen - Mic Comparison

3 days 17 hours ago.

In most budget mixing desks the monitor section is the weakest link, often providing only
a level control, a headphone outlet, and external monitoring of a master recorder return.
A professional desk will have a plethora of external monitoring sources, the ability to
drive multiple loudspeaker systems in stereo or mono, and the provision to dim or cut
the monitors without changing the setting of the level control.

This last feature is particularly important because, when mixing, your ears develop a level
reference based on the listening volume. If you change the monitoring level, that
reference will be destroyed, and your mix will be inconsistent as a result. Professional
monitoring systems therefore provide Dim and Cut buttons to reduce the monitoring
level or to turn the speakers o� without a�ecting the original level setting. It is also
important to be able to check the mono balance of a stereo mix, so professional consoles
provide facilities to listen in mono (ideally through only one of the speakers).
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3 weeks 1 hour ago.

Mixing In The Digital Domain

The same fundamental gain structure considerations
are also important in digital mixers, although the
provision of su�cient headroom is usually far more
important than worrying about the audibility of the
noise �oor. With an analogue system, as you run out of
headroom, the amount of distortion builds relatively
gradually — some engineers deliberately run their
mixers fairly hot to take advantage of the distortion
Oak Felder - Recording Demi Lovato's 'Sorry Not Sorry'
(although few mixers sound nice when driven hard).
1 month 2 weeks ago.
However, digital mixers don't have headroom of their
own — you have to allow for it when you set levels — and the moment you run out of
headroom everything sounds extremely horrid.

Digital mixers come in two �avours: �xed point (most budget

consoles) and �oating point (usually the more expensive
consoles). If you want to know more about these terms, check
out the 'All About Digital' series which began in SOS May 1998.
The important thing to realise is that �oating‑point designs
have a massive internal dynamic range, which means that
there is e�ectively in�nite headroom and a totally inaudible
noise �oor within the mixer. Levels will still have to be
managed to ensure the signal sits nicely within the output
window of the digital or D‑A interfaces, but you can't 'break'
the signal while processing within the console.

On the other hand, a �xed‑point console will have a �nite dynamic range of about 6dB per bit
of internal processing resolution. While this can look quite a lot on paper, it is surprisingly easy
to run out of headroom if applying a lot of equalisation and mixing a lot of signals together.
That is why these kinds of consoles tend to provide digital attenuation just prior to the EQ
section. If you are planning to introduce substantial amounts of equalisation, or if a lot of
signals are being combined, think about winding in a few decibels of digital attenuation �rst.

Optimising A‑D Conversion

The conversion of analogue signals to digital data is something with which almost all
recording musicians will have to contend. If you're using a digital mixer, analogue signals
will need to be converted at the mixer's inputs. However, even if you use an analogue
mixer, you're still likely to have to convert to digital at the inputs of your master recorder.

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As a result, it's important to know how to get the best out of the analogue‑to‑digital (A‑D)
conversion process — a signal that is badly converted from the analogue domain to the
digital domain will always sound bad, irrespective of what digital processing is available
to you.

To get the best conversion, you should ideally set the input level to your A‑D converters
so that the peak analogue signal level is as close as possible to the maximum level
accepted by the converter. However, there is often a degree of uncertainty about the
maximum peak level of an analogue signal and so some headroom will have to be
provided. This is particularly true in live situations where the signal sources are
inherently unpredictable, but even in more controlled studio circumstances the most
carefully optimised levels can fall foul of occasional mic popping, for example.

Creating this headroom solves the

problem of transient distortion, but
introduces two undesirable side e�ects.
Firstly, for every 6dB of unused
headroom you e�ectively lose one bit of digital resolution. With an unprocessed
transient‑rich percussion track you may well have to provide as much as 24dB of
headroom to ensure those transients are captured intact, which means your 24‑bit A‑D
converter is really only providing 20‑bit resolution to the main body of the sound. With
a decent delta‑sigma converter there shouldn't be any problem with this, but with
budget 16‑bit converters the resulting quantisation noise and low resolution can prove
a major headache! The second problem with leaving enough headroom is that noise
levels can become a serious problem, particularly if digital gain and compression are
applied to compensate for the low overall signal level.

However, there are ways of dealing with these problems. Perhaps the most useful way of
circumventing the need for excessive analogue headroom is to use an analogue
'voice‑channel' processor to condition the signal — at least partially — prior to
conversion. In this way the dynamic range can be brought under control and the
peak‑to‑average level optimised more e�ectively before the signal reaches the A‑D
converter, providing a better sound overall and generally making life easier in the digital
domain. The huge number of voice channels available on the market indicates just how
popular this approach is at all levels of the music recording industry.

Getting Your Fader Levels Sorted Out

Whether you're using an analogue or digital mixer, it's designed to operate most e�ectively
with its faders at or near the 0dB or 'unity gain' position (sometimes simply marked with a 'U').
This provides the best compromise between a useful amount of headroom and adequately low
mix‑buss noise. So, when setting up your mix, you should open each fader to the unity mark
and then adjust that channel's input gain control so that the signal is at roughly the right level
for the �nal mix. Clearly, you won't know what that is for sure, and EQ'ing the signal will a�ect
its level too, but you can usually get it pretty close with a little thought and some experience.

If you have little experience with mixers, a handy tip is that when you have created something
resembling the perfect mix with all the faders close to their unity marks, mute all the channels
and then audition each one in turn to see how loud particular sources are in isolation. That
way, you will have a good idea where to set the input gains for those instruments the next time.

If, when you come to mixing, you �nd all the faders are barely o� the backstop, or pressed up
hard at the top of their travels, you need to re‑optimise the channel gains, because you are in
danger of either running out of headroom in the channels or su�ering unnecessarily noisy
signals.

Input Conditioning
Most home setups rely entirely on near�eld monitoring, and the weak or missing bottom
octave(s) of such systems can make it very hard to know exactly what is going on in the deep
bass region. Vibrations through mic stands, plosive popping and air conditioning or other
machinery can all create huge amounts of LF energy which, at best, clutters up the mix, and at
worst makes it impossible to create a decent mix at all.

So if in doubt, �lter it out! Many desks include

switchable high‑pass �ltering on the mic inputs

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and some even allow a tuneable �lter. After setting the input gain, I routinely �ip the high‑pass
�lter in to see if it improves the sound quality or not. At this point it is often also a good idea to
apply some corrective EQ cut if it helps clean up any acoustic spill. For example, if you have
a number of microphones in close proximity — such as around a drum kit — there will be a lot
of spill between them. Just make sure that any EQ you're applying to sort out spill problems
doesn't detract from the wanted signal unduly.

Another thing that can help with spill is judicious use of the polarity reversal switches that are
provided on most mid‑price consoles. However, this facility is mostly used to �nd the most
suitable sound where any instrument has been captured using several recording methods
simultaneously.

Setting Up Your E�ects Sends

Even the simplest mixer usually provides one or more auxiliary
outputs as well as the main programme output. You can use
these to send signals to external e�ects units — delay, reverb
and modulation processors in particular — while mixing down.
Auxiliaries are always equipped with a level control, often
a pre/post switch and sometimes an on/o� switch too. The
pre/post switch determines where the auxiliary signal is
derived from in the channel signal path — either before or
after the channel fader. For mixing purposes, you'll probably
want to switch these to post‑fader, so that if you fade out the source it's e�ects processing
disappears as well.

Obviously, if you're sending to an external e�ects processor, you'll also need to return the
processed signal to your mix. Many desks have dedicated e�ects returns channels, but if yours
doesn't have any (or not enough) you can always use any spare mixer channels instead.

Working With E�ects

The most common problem for anyone new to mixing is deciding how much
reverberation to add. Sound On Sound has carried many articles on using reverb —
particularly on selecting and �ne‑tuning the available programs of speci�c digital reverb
machines. The idea of adding reverb is create the illusion of depth, adding a second
dimension to the mix. In real life, the closer you are to the source, the stronger its direct
sound will be in relation to the room re�ections. The greater the room size, the longer it
will take for those re�ections to arrive, and the harder the surfaces, the denser the
reverberation tail will be. Armed with these simple concepts, it is possible to modify the
parameters of most reverb units to create believable acoustic spaces which will
complement your music.

The thing always to bear in mind is that reverb will tend to clutter the mix by �lling in the
gaps between instruments, both in the time and frequency domains — particularly if long
decay times are used. Try to create the room sound you want just through the levels,
density and timing of the early re�ections, adding a su�cient decay to sound natural, but
without it becoming intrusive. If you have more than one reverb machine available, use
di�erent programs to create di�erent acoustic dimensions and more interest in the mix.

In terms of balancing the reverb levels against the rest of the mix, the most useful advice
I can give is to fade the reverb return up until it sounds about right, then back it o� by
about 4‑5dB. This rule of thumb tends to cure the typical problem of having too much
e�ect in the mix.

Working In Stereo
A lot of sources are stereo these days, including drum machines, keyboards, turntables and so
on. Ideally, you should bring these sources into the mixing console through a dedicated stereo
channel — most desks provide at least a few these days. The advantage of a stereo channel is
that there is only one gain control, one fader to push and pull, and only one set of equaliser
knobs to twiddle. If there are only mono channels in your desk, you will have to plug the left
signal through channel one, say, and pan it hard to the left, while plugging the right signal
through channel two, panning it hard right... and now you have two input gain controls, two
faders and two sets of equalisation to worry about.

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Why is this important? Well, the position of a sound in the stereo image is essentially governed
by the relative loudness of the signal components in the two channels — a pan control takes
a mono signal and allocates part of it to each channel, the relative proportions producing the
required image location somewhere between fully left and fully right. In the case of a stereo
signal, the stereo positioning of the instruments it contains is already de�ned — that is why it's
stereo. If you are running this through two mono channels and they are not perfectly matched
in terms of their gain and equalisation, the imaging will be o�set to one side or the other. In the
case of a mismatched equaliser, the image will pull in di�erent directions at di�erent
frequencies.

The only solution is to take great care in making sure the two channels are matched as closely
as possible. Matching input gains is fairly straightforward, particularly if you can temporarily
send a mono signal from the stereo source (use a mono record or CD, for example, or play
a mono instrument sound without e�ects, rather than a stereo sound, from the keyboard).

When it comes to EQ, you just have to try to set the positions of both sets of EQ knobs to the
same values and then hope for the best. Listen carefully to the stereo image and make sure
you are happy with it once you have everything lined up as best you can.

Of course, once the gains and EQ are set, you probably won't
want to mess with them again during the mix, but you will still
be riding the faders up and down. This is where most people
come unstuck, because if one fader is moved a smidgen more
or less than the other, the stereo image will wander.

To help reduce the likelihood of an unstable stereo image, you

need to couple the faders mechanically. Companies like
Canford Audio and Studiospares in the UK can supply clear
When using two mono channels for
plastic clips which �t over the two knobs, e�ectively locking stereo sources, a cheaper, though
them together. These are supplied to �t over di�erent‑shaped admittedly less attractive, option is
fader knobs from di�erent manufacturers, and span di�erent to link the fader caps together
widths, so you will need to check out your speci�c using a short pencil and some
ordinary sticky tape...
requirements before ordering. A cheaper, though admittedly
less attractive, option is to link the fader caps together using a short pencil and some ordinary
sticky tape... Whichever solution you choose, make sure the link doesn't foul any routing
buttons which may be positioned between adjacent faders.

Starting Work
There are several di�erent approaches to mixing, but most people like to start with the rhythm
section, building the song up from there. Just to be contrary, I often work from the opposite
direction, starting with the most important element of a pop song — this will usually be the
lead vocal track — and then �lling in the countermelody instruments and supporting sections
as necessary. It is often easier to make sure the peak levels stay under control by working this
way. Starting from the bottom and working upwards can often lead to a �nal mix which peaks
signi�cantly higher than intended.

Again, a popular approach is to start mixing with everything panned to the middle, and to start
panning sounds to create a stereo stage only when the mix is roughly right. The drawback is
that if you pan a sound close to either side, its level will fall by nearly 6dB relative to its level at
the centre, which is enough to completely upset the balance. Consequently I �nd it quicker and
easier to pan sounds to their appropriate positions in the stereo sound stage before
attempting to build the balance.

It is important to keep checking the balance in mono as well as stereo (or surround) —
particularly if your material may end up on the radio. Inevitably the mono mix will sound
di�erent to the stereo (and the stereo to the surround), so a degree of compromise will be
required to achieve the most acceptable results in each format. Pay particular attention to
reverbs, which have a habit of drying up when you listen in mono.

At the mixdown stage, equalisation can be used to help instruments retain their individual
clarity. I �nd that cutting unwanted frequencies generally sounds more natural and subtle than
boosting wanted frequencies in this case. Whatever settings you choose, make regular use of
the EQ bypass button to make sure you really are improving the situation and not just making
everything sound loud and bright.

You Live, You Learn

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The skills required to create a great mix don't come naturally to most musicians, and there are
a lot of potential pitfalls for the beginner. However, if you take the time to practise the above
mixing techniques, with a selection of reference CDs close at hand, you should be able to keep
yourself heading in the right direction.

Referencing Your Mix

It is very easy to lose your way when starting out in mixing. Your attention is continually
being drawn in di�erent directions, concentrating on the di�erent instruments and
voices. This makes it very easy to become bogged down in the detail of the mix, rather
than its overall balance. You also have to consider the general tonal balance of the mix
and how it compares to commercial tracks of the same genre.

One way to create and maintain a reference on which to base your mixing decisions is to
listen to examples of similar music released commercially. Playing suitable music CDs
through the same monitors in the same listening environment will help establish the
all‑important sonic reference with which you can judge your own mix. Listen critically,
and form opinions about both the spectral balance and the relative levels of di�erent
instruments. You may also be able to come up with some good ideas for reverb and
e�ects settings, and maybe even a few production ideas!

Another trap to be wary of is that of ever‑escalating listening levels. In general, the louder
your monitoring level, the less accurate your perception of balance will be. This is
because it is easier to hear detail in quiet elements of the mix when the whole thing is
very loud. Turn the volume down to a more normal domestic listening level and the quiet
bits will be completely lost! Far better to set a comfortable listening level with your
reference music sources (which may be a little louder than a domestic level, but not too
much), and then try to balance your mix at the same level. It is a little harder to do, but
you will get better, more transportable results, with less ear fatigue and happier
neighbours...

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