Avoid These 5 Mixing Mistakes

Mixing a song means more than just pulling up the faders! Every signal is important and deserves its place in the mix. To beginners in particular, this can feel like a huge mountain to climb. In this article, you’ll find out what the 5 most common mixing mistakes are and how you can avoid making them in the first place! Let’s go!

We’ll assume that you are very familiar with your monitoring system, be it monitor speakers or headphones, and that you’ve already listened to many finished songs on it. That’s the basic prerequisite before we start.

If not, here are some resources:

👉 Studio Monitors: 5 tricks for optimal placement

👉 Your First Studio Monitors

Mixing mistake #1: Not taking the time

Just turn up all the controls, quickly adjust them and you’re done? That may work for an 8-track mix. But if you’re mixing a modern recording or a DAW production with individual outputs from a lot of instruments, the drum set alone can have six or more tracks. That’s why it’s better to take your time to focus on each track. Especially if you’re mixing someone else’s material and are given individual tracks, you should first listen to everything carefully so that you know what you’re dealing with.

Then you can make decisions: how should the drum set be positioned in the stereo field? The way the audience in front of the stage hears it or as the drummer hears it? How many guitar tracks are there? It gets even more tricky with club productions that use only synthesized sounds: What belongs together, what should be placed where in the mix? Once you’ve finished working on the tracks for an instrument or a group of sounds, route them to a common bus. This way, you only have to mix the individual groups at the end. Multi-channel instruments like the drums or grouped elements such as synth effects remain coherent and you have to move fewer controls.

Mixing mistake #2: Using EQ incorrectly

There’s a reason why EQs can not only boost frequencies, but also cut them. Beginners in particular tend to forget this and rely mainly on boosting. While this can work just fine, it also makes the signal louder and can change its character. It often makes more sense to attenuate the frequency ranges that are not required or even annoying. A female pop vocal doesn’t need a booming low end at 80 Hz – that’s the bass drum’s territory! The kick, on the other hand, doesn’t need the frequencies above 8 kHz. So get rid of them!

When combining sounds into a mix, it also helps to take something away from one sound at certain frequencies to carve out space for another sound. But be careful – if you remove too much, there’s a risk that your mix will sound lifeless. To sum up, don’t forget that an EQ has both positive and negative values.

Mixing mistake #3: Too many effects

This wasn’t an issue in analogue times, when only expensive mixing consoles offered compressors on every channel. Even today, most higher-end studios keep a handful of selected hardware devices around for their specific sonic characteristics. Thanks to modern computers and efficient plug-ins, it is now no longer a problem to insert an 1176 compressor and a reverb plug-in on every channel. Although this may seem like a great idea at first glance, it usually doesn’t deliver the desired result of a coherent mix in which all elements sound like they belong together.

For standard reverb and delay effects, you should work with sends and process several signals through the same effect. And yes, two (or sometimes more) different reverbs are still the best way to control the depth of field of your mix. Signals that belong together, e.g. the drums, can be routed to a bus and processed by a single compressor.

Mixing mistake #4: Treating all signals equally

Yes, all signals are important. But that doesn’t mean they all play the same role in the mix. The magic words here are depth of field, frequency relations, and dynamics. Not every instrument stays at the same volume throughout a song, nor should all instruments be equally loud. And as mentioned before, every instrument needs its place in the frequency spectrum.

Even if every musician usually wants his or her instrument to be represented exactly as he or she hears it, this does not necessarily lead to the desired result when mixing. If everything is equally loud, there is no depth in the mix. And if you distribute everything evenly to the left and right, your mix will lack spatiality. It is much more important that you pay attention to the interplay of the individual elements. Use both the panorama (spaciality) and volume (depth) to place each sound in the mix so that listeners can locate it precisely.

Mixing mistake #5: Mixing with eyes instead of ears

This is a very important point that many mixing beginners often forget and then wonder why the mix doesn’t work. No matter how precisely you follow the manual and pay attention to all the points mentioned here: in the end, you should always trust your ears instead of dialling in specific parameter settings. Many successful mixing engineers don’t pay attention to the numbers when adjusting an EQ or compressor. They often don’t even look at them and prefer to rely on their ears.

If the result is right, it doesn’t matter how you got there! Parameter values are always just starting points from which you move towards the desired sound. The important thing is that you capture the musical moment with your mix. If you remove every breathing sound, suppress every noise, compress everything, and edit every track down to the smallest detail, you may end up with a technically perfect mix, but it will likely sound totally dull. By the way, this is also the reason why demos often have a certain magic to them that the final mix later lacks.

If you pay attention to these mixing mistakes and try to avoid them, you’ll notice that your mixes will sound much more musical and therefore better. Do you already have mixing experience? Then why not leave us a comment and share your tips on what beginners should look out for.