Give Your Mix Elements a Job!

Author: Terry Edelman (CAVE DIVER) | Founder & Owner of Space Jam Studio
November 2nd, 2024 • 5 minute read

Mixing is a complex task. I often think of it like trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle where as you go about placing one piece, the other pieces are changing shape responsively, their once-fitted nubs and cut-ins pushing and pulling at each other and causing all the hard work you’ve done previously to break apart. Mix elements are interactive: choices you make to the sound of one will affect how another is functioning contextually. This can lead to the frustrating feeling of playing whack-a-mole with the tracks in your mix. You might feel like you’ve gotten your guitars sounding great, then start looking at a subpar bass tone, make an adjustment there only to realize your guitars are no longer providing the needed heft in the mix.

Working with Elements in Context

A piece of useful advice I read some years back suggested spending as little time as possible with elements in solo, explaining that a mix element’s soloed sound bore no relevance to how that element was functioning in the mix. This made immediate sense to me, and changed not only how I approached my mixes but also how I listened to music and analyzed it for its tonal characteristics. For example, the “big” guitar sound found on many records I grew up with in the 90s was achieved more often than not with what was in fact a rather thin guitar tone supported by a robust and complimentary bass tone. Working with the full mix up would help create such a relationship between my mix elements now, right? It did help, but such an approach had its limits too: it could be difficult to discern what effect certain EQ or compression choices were making in a still-cluttered mix, or when detecting masking or muddiness to determine who needed to be cut in places and who needed to be boosted, and where. Dialing down to small solo groups helped me troubleshoot at times—listening to drums and bass at the same time without keyboards or guitars—but still led me back to whack-a-mole often enough.

Recognizing the Need for a Framework

After a series of frustrating mixes where I felt like I was nearing a breakthrough but not cracking it, I finally came to recognize what I was lacking. I wasn’t failing to perceive issues in the mix, but I was missing a framework for solving them. It’s one thing to note there’s a lack of articulation around 250 Hz. It’s another to make a strategic choice as to how to solve it. And what I came to realize is that such choices needed to happen at a conceptual level before they could be implemented effectively at a technical level. I needed to give each of my mix elements a job. To decide what they want to be doing and where, spectrally, they want to live, then execute it with the tools at my disposal.

Assigning Jobs to Mix Elements

This new approach allows me to work more efficiently and also invites me to stay open to the possibility of assigning different roles to instruments and elements more responsively rather than prescriptively. I might hear an overdriven bass that has a really pleasing grind in the mids but is a little flabby in the low end. Then I could look at my synth pad and see if it has something in the lows that’s working better for me. It does. Great! So we give these elements a job. The bass’s job is to provide a midrange presence that gives robustness to the mix. The synth pad is going to own the low end, with only the kick below it. Now I can feel comfortable making some cuts to the bass in the low end area that the synth is shining, knowing that I have a plan for giving my mix the requisite weight. And I can focus that synth sound on that low end while boosting the upper mids for character, creating a bit of a smiley-face curve that lets the bass own the area in and around 1k. Maybe we can then let the bass get a little presence boost above our synth’s upper mids for a little intelligibility.

High-End Distinctions

One of the most important areas to make such distinctions between elements’ jobs is in the high end. I’ve noticed that a lot of effective contemporary mixes reserve this space for one, maybe two key elements, often something like a vocal or snare drum. With this in mind, you can safely roll off in many cases this region for your other elements. But I’ve also heard vocals effectively parked between upper and lower midrange elements in certain styles, allowing programmed drums or live cymbals or an exciting synth or guitar to assert themselves in the high end more so. The “job” approach is at its best when you can eschew some of our assumptions about where things are “supposed” to be and make a subjective decision about what might be interesting, functional, and responsive to the sounds committed during tracking/production.

Exercise: Assigning Jobs in Your Mix

So here’s a fun exercise that I want to try and you can try, too: the next time you’re pulling up a fresh mix, do some light volume balancing, then listen through, making notes of each mix element and what you like best about it. Then, without listening further, draw up a game plan of where you think each of these elements want to live spectrally and spatially. This could be descriptive, written out in paragraph form. Or it could be more visual, focusing on the ordering of elements in a stack reminiscent of a stacked bar graph. Then dive into the mix, trying to position these elements such that they occupy the intended place in your mix. This won’t guarantee that you’ll get it right on the first try, but I’d bet we’ll find ourselves arriving at a more finished first mix more quickly than ever before. When your first mix is done, try repeating the process, filling in gaps or weaknesses that you can now more easily identify. Let me know how it works for ya!