Recently I was asked:
Imagine there is no budget pressure and you do not have deadlines; how do you know that a mix is finished?
This is a great question! I don’t know that without a budget or a deadline that I would do anything differently.
We go in to mix and we have a week or ten days to mix an album. A week is more than enough time to mix an album. I might spend a day or day and a half on the first song, then after that I’ll start to have a template or a sonic idea of how the rest of the album should sound. The next day I might get one song done, and the day after that I might get two done and so on!
Even if you had three weeks to mix an album and you came back a year later you might hear something you missed or you’ll probably hear something you spent a long time doing that you wish you hadn’t done!
It’s a bit of a difficult question to answer.
I think with no budget constraints I would probably have an infinite amount of really expensive compressors and EQs that I might barely use.
I think in a perfect world where I could just feed signal through some beautiful equipment without any budget constraints, maybe I’d have a ton of gear at my finger tips however, they’ll probably make a subtle difference to the mixing. It’s more that feeling you get when you have endless amounts of gear! But most of the time I have what I need.
I have a ton of outboard gear, an SSL and Pro Tools filled with a ton of amazing plugins, and I lean very heavily on the plugins!
You and I can mix the same if you’ve got the same plugins!
I answer your all of the following questions in the video below!
• Imagine, there is no budget pressure and you do not have deadlines. How do you know that a mix is finished?
• Do you ever make use of any subwoofers when you mix?
• What are your thoughts on Gretsch guitars?
• By being a part of the academy it’s possible to get discounts on mics?
• Do you add your effects pre or post recording guitar?
• Any suggestions on the best acoustic guitar in the $500-$700 range?
• I was wondering if there were advantages/disadvantages to recording the same guitar part twice vs. duplicating?
Earlier this week we featured 4 drum mixing techniques from 4 pro mixers!
All of these guy are part of a 10 song back that we do called The Ultimate Rock Mixing Bundle. In this bundle you get 10 different approaches mixing rock, metal and punk!
It’s pretty awesome to see 4 different techniques in mixing. Some of the guys adopted similar approaches- there’s some similar boosts and cuts going on in kick drums, but ultimately we all hear things differently.
Get The Ultimate Rock Mixing Bundle here
I’ve talked about using some of my favorite plugins this week, which you can check out here:
➡Waves MV2: https://bit.ly/2HVhTy3
➡Waves RBass: https://bit.ly/2KLkN6h