How To Finish A Mix

There comes a point when tinkering with your mixes won’t improve them — it could even damage them. But just how do you know when it’s time to let go?

There’s a famous quotation, often attributed to Leonardo da Vinci: “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” In other words, creative projects aren’t like mathematical equations that can be solved. There will always be more that the creator could do, but since there’s no ‘right’ answer they’ll never arrive at a clearly defined end point. So they must learn to live with the fact that they may never be truly satisfied with their creation, and figure out how to recognise when it’s time to let go and move on. It’s a sentiment that applies as much to mixing music as to any creative endeavour...

Unfortunately, today’s music‑making technology practically invites us to keep on refining our mixes, and strive to inch ever closer to some vaguely defined notion of ‘perfection’. Knowing when a mix is ‘done’ can be even more challenging for those who are still feeling their way into mixing, since they can be tempted to try out lots of new and exciting techniques in a constant chase for results that sound ‘better’ or ‘more professional’. But, at some point, the experimenting must stop, and your focus needs to shift towards ‘signing off’ the mix. That means learning how to wrap things up in a practical sense, but also how to move on emotionally from a mix — and I can’t stress how incredibly important this is in your development as a mix engineer!

Can You Feel It?

So, just how do you know when a mix is finished? Well, if you’re mixing for an artist (or any other client), the short and obvious answer is “when they’re happy!” But if you’re to feel at all satisfied and to develop as a mix engineer, it’s important that you’re also happy with the mix before you send it off. And, of course, maybe as well as being the engineer, you’re the artist — in which case, how do you know when you’re content to call it a day?

In my experience, there’s rarely one clear moment in which you feel that you’ve suddenly ‘cracked’ the mix, and find yourself punching the air and dishing out high fives to unsuspecting strangers in the street. More likely is one of a few different scenarios, and the most gratifying is when you sense that the music you’ve been engrossed in mixing starts to take on a life of its own. It’s when you start to feel more like a listener enjoying the music, and less like an engineer trying to shape it. Maybe the chorus stirs some sense of feeling, perhaps a particular lyric begins to resonate and the hairs on your neck start to tingle. Or it might simply be that you notice you’ve subconsciously started nodding your head or tapping your foot to the beat.

I’ve learnt to take such feelings seriously, because at this point mixing can become more about protecting and nourishing this often‑indefinable quality in the music. On that note, another scenario might be seen as the flip side of the same coin: you notice a growing sense that you might be ‘overworking’ the mix, and thus making it worse. In that case, maybe it’s time to stop throwing more plug‑ins and production tricks at the project, and make a conscious effort to tie things up. More pragmatically, an end point might be driven by client deadlines, or a simple need to get on and get a mix finished so that you get paid.

Now, in any of those scenarios, we absolutely still need to feel moved by the music. That’s the whole point! But when there’s a lot to do and we don’t have the time to reflect and experiment, we can, hopefully, lean on our experience and some routines to allow us just enough space for creativity while ensuring we deliver consistently good work.

I deliberately draw a metaphorical line under things, take stock and change my perspective... and to help me make this shift I’ve developed a few routines.

Shifting Gears

For clarity, let’s say we’re talking about ‘the last five percent’ of a mix, and how we take the good work we’ve done and move serenely to the point where we’re happy to send it off to the artist, or maybe even invite them into your studio. At this stage, I find it helpful to make a conscious decision to shift gears, and stop striving/pushing for ‘something more’. I’m happy to do that because I’ve decided that I like where I’ve got to. I’ve done my experimenting, explored some blind alleys. I feel confident that, at least to my own taste, I’ve arrived at a point where the music has some impact and is making me feel something. Or perhaps I simply feel that I’ve respectfully stayed out of the way of the song while giving it a little polish.

So at this point, I deliberately draw a metaphorical line under things, take stock and change my perspective. Like anything that requires self‑discipline, this can be hard, and to help me make this shift I’ve developed a few routines over the years. I find that these help me a great deal to finish a mix strongly, and feel that bit more confident about handing it over to someone else.

A good set of studio headphones may well tell you something useful about your mix as it nears the final stages — but you do need to be careful about what you tweak as a result.

I mix primarily in my studio, on a single set of speakers. Whilst I’m very happy with my monitoring setup, in these later stages of a mix I make a point of having two or three listens through on my good‑quality studio headphones. I nearly always spot a few things, such as a panning issue, some amp noise hanging over a ‘stop’ section, or a stereo effect that worked on speakers but seems a bit overbearing on headphones. Obviously, I’ll attend to those. I may also make some very minor changes with EQ, but I try hard not to start tinkering and experimenting again, because I find that can lead me to second‑guess what I’ve already done.

Whilst I’m in this mind set, I’ll take a closer look at my Pro Tools session and double‑check a few things. I might well be working on different projects simultaneously, so want to get the current mix into a state where I can return to it next time (often a day, but perhaps a week or months later) and be able to make tweaks or revisions for...