Thursday, October 3, 2013

Mixing in the Mix Box

I saw a great post today from Graham Cochrane over at The Recording Revolution. (Great and informative site) Graham was talking about mixing in the mix box, and I felt this was such an important concept that I needed to share it. The idea is that there is a box that your mix falls in. It's basically the depth and width of your song. How wide does your song go and how dynamic are the instruments?

Today I want to share some ideas that can help make your mix sound wider and have more depth. This will help you to create a huge song without everything being stuck inside the mix box.

The first thing I want to talk about is LCR mixing. LCR mixing refers to panning. The idea is that you either pan hard left, hard right, or dead in the center. I'm a huge fan of LCR mixing and in my opinion it does wonders to widen your mix. I've talked about it before and I'll probably talk about it again. If you're not at least trying LCR mixing, what do you have to lose?

Secondly, you need to create depth to your song using volume. Basically you don't want to have every instrument in your tracks sitting at the exact same level. This will make your song sound crowded and as if the instruments are all fighting for attention. Try to let certain tracks shine through like lead vocals or lead guitar. Create dynamics and by default, you will create depth.

Lastly, I want to talk about adding EQ to your tracks. Not every track needs low end and not every track needs high end. This is what high pass and low pass filters are for. They allow you to clean up the frequencies that aren't being used by certain instruments so that the instruments that actually are in those tracks can really punch through. I generally put high pass filters on almost everything except bass guitar and the kick drum. What you want to achieve here is better dynamics between your frequencies. You allow your tracks that have a lot of information in the mid range to sit comfortably inside the box, while pushing your tracks with high end information up and tracks with low end information down. This adds vertical dynamics to your song.

So to recap, there are three things you can do to help your tracks not fight in the mix box.


  1. LCR Mixing
  2. Volume Dynamics
  3. EQ, High Pass, and Low Pass Filters
Hope this helps you take another step to a bigger and better mix! 

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