Perfection in your music mixing

Music mixing is an intense and time consuming profession.

Sometimes you strive too hard to achieve perfection. Perfection in your mixes can seem like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

You hear something in your head that no matter how much you tweak knobs and turn up faders you can't seem to achieve the magic that your brain is telling you it wants.

Recently I had been working on my friend's song. It’s a great song that’s been really fun to work on.

But when you’re involved in a project for so long and listen to the same song over and over again, ultimately you need a break from it.

Here are a few thoughts on music mixing:

• Fatigue and tiredness from mixing is not an unheard concept. The general rule when mixing is that you should never mix when your ears are tired, or for more than a few hours at a time.

• So if you’ve been recording or have been listening to music the whole day your mixing session is not going to go the same way as if you had rested ears.

• You also need to try to step away from the mix. Because when you’re so involved in a mix you get way too much into the details, hearing things most listeners will never hear.

Dwelling on the details and trying to perfect every single note is an exercise in futility.

“The problem with perfection is that it has no limits. Normally, once you think you have obtained perfection you realize how it could be better.”

So every once in a while, take a step back. Think to yourself:

“Can I hear the song as a song instead of a collection of frequencies and amplitudes?”

If you are just pushing faders up and down, tweaking EQ to and from the original mix you are never actually going to be able to finish a mix. There comes a time when you should just say to yourself:

“Ok, this is done. It sounds consistent to what I want it to”

If you had an idea in your head before starting the mix and now it’s sounding like you want it to, no amount of nit-pick-tweaking is going to make it perfect in your ears anymore. You've worked for too long on a song so your brain doesn't have a clue what it wants anymore.

My teacher had this thought about music mixing:

A mix is never finished, it’s abandoned.

And that’s exactly what you should do. If it sounds good enough to you and amazing to other listeners, it is done.

And that’s exactly what I did. I just left it as is. I could have tweaked those guitars for months but I thought to myself:

“This song is exactly as I want it to be”

Because in the end, it’s all about the song.

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