Struggling with your mixdown? Do you find yourself getting lost in the million possibilities for changing the balance, levels, and sound of your beats? There is another way! Read on for some tips on how to make things much more straightforward as we delve into one of the trickiest topics in production - the mixdown.This blog often returns to the idea of keeping things simple and straightforward in your work, and mixdowns need be no exception. Modern production capabilities mean that even with a relatively basic laptop and a DAW, you can still end up with dozens of channels - drums, extra percussion, FX, layers of synths and more. This is something that didn't happen so much 10 years back - people just didn't have enough hardware to cope with all that stuff. A 50-channel mixdown was solely in the realm of mega-money studios. Now we're all trying to keep up!
So what can you do? The obvious suggestion is to use less channels - and that's exactly what you should be considering. A 'stem mixdown' involves bouncing down some of your myriad channels into groups, then opening a new project file, loading them up and taking it on from there. Ideally, you should be looking to work with a selection of channels that strikes the right balance between flexibility and efficiency. Ten to twelve is usually a sensible amount.
There are a number of reasons as to why this is a good idea. As mentioned, the most obvious is to simplify the mixing process - working with groups can be much simpler than many individual channels. On top of that, there's a psychological aspect too. You might have heard the old producer's mantra that you should never spend more than 20 minutes working on a sound (if you've got a sound in the right ballpark in that time then move on and come back to it later, to keep the creative flow going; if you haven't, then bin it because it'll probably never work) - well, this applies here too. By bouncing your stems and setting them in stone, you're moving on to the next stage. You're less likely to get bogged down in trivial details, and you'll find that many issues will be easily solved by treating the whole stem. Also, by narrowing down your options you'll be less likely to suffer the classic paralysis induced by too much choice.
So how should you go about it? Well, precedence should be given to anything that needs to be a major feature of your mix - vocals, leads, basslines. These things can be given their own stems. Drums can largely be grouped together, although it's often useful to bounce the kick separately to the rest of the percussion, to make subsequent side-chaining easier, for instance. Similarly, it is wise to treat the bassline and sub bass as two different entities - for side-chaining again, and also for reverb and other effects which may want to be on the top section but not the sub.Anything that involves several instruments playing the same thing (for instance when you have synth parts doubled up for a bigger sound) can be bounced down to a single stem, and with vocals you can perhaps have a lead vocal stem, and one stem for adlibs, backing vocals, and so on. Incidental effects too - make sure that you've got the panning sorted first (but even this can be expanded or contracted later on), and then bounce to one stem.
Reverbs and group compression should be left off until you're mixing down - it doesn't matter so much with background FX, but drums and featured elements should be kept fairly clean so that you can process them more effectively in mixdown.
Once you've done all this, and loaded it into a clean project, it's a lot easier to hear what is going on. You're less likely to be distracted by things you've already done - for instance, sometimes when you think a part needs a treble boost, and you see that there's already an EQ with a treble boost on it, you can be inclined to just leave it - as it's an issue you've clearly already addressed. When you've bounced everything, however, it becomes much more straightforward - if a part needs a treble boost then you simply apply one without worrying about it.
Of course, nothing is ever set in stone - and if you really need to go back a stage and bounce two elements separately then it will only take a few minutes to go and do so - but the hassle factor of that means that you'll most probably try and solve the issue without breaking up the stems. And in most cases, you'll usually be able to do so.
So, as we know, mixing down can be a complex and tricky process. But by narrowing your options, you can find that the choices you need to make can be reduced, without having to compromise on sound quality. So next time you're facing a big, multi-channel affair, try bouncing down to stem level and starting again. You may be surprised how much difference it can make!
