How to mix a song from start to finish

You’re at square one, staring at a session of unmixed tracks. There’s much to do, from gain staging and unmasking the kick and bass, all the way to mixing vocals. Where do you go from here? In this tutorial, learn how to mix your track from start to finish, and even get a rough master ready – all with core mixing and mastering tools like  Neutron  for intuitive mixing, Guitar Rig for detailed FX processing, and  Ozone  for fast, intelligent mastering.

Follow along with this tutorial using all of the intuitive mixing tools included in iZotope  Music Production Suite  – on sale for a limited time during Mix & Master month.

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1. Listen to your rough mix and get your references in order

Whether you produced the track or not, play the song from start to finish and write down some goals, thoughts, inspirations, or anything else pertinent to the song while you listen. You want to put on your mixer’s hat and familiarize yourself with the material, and listening from top to tail is the best way to do so. 

Mixing a song from start to finish is easiest when we have set goals in mind from the outset – so don’t skip this step!

After you've listened to your song, take a listen to the reference tracks that you want to inspire your mix. Take some notes on the way your references sound. You'll need them later! 

For instance, here are some tracks I was given for a really fun song called “Shadow.” 

The final mix wound up sounding like this, but I thought we’d take the first verse and chorus from the beginning for this article. These sections represent what you might work with at the beginning of your career: It was recorded well but not perfectly, and the acoustic instruments generally need the most amount of care in mixing, whereas sampled stuff has been “pre-mixed” by the manufacturer.

I pretend the previous mix doesn’t exist and listen to the ruff I was given. 

I also determine my references – songs that inspire me for this tune, songs I always use when referencing, and the bands’ own choices for reference material. 

They gave me more “emotional inspirations” than sound-alikes, so I ran the idea of a “Tame Impala” vibe by them, which they approved. 

Now that we’ve got our start, on to our next phase.

2. Organize, gain stage, and balance your mix

If you want to move quickly and keep focused, you have to stay organized. 

Everyone has their own way of doing this, but here’s what I recommend:

Organize your tracks and color code them.

Gain stage your tracks in some manner that preserves headroom. 

Folks, I’ve spent a lot of years on gain staging. I’ve used a whole bunch of different approaches and wasted time on cockamamie schemes. 

I’ve done the hard work of stumbling through the countless misconceptions of gain staging – which means you don’t have to! 

The simplest and easiest way to gain stage your mix:

Play the tracks as you have them, and look at your main output meters. Is it clipping (hitting or going above 0 dBFS)? If not, is it way too close to clipping (constantly peaking around -3 dBFS or higher)?

If the answer to either question is yes, simply select all the regions, items, or whatever your DAW calls the visual representation of your audio, and clip-gain them all down till the mix comfortably hovers around -18 lufs or -18 RMS (your preference). -18 is what I use because a lot of analog emulations default to 0 dB VU = -18 dBFS. You can go higher if you want (say -14) or lower (-23). Don’t go too high or too low. 

Observe this wordless video:

At the end of this video, you’ll note I turned the vocals down independently from the music. They were way out in front, so I made a judgment call that takes us neatly into our next item on our list:

Put up a static mix to start with. You can also use the Balance Assistant in Neutron’s Visual Mixer to get started. Read through the tutorials above to get a good grasp of these concepts. Once you've reviewed them and applied them to your mix, we'll begin step three. 

My static mix will sound like this:

3. Listen to your rough mix and sketch out some goals

Take a minute to listen to your static mix and sketch out some rough goals. 

For instance, I listen to this mix and I think: the bass is too loud and flubby, the whole vibe doesn’t feel dreamy and floaty enough, and the guitars are a little tinny in the high mids. I also think about how the pre-chorus needs to blast off into space with some fun modulation and time-based effects. 

Goals in mind, I’m going to work on drums and bass first, and go from there.

4. Mix your drums

Many engineers start with their drums. This makes sense, as drums are a foundational instrument in almost any production. 

I like to spotlight the drums first, but I’ll keep the other instruments in at a slightly lower volume:

Now it’s time to start working.

We’ve already listened to the static mix. We have some broad goals for the mix, and now we need to chart out some specific goals for the drums. Think about questions like:

• What do I want to get out of these drums?
• What is bothering me about these drums?
• What’s missing in these drums?
• How do I want these drums to change from section to section?

Write down the answers for yourself. Answers can be general (“the drums need to smack more”), or specific (“there’s too much muddy resonance in the floor tom”). 

Whatever you do, do not skip this step. 

I know, I know, I know: you want to start loading plugins and getting to work. But the goals are important, and writing them down helps you move with purpose and speed! 

Here’s what I wrote down for what I want out of the drums:

• Not much on a balance level 
• Maybe start with general character shaping first – work top down
• There’s a certain boxiness in the snare
• Snare’s a bit loud
• More ride in middle section, and it would be nice to get that ride on the left, and maybe flange/reverb some stuff here for dreamlike qualities
• Some midrange reinforcement for the chorus

With Music Production Suite, I have specialized tools at my disposal to accomplish each goal. It’s easier to show you in a video, so here’s what I did:

We’re not done by any stretch with our drums, but we’ve reached a point where we can focus on how they interplay with the bass.

5. Use the bass as a “hinge point” in your mix

Mixing is paradoxical: it helps to go instrumental group by instrumental group (drums, low end, instruments, vocals), but they all fit together like a puzzle, so working in solo doesn’t really fly. 

We all develop our own ways around this paradox. I mentioned dimming instrument groups rather than muting them.

I also like to use “hinge points” to get from one section to another, and the bass is one such hinge point.

The bass has to hang with the drums: I can’t successfully mix a bass without having my kick in. The bass also has to fit with the other instruments: I can’t get a good feel for how to EQ my guitars without the bass in there. Therefore, the bass is an excellent pivot point from rhythmic instruments to harmonic ones. 

This song features an acoustic upright bass – also called a double bass. Those can easily lose definition and venture into flabbiness territory.

So here, my goal is simple: don’t mess it up. Make sure the bass doesn’t get too muddy and flabby, keep its intrinsic character, and make it fit with the other instruments.

Here’s what we did:

6. Focus on harmonic and melodic instruments

Our hinge point is once again our bass, as we lower the drums and bring up the harmonic instruments to hear the relationships.

Again, we have to listen to the song and ask ourselves “what do we want from these instruments?” 

I took the following notes:

• Left guitar annoying in high mids 
• I want to tremolo right guitar in pre-chorus 
• More low-mid guitar in right guitar and make that focal point
• Switch orientation after orientation of guitars 
• More hi-mid on piano
• More treble in piano
• Move piano to the right for the pre-chorus 
• Chorus guitar should feel more like a Rhodes
• Do some hard left/hard right stuff with the 1st guitar

How’d that all shake out? 

Again I have to stress: all of these moves are individual and particular to this arrangement, hence the video stuff. 

The order of operations – and the visualization of my goals – is what generally stays the same from mix to mix.

7. Start to think about bus processing

With the instruments roughly in place, it’s a good time to start thinking about what you want to get out of your bus processing – and by that I mean, the treatment you’ll need to apply to any and all submixes (drums, instruments, and stereo bus for example) for an optimal mix. 

I’m always thinking in terms of the vibe and story of the song: what is the music telling me it wants? What kind of movement can I achieve to serve that goal?

In this case we know we want a bit of that washy, indie, and somewhat dreamy Tame Impala vibe, so I’m going to be using a lot of mid/side saturation and compression to help me get there.

8. Move to vocals and background vocals 

With our rhythmic, foundational, harmonic, and melodic beds taking shape we can turn to mixing vocals, safe in the knowledge that we’ve been subliminally subjecting ourselves to them all along (because we never mix in solo!).

We obviously have some idea of how we want vocals to fit in the mix, but I’m still going to suggest listening to the song, and writing down your goals, this time with a few considerations in mind:

How much corrective work is required? Maybe the vocal was recorded in a noisy room, with bad equipment, or in a sloppy manner. If so, problems have to be taken care of with tools like RX before we can consider mixing.  

Do these vocals need pitch correction? If they do, you’ll have to bust out a program like Nectar 4 or Melodyne 5 Essentials or use some sort of global pitch correction software to get to the desired result.

Is there a rough mix or reference vocal that outlines the overall approach?

Does the reference have any obvious reverb trickery? Any delays or modulations? Is saturation the name of the game? Always keep these things in mind when working with vocals. 

Do any instruments obviously conflict with our vocals? By now you have a good idea of how all the instruments will sound, so you should be able to hear if your snare might get in the way of the vocal’s frequency content. This is another consideration to keep in mind as you mix. 

Thankfully, iZotope provides tools that help with many of these issues. Unwanted resonances, appropriate use of saturation, and more can be dealt with rather quickly using unmasking technology.

Every vocal is different, and this is no exception. I’ll show you what we came up with forthwith:

9. Print your mix and take it outside the studio – then tweak!

We don’t have a finished mix yet. What we have now is the ability to tweak our way to a fun, finalized mix – having gotten there with minimal processing thus far. I’m a big believer in using the least amount of processing that will suffice.  

To keep things purpose-oriented, I like to bounce down what I have at this stage, take a break, listen again, and write down notes of things I’d like to see happen. 

Again, these notes can be granular (“too much 650 Hz on main bridge vocal”) or conceptual (“try putting the drums in mono for the bridge and really emphasizing their roominess”). 

The notes are always written such that any problem is matched with a solution. “I need the chorus to hit harder” is always matched with an actionable note, such as “Automate Neutron’s punch compressor in parallel on the drums to emphasize their transients” or “widen the instrument bus with Ozone in chorus to give us a contrasting feeling of immensity.” 

So, I took the mix on a walk, and sketched out some notes.

Then I went back in and tweaked:

I’ll spare you the video and instructionals; by now you know that this has to be an iterative process, based on the knowledge you have, and acquiring new knowledge through research and experience. 

Suffice to say, I took a break, I took some more notes, and tweaked again:

With each pass, the mix takes on a more polished and finished quality. Each pass lets me focus more on personalized touches, such as effectual throws, different ways of handling an important section, and automation.

You should always use automation. What is automation? Simply put, it means telling the DAW to change the parameters of a sound over time during the mix. You can draw in the automation with a variety of DAW-specific tools, use the mouse to execute automation, or route the parameter to a MIDI controller so you can perform the automation in real time. 

Automation is your best opportunity to inject your personality into the mix, so don’t shy away! 

In general, I like to do three rounds of tweaks before I send off to the client, often using reference mixes to ensure I’m giving them something that competes with polished releases. 

Somewhere around this process, I also start conceiving my end goal – which means I start playing with limiters.

10. See if your mix passes the limiter test

I want to make something super clear off the bat: using limiters in mixing is controversial. Your mastering engineer may hate you if you send them a mix with a limiter. 

You are also actively destroying the integrity of your mix as you go about this particular test: a limiter is designed to say no to your transients – and transients are the life-blood of any mix. 

Whether or not you send your mix off to a dedicated mastering engineer, it’s most likely going to require limiting to get to commercial loudness targets. Ain’t no way around that. 

t’s also likely your mastering engineer will limit your mix with Ozone, the industry-standard mastering suite which is almost certainly already part of their workflow.

So if you have Ozone, you might as well take the limiter test and see if you pass. But what’s the limiter test?

It’s simple: you limit your mix to a commercial loudness target and see if it falls apart. If it does, what is causing it to fall apart? Is it the kick drum causing everything to become blocky and distorted when it should be sharp and impactful? Are the vocals hitting the limiter too hard no matter what you do? 

The answer can help you make an informed decision about how to clip or saturate the kick drum so that it doesn’t hit the limiter as hard – that’s one example of how you can anticipate the problem.

When you fix those things in the mix, you stand a better shot of getting a great master at the end of the process. So take the limiter test, which looks like this:

Start mixing your music from start to finish

That’s the basic idea, but do remember: this is just a roadmap – a methodology that will help you work towards the goals you want to achieve. It’s not a substitute for studying the tools of the trade, or the principles of how sound works in a recorded medium. Those matter quite a bit. You can say “make the kick more punchy” all you want, but at the end of the day, you still need to know what that means, and which tools will help you get there. 

Like most things in life, developing that knowledge takes time and practice. Luckily, iZotope has a treasure trove of content to help you educate yourself. Dive in, practice, follow this road map with all of the tools available in Music Production Suite, and you'll be on your way!

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