Mix Mondays is our weekly mixing help column, that helps you start the week off with mixing advice.

I remember my first mix in Pro Tools. I was given a copy of multi-track recording of Trent Reznor’s “Only” so that I could try my hand at mixing something that I hadn’t recorded. (He releases the multi-tracks to encourage remixing btw, so no subterfuge was required).

I spent hours and hours with this song, carefully soloing each track, listening to the drums, bass, various keys, and guitars. I remember thinking… I’m not sure what I’m listening to. This was part of my first course in using Pro Tools so, an instructor would periodically pop into my little mix booth and take a listen to what I had done.

Sad to say, after about three hours in…I hadn’t gotten much done. I had thrown Eq’s on a couple of things, but every time I thought I had a sound Eqed to perfection, I’d un-solo it and find all of its perfection getting lost in the mud, covered by something else, or so unnatural sounding that I wanted to trash the whole thing and start over.

Thankfully, my instructor knew exactly what I was going through, and he had a great idea as to how I could get past my roadblock – stop all the damn soloing. Soloing is a great tool in multi-track recording and mixing, because it allows us to focus in on tracks, diagnose problems, and make decisions. BUT if the first thing you do when you open up a multi-track recording session is solo the kick drum, how do know where it’s supposed to fit?

How do you know if its going to work better as sub-sonic, intestine-shaking club kick or a punch-to-the-chest, early Elvis Costello proto-punk kick? You don’t really know where any track fits in if you’re never listening in context. As an example – I tend to figure out faster what to do to a kick, when I hear it with with the snare and bass tracks.

The snare because in most genres it is the drum that kick plays against to form your rhythmic feel, and the bass because its the instrument that has the most frequencies in common with the kick and has the greatest chance of overlapping with it.

But then expanding on that, I tend to like to hear the Kick with the overhead mics or cymbals tracks, to see how much room reverb or phasing occurs if those tracks pickup any kick. This happens because they’re the mics on the drum set that tend to be farthest from the kick, so they tend to have some delay and pick up more reflections.

But then, how I can really get a sense of the kick’s contribution to the mix, without referencing it to the most up-front part – the vocals? So on-and-on I’ve found reasons to listen to the kick in context with almost all the various tracks in my mix. And what does this tell me?

Well, for starters, I always open up a new session, and hit play. Then I flip to the mixer window and start moving faders and pans. No Eq, no compression, no reverb, no nothing. Just volume levels and pan positions. Then as the song progresses, I start to take note (in my head and on paper) of major song changes, instrumentation, mud or overlap that I can hear, etc. Just start to note things that contribute to the decisions I will make when fine tuning. Notice I haven’t touched a solo yet.

The key for me is to get a sense of what the band or musician was hoping for as he/she/they were recording and writing. It’s all about how the parts work together – or get mixed together. That gives me something to think about as I start my soloing. Now when I solo my kick, I have a sense of where it needs to fit. I also know where to cut it back to make room for my bass. I might be wrong, and have to tweak my changes, but if I repeatedly un-solo it to hear it with the bass, I can verify or un-do my tweaks as I’m doing them.

There are some people who don’t solo a thing while mixing, and there are some people who solo everything (I think there’s more of us). But the key thing to remember is that soloing is a tool that lets you look at tracks in a particular way. But mixing is ultimately about the big picture.

So if you find yourself getting lost in endless tweaks because every change you make seems to get you further and further away from that perfect mix you hear in your head- perhaps stepping back and rough mixing without the solos will help bring back some perspective.

Just some food for thought. Until next week, happy sound hunting.