This is by far the single most important thing that I have been taught. My mixes improved exponentially when I stopped being afraid to just leave things alone.
Once the proper balance has been achieved on a great song, there is nothing in the mixing process that can enhance its commercial value any further. Recently, I was sitting in a studio lounge patiently waiting for a customer service representative for a big company to assist me. My phone was on speaker as the on-hold music played. The song playing at that moment was “Lost That Loving Feeling” by the Righteous Brothers. Some additional engineers joined me in the lounge. The conversation quickly turned to the music playing on the speakerphone. We were all in agreement that in spite of technology limitations of 1960s recording equipment, and the fact that we were listening over an on-hold delivery system, the song sounded great to our ears. If a song isn’t great from the moment you first push up the faders, it’s never going to be great. In that case, you have to find something about the song that you can accentuate to give the artist a chance to be heard and fight another day.
I used to add a ton of reverb in solo because "everything sounds better with reverb in solo" haha. Always mix tracks in context with the rest of the tracks.
The problem with all the so-called experts, preaching to you here on RU-vid of how to make your mixes is everybody’s ignoring the biggest factor and that is the talent that goes into a great performance and the vibe and the energy and the magic all of that great stuff all that stuff we turned to music for is systematically being squeezed out of it. Listen to the drums that almost all these great producerson RU-vid they are solace. They are repetitive not all of them but almost all of them. There’s a few exceptions.
I run a channel about Live Sound and this is exactly why I don’t Teach people how do stuff like this, I explain the results I want to get and how to achieve it, not “ EQ this “ or Comp this…
another thing too is that alot of people will watch random channels like this one or colt capperune and think that mixing advice applies to all music, when really it doesnt, alot of these guys making youtube tutorials dont work on electronic music for example or they rarely do and its a very specific type or style mixing advice shouldnt be taken as one size fits all
I made some horrible sounding mixes doing this. One song however sounded amazing, completely by chance. My really poor, over-compressed mix somehow made it work really well.
