Mixing day

Mixing day is the day a song stops being mine and starts being itself. Up until then I have been deciding things. Which take, which key, which guitar. Mixing is when the song answers back.

The trick I am still learning is to not over direct. A good engineer hears things I cannot hear from inside the song. If I sit beside them telling them where every fader should sit, I am just making a louder version of my own demo.

So I bring tea, and I bring two reference tracks I love, and I try to describe how I want the song to feel rather than what I want it to do. The mix that comes back is almost always better than the one I would have built alone, and the parts I most wanted to protect tend to be exactly the parts the engineer made shine.