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Up.  Up is many people’s favorite direction.  Turn up the guitar, now turn up the drums, now turn up the bass.  Oh, now we need to turn up that guitar again…and the cycle renews.  Up is not always the way to go, in fact if you view mixing as a closed system, you can only go up so far before everything becomes an overly compressed or distorted wash.

I’m hear to preach the oft-forgotten direction of down—I call this subtractive mixing.  Instead of thinking in terms of what you’d like to hear more of, think of the tracks that you could stand to hear less of at a given moment.

What track should be featured during this song or during this section?  If you’d like to hear the guitar screaming throughout the tune, then try turning down everything else.  In the world of mixing, this approach will allow more headroom in the mix so that you can achieve a proper balance first and then bring the whole mix up afterward with two-mix compression.

If you’ve ever engineered a recording session at a studio with individual headphone mixers, then you know that when you show the musicians their cues, the most important knob is the “more-me” knob.  As in “Which knob do I turn up to hear more me?” (Think of that opening sequence in School of Rock where Jack Black is playing guitar in front of a wall of Marshall Amplifiers and still says “More me!  I need more me in the monitor!” it’s funny because it’s true…)  Since most amateur and semi-professional recordists are musicians themselves, they often approach a mix in the same way.  If you happen to be playing on all the tracks, then turning up the more-me knob everywhere doesn’t do much good! 

Now it is important to bear in mind that we need not relegate addition and subtraction to gross level changes.  In many instances, this would be like using a hammer when a scalpel is more appropriate.  If you want the bass guitar to shine through, you don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater by turning down everything else.  Instead, you might use an EQ to carve a place out for the bass guitar in the mix.  One of the so-called “magic frequencies” is 270 hz.  Try turning down 270 in every other instrument and turning 270 up in the bass.  This is just a starting point because I am not a big believer in magic frequencies for all applications, but the exercise is useful as a starting point.

One of the tried and true commandments in the mixing world is that in order for something to be big, something else has to be small.  So instead of thinking about what you want to be big, start thinking about what can be small.  A flavor track like tamborine can be small in comparison to the lead vocal, the bass content of a lead guitar can be small in comparison to the bass content of the bass.  While nothing changes but your philosophy, oftentimes it will result in a more satisfying, more complete mix.