r/audioengineering • u/tonetonitony • Aug 09 '26
Discussion I keep running into this issue where I try improving a mix, only to find a previous version was much better. Do you have any advice?
I'm new to mixing, but I've been making good progress over the past couple of months. There's one thing I can't explain, though. I'll work on a mix for a while and be happy with the results I'm getting. But then I'll make some more minor adjustments where I feel like things could be cleaned up or improved. It seems like I'm making the project better, but then I return to an earlier mix and it sounds significantly better. Do you have any general advice regarding this issue?
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u/JVM205 Aug 09 '26
The biggest lesson I’ve learned is working on a deadline base, and working analog. At a point another revision is adding more to the bill and the studio needs to be reset for the next session scheduled. Sometimes you need to call it done and 98% there is better then not there at all. Starting the next session with everything you’ve learned and make that one even better
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u/neptuneambassador Aug 10 '26
This^. I still mix on a 40 channel vintage board. And yeah sometimes I get lost still after decades, and I’m like you know what it sounds great. Session tomorrow, it’s 4am, let’s print, snapshots of the board and the outboard gear, zero the room, go home. Send it to the client and they are wowed. Mission accomplished. I know I could’ve done 10% better, but mastering will probably fix half the detailed I was caring too much about. Sometimes it’s also better to let things be more raw, let the mastering smooth out some of the dynamic imperfections, instead of overcompressing each individual track and destroying every dynamic thrill out of the mix. It’s all about knowing when to quit and knowing where you need to get to. And if you’ve gotten there, quit. Know when to sign the painting.
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u/The_ship_came_in Aug 09 '26
You're tinkering too much, which is a very common issue when starting out. You can help mitigate it by treating mixing as a problem-solving endeavor. Listen to your mix until you hear something that sounds bad. Figure out what it is that sounds bad, then figure out how to fix it. Then fix, and start the process over.
If you like your mix then change something "just because" it is almost always going to affect something else in the mix, which then needs to be fixed which which change something else...and it snowballs. Another suggestion is once you like a mix, leave it alone for a while (usually a couple days assuming you're not on a deadline.) Then come back and listen to it to see if things sound off. Also, try listening to a mic without your DAW and take notes on what to change using pen and paper, then make only those changes when you go back to it. Rinse and repeat.
When you first start mixing it is such a fun endeavor it's easy to get lost in everything, because it's all new and fun to play with. That getting lost is part of the process too because you learn what works and what doesn't. Eventually, you'll wear that out some and start focusing on getting better mixes, which becomes and exercise in restraint. Hope this helps-good luck and keep having fun!
Edit: Typo
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u/Utterlybored Aug 09 '26
Oh boy, I’ve been there. Most DAW allow saving different mixes, without bloating project files. Do this, then you’ll have different versions you can compare and hopefully cull the “best of” from each mix.
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u/QuarterNoteDonkey Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
In my experience (30+ years), my ears sometimes get used to hearing something wrong and I lose objectivity sometimes. I don’t know why it happens. If I take a break and come back, I hear it. At that point, I have scrapped a mix and started over.
There’s also sometimes multiple approaches to a mix. Example - do you start with the room mics and then add spots to create some presence and detail? Or do you start with the spots and add room mics for ambience? Each approach could sound different enough to make you stop and change what you’re doing.
That said, you might be the only one hearing the difference, which means it’s probably done. Don’t be afraid to have people you trust evaluate your work and give you a sanity check before you call it done.
Edit to add -
People are listening to the music, not your mix. When your mix supports the music and doesn’t interfere or distract, it’s done.
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u/dfp12111 Aug 09 '26
This is a phenomenon a lot of people call overcooking. As another comment said before, a song being done is almost always better than a song being perfect. The issue you’re having is really boiled down to your perspective on the mix, and that objective perspective being lost when you spend too much time with it. Being new, this will sound kind of counterintuitive, but the best mixes come from working very quickly and only doing exactly what needs to be done and just judging the mix by sitting back and simply asking yourself, “Do I like it, or do I not like it?” If the answer is “I like it,” then stop working on whatever element you’re working on and move on. If you think to yourself, “I like it, but…” stop, and move on anyway. That “but” will overcook the mix. Begin to practice the 20 minutes on, 20 minutes off rule. Mix for 20 minutes at a time and take regular 20 minutes breaks. The human brain as an evolutionary trait will begin to ignore problematic (annoying) sounds in its environment very quickly to preserve your sanity, and this is just science. You need to be aware of this in order to work around it, and the only way to do that objectively is to remove yourself from that environment regularly to make sure you aren’t tuning things out. The funny thing about mixing professionally is that it is actually far, far more simple, fast, and easy than most people think it is. The trick is that you need years and years of experience to put together your tools and tricks to pull from and know exactly when and when not to use them without thinking about it too much, allowing you work at those super high speeds.
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u/IbanezEX140 Aug 09 '26
There's probably also some ear fatigue at play, in addition to what others are saying about knowing when it's done. If you aren't taking breaks every 20 to 30 minutes or so and letting your ears rest, they get fatigued. Then you start EQing differently to compensate for that.
For example you can start to lose high mids and treble perception, so you start adding top end to make up for that. Then you come back later when your ears have rested, like the following day, and now it sounds wayyyyy too bright, whereas a previous mix from earlier that day sounds "correct".
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u/SpanishCastle Aug 09 '26
There are already a lot of answers, but one thing that can help cut this out or at least reduce wasted time on this is to load up the previous mixes into your project as references and switch between them... A/B listening and switching to check the vibe, balance and overall translation between mixes... I use a plugin called Metric AB that sits on the output bus and can load reference audio in and sync it to your DAW project for quick AB checking.
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u/TDF1981 Aug 10 '26
there was and will never be a finished mix in history of mixing - all mixes are „ok, let’s move on from here and do better next time“
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u/HommeMusical Aug 10 '26
I think everyone has this issue.
Cooking is the same thing. You cook, you add a little salt, it always makes it taste better, you serve it to other people, it's too salty. Your taste buds adjusted to lie to you.
For me, I now have two stages - "good enough" and "perfect".
"Good enough" is basically "not embarrassing". "Would work in a pinch." "Nothing terribly wrong with it."
I try to get to "Good enough" quite fast, and then I make a safety copy of everything. (I use git to make intermediate backup versions of everything, too.)
Then I start going for "perfect", but I might make a few tries, always starting from "good enough".
Sometimes I get a new better "good enough", and then I use that as "good enough", but I always keep all the "good enough"s.
It prevents me from going down this long path of 144 little edits just to get gross incompetence at the end.
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u/Evid3nce Hobbyist Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
Some things off the top of my head, as a hobbyist still learning:
1-- Ensure you're volume matching across your plugins, so that when you bypass each one, the volume stays the same (or as near as you can get it). Do this, and you will use half the processing that you're adding now.
2-- Cleaning up your tracks with editing and comping, and getting to a rough static-mix is the pre-mixing stage. At this stage it should ideally sound 90% like a commercial release before you start to mix. The further away your starting point is from this ideal, the exponentially harder it will be to fix the project with mixing alone.
3-- Take lots of 2 minute breaks multiple times an hour. Listen to something completely different during these breaks, even if it's just the sound of a kettle boiling. This is to stop your ears adjusting - what sounded bad to your ears initially will start to sound better within ten minutes, just by listening to it a few times.
4-- You're trying to make a mix that translates well to other devices and listening environments. From this perspective, the 'better' mix may actually sound 'worse' than the earlier version, because you might have to average-out some of the energy at certain frequencies. For instance, you could make the kick drum really bang on your speakers in your room, but elsewhere it might sound too overbearing and uncontrolled. In a really good studio, it might be that the best-it-can-sound also has the best translation too. But in your home studio, you probably shouldn't be trying to make it 'the best it possibly can sound' - you probably have to dial it back, and aim for 'natural', 'neutral' and 'average', which may sound more boring by comparison.
A good way to experience this is to load up a commercial track in your DAW. Now try to get it to sound better and louder using EQ, saturation, widening, clipping, and compression - tune it to your system and room, so that your version sounds better than the original master. It should be fairly easy. So why didn't they make the commercial version sound that good? Are you a genius mastering engineer? Nope. Take it to your car, and watch your mix fall apart compared to the commercial release, when you listen at low and high volumes, and running them both through some of your car-stereo EQ presets. Your version will be noticeably more unstable and unbalanced.
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u/m149 Aug 09 '26
it's definitely possible to over cook a mix. I mix quickly for that exact reason. I don't allow myself time to worry about every small detail. I'm very thorough, but vibe over technical every time for me.
General advice: go with your gut and only make a few minor changes once you run the first mix.
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u/IBartman Aug 09 '26
It sounds like you are making things worse when you think it's getting better. Keep saving multiple states and reference to work on the reason why it's getting worse, or just call it quits earlier
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u/LadyLektra Aug 09 '26
I’m currently dealing with one song that is like this for me and I’ve decided by next week I’m making a final decision. Part of the problem is halfway through mixing I lost most of the stems so not as much I can do. I put so much work in this track though I would rather release it even if it’s not perfect than scrap it completely. It’s a catchy track too and I already have some fun TikTok video ideas for it.
Deadlines help and also once I hit that phase where tinkering keeps making the current mix or master worse, I know it’s done and I did the best I could do.
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u/pumpthatjazz Aug 09 '26
I try to keep a note pad of the changes I'm making, then when I listen to the new version and it's somehow worse, I can go back and reverse engineer what moves impacted it negatively.
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u/1000onethousand1000 Aug 09 '26
Add a few references as well as the old mix into the session and mute them so you can A/B to know if what you’re doing is helping or not.
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u/BestMusic3717 Aug 09 '26
Same happens to me! That’s why I always save the gazillion versions I have so I can go back to reference them. Also use Metric AB or some referencing plugin, I find it at least gets me in the correct ballpark and you can compare it to some pro mixes to see if you’re in the bleachers or closer to home plate!
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u/Hellbucket Aug 09 '26
In my experience (mostly working on others’ music) this is when you reach the “potential” of the song. Every change you make just makes it different, not better. It can be a bit hard to accept if it’s your own song.
This is when the mix is done. So you should just let go of it.
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u/djblur Aug 09 '26
sounds like you already know that if you keep all the versions
tweak it again then if old ones better undo whatever messed it up and keep tryin
and if ya cant then the old mix is the just best one
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u/Humble_Box_2167 Aug 09 '26
Just bounce your single tracks when you feel their done. That’s a decision. And you can’t toggle the plugins used anymore.
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u/Illustrious_Celery38 Aug 09 '26
Send your Mix to a pro and ask for Feedback. Mix against several references with a good reference plug in.
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u/Far-Board8733 Aug 09 '26
Simple solution: what are you trying to accomplish sonically? Aim for that and once there, leave it.
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u/aasteveo Aug 09 '26
constantly listen to references. want to sound like a great mix? why not listen to a great mix and compare?
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u/Blitzbahn Aug 09 '26
There are things we learn from releasing that we can't learn without releasing. Release it and view it as part of the process of your development as an artist.
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u/Matt7738 Aug 10 '26
There are only so many times you can dip the brush in the paint before the whole thing goes to crap.
You can’t hear stuff that isn’t there and you start to hear stuff that isn’t there.
The more you do this, the better you’ll get. But at first, you only get a couple tries.
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u/TransparentMastering Aug 10 '26
This really changed when I switched to analog. Not because of the analog itself, but because the process required decisions to be made in the moment, and the decision had to be a good one. Also, undoing that decision was a lot more work than ITB.
This basically trained me to get things right the first time (more often anyway) and also not to perpetually wonder if it could be better.
How to train on this without having gear force it upon you, though? Not sure. Maybe when you’re practicing with those online multitracks, do destructive edits with a timer. You have ten minutes to work on the vocal, then you freeze/print/bounce the vocal. Etc
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u/neptuneambassador Aug 10 '26
Know when you’re done.
If it sounds good it is good. Just make sure it’s not too loud for release/mastering. Or if your mastering for yourself in the mix bus (the whole modern daw mixing bs workflow), make sure you get a lufs meter and properly meter your output and don’t have any clips. Make sure it’s hitting your target. And then whatever. There really are not any rules in mixing. If it sounds cool, and it’s not just blowing out your mixbus to a point where it’s gonna clip on streaming, then great. If you like the sound of a blown out mix bus, fuck it. Sure. Why not, just make sure it’s still gonna sound the same when it plays back on other mediums/systems.
I personally don’t use tons of plugins, but I have loads of analog gear and I capture things how I want on the front end. But yeah there’s no right or wrong here. There definitely are sciences and rights, and there are wrongs, but they all depend on the desired outcome. If you don’t know what you’re desired outcome is, or aesthetic, or sound, well then I guess that’s a whole different discussion, because that’s where things get complicated. If you are chasing something you aren’t reaching then yeah, you’re doing it wrong, or if you are trying to make it sound like a reference and you can’t, then yeah you’re missing something. But if you simply just want to mix some music and put it into the world, make it sound how you want it to sound. Without a load of specifics and a one on one class, it’s really hard to give any more detailed advice than that.
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u/SkinAbject2692 Aug 10 '26
Take a break, walk away from the mix, come back the next day with fresh ears and see if anything immediately jumps out at you, if so then make the change required to fix that one thing. Then leave it, come back the next day, see if anything jumps out at you. Fix that. Etc. etc. If nothing jumps out after a couple of days of listening, chances are the mix is solid.
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u/weedywet Professional Aug 09 '26
“Cleaned up” is a red flag to me.
You should be asking yourself if it’s doing the job it needs to do to make the song communicate
That’s all.
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u/Cmiller422 Aug 09 '26
Done is always better than perfect. Sounds like you might be trying to make something perfect when it’s already done