How long does it take to mix a song?
The short answer: about 4 hours, probably.
The long answer:
Brace yourself…
Estimating how long it will take to mix a song, and therefore offering a reliable quote for it, is a bit like quoting for the time it might take to do a jigsaw or a Sudoku. You may start with enthusiasm, but the scale of the challenge is only realised after you’ve sat there for hours chewing a pencil.
Add to that the fact that the human mind is simply incapable of focussing on the same piece of music, over and over again, all day long, without diminishing its ability to make good objective judgements (even when factoring in occasional breaks), and the initial estimation quickly starts to seem like some kind of insane fantasy.
The good news is that I have timed it, over many sessions, and it averages out at a fairly stable 4 hours. The slightly more ambiguous news is that this figure masks a huge degree of nuance, based on many variables too tedious to scrutinise in detail.
But that’s okay! “Tedious” is my middle name!
🤔
I’ve done plenty of weekend recording sessions where the mix was thrown together in the dwindling hours and just happened to come out sounding great, sometimes after having given a long speech about how that literally never happens. Some of my favourite sessions were like that, and the sheer immediacy of them – the fact that lightning in a bottle was captured, and no-one got fatigued or bogged down with any of the obsessive sticking points that can plague ongoing projects – meant that everyone could walk away from the session feeling genuinely chuffed, rather than flat out exhausted and vowing never to listen to it again. This is one among many reasons why perfectionism is not your friend.
However, that scenario isn’t guaranteed – it reflects a very particular set of circumstances. Usually, these projects have a naturally organic aesthetic that benefits from not sounding mechanically “perfect” and doesn’t call for much post-production trickery. Nor were there loads of problems to fix. The musicians were happy with their takes after one or two passes, the instruments sounded great quickly and easily, and the mix just fell into place without much persuasion. In short, there was nothing left that needed fixing at the mix stage – the arrangement, tones and performances were already doing the heavy lifting, so a quick rough mix was enough to capture it.
This only happens when the band have all the pieces in place, or when we’ve had enough time in the studio to go on that journey of discovery together. A mix is only as good as its constituent parts, and if I have to retroactively construct it with a mammoth edit-and-mix session because you only wanted to spend two days recording eight songs, you will destroy my objectivity and still face the huge bill you thought you were avoiding. Skimp on the recording, pay for it in the mix.
What is Mixing?
Mixing isn’t some mystical process of alchemy. I think of it more like touching up a photo in Photoshop; if the source image isn’t any good to begin with, your ability to salvage it is extremely limited. You can enhance, balance and bring out what’s already there, but you can’t fake clarity or emotion that never existed in the first place. As the old computing phrase goes: garbage in, garbage out.
The goal of mixing is to balance all instruments within the stereo field so that they sit together in a natural, complementary way. For recorded music, that’s often easier said than done. I’m sometimes envious of electronic producers, who get to sculpt sounds from scratch to fill precise spaces. If there’s a hole in the mix, they can simply program a synth to plug it – no bleed, no spill, no technical acrobatics required. That’s no denigration of their craft; doing it well takes real skill. But mixing live instruments brings its own unique set of challenges, with goalposts that shift constantly from one band to the next. There’s a general methodology I tend to follow, but how closely it sticks to the plan depends entirely on what I’m working with. Some mixes glide smoothly from start to finish, while others need a bit of coaxing to behave. When the recording’s solid and the performances are confident, everything tends to fall into place. When it isn’t, that’s when the wrestling match begins.
Broadly speaking, the approach for a rock band runs along the following lines, but bear in mind, this is very approximate and assumes a project of one song being mixed thoroughly:
| # | Task | Details | Time taken |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Organise project | Decluttering, colour coding, bouncing, general organisation. | 1-3 hours. |
| 2. | Editing | Drum editing, comping vocals, tidying up takes, fixing problems, cross-fading, etc. | 1-3 hours for light work. 8+ hours for extensive drum editing, vocal pitch correction or other problem-solving. |
| 3. | Mix drums | Establish/refine a basic drum sound from a combination of close mics and room mics, with use of sweetening EQ and dynamics processing. Toms may be manually isolated, and reinforcing samples may be added if necessary. | 1 hour for a good kit played well. 2-3 hours to address significant problems. |
| 4. | Mix bass | Establish/refine a basic bass sound from a combination of mics and DI, and mix with drums. Longer required if the bass sound changes with distortion, FX, etc. | < 1 hour. |
| 5. | Mix guitars | Establish/refine basic guitar sounds from a combination of mics and DI, and mix with bass and drums. More guitars may take longer (but not always). | 1-2 hours. |
| 6. | Mix vocals | Establish/refine basic vocal sound using EQ and compression, manually align harmonies, BVs, and add into the mix. More vocals take longer. | 1-2 hours. |
| 7. | Overall balance | Create a good balance of all elements within the stereo field, that work well with each other. This is likely to entail fine-tune adjustment of EQ, compression, etc of all instruments. | 1-2 hours. |
| 8. | Focus on details | Creation of lots of automation throughout the song. This may include: Balance of guitars (widening in chorus, specific flourishes boosted, etc). Change in vocal sound between verse and chorus. Side-stick hits not sufficiently cutting through. Various overdubs/samples need addressing. | 1-3 hours for light work. 8+ hours for extensive work. |
| 9. | Overall mix | After a break, preferably of a day or more, the overall mix should be reviewed again, with adjustments made where necessary. | 1-2 hours. |
| 10. | A break of a week or more is optimal to clear my mind and allow a more objective overview of the mix. | ||
| 11. | Tweak | Mix review. | 1-2 hours. |
| 12. | Tweak | Ditto, except this time I’ll have the band present to make whatever adjustments they wish to make. | 1-2 hours. |
Mixing a Quick Recording Session
Most bands are very conscious of budget, and with budget being a forefront concern, they try to cram as much recording into as small a time frame as possible. Let’s say a weekend to record a handful of songs. Although quite common, the reality is that harsh time constraints are imposed on the session, and therefore the degree to which it’s physically possible to achieve the fantasy sound that they are dreaming of is severely curtailed. Failing to allocate due care and attention at the recording stage risks piling on pressure to the post-production stage – patching a hole over here only means the pipe bursts over there. To properly ensure a healthy flow we either need to decrease the water pressure or invest in a bigger pipe.
In our weekend session we only have time to record exactly what is in front of us, no fuss, no faff. We can’t experiment with tones, we can’t try things out, listen, review, and course-correct where necessary. We simply have to get it down and hope for the best. This is a gamble, because a recording session is a process of discovery, and it’s not obvious from the outset how it’s likely to unfold. You may start with the best of intentions, but if something’s not working then we should take steps to address it, and we should have allowed ourselves a sensible amount of time to do that. When time is against us, all concerns are reduced to “just get it down”. We patch the hole, only for the leak to spring up somewhere further down the pipe.
So we come to the end of the weekend recording session, we’ve scrambled to record all the necessary parts, overdubs, several vocal takes, a couple of different versions of the solo, etc, etc. By this point the project looks like a bomb has exploded in it because no time was available for project maintenance; automation lines are everywhere, various takes litter the screen with quick, scrappy edits yet to be properly addressed, and the track count is running into the 80s. The more songs there are, the worse this looks. The question is then asked “how long do you reckon it’ll take to mix this?”
The answer is “longer than 4 hours”.
Congratulations — you are doing sterling work in pushing up my average!
Failing to pay due care and attention to the recording, and leaving fate to determine how successfully the elements can be moulded together in the mix, invariably elicits phrases such as “the snare isn’t cutting through enough”, or “that riff is getting lost in the heavy bit”. Indeed. That’s because we steamrollered through the recording, and now we’re noticing things that would have been addressed earlier, had we allocated more time to pre-production, performance and recording. At this point those sorts of things are a major hassle to change, perhaps even requiring re-thinking altogether. Ultimately, if you want it to sound right, these are not issues that should have escaped attention until the mix stage.
Mixing on the Same Day as Recording
“If we finish early, can we spend the last few hours mixing?”
Despite my earlier confession that it’s not inconceivable that a session can be recorded, mixed and put to bed in the space of a weekend, that is not a realistic baseline expectation. I am very good at getting a fat sound that will put a smile on your face very quickly, but don’t therefore imagine it’s likely that we can pull everything together with a bow on top, to the satisfaction of your future self listening to it on your home speakers – especially after I’ve spent the day recording, problem-solving, jumping in and out of my seat and generally testing the limits of my attention span. It is not the time to delve into the intricacies of the mix while the band sits behind me restlessly chattering, noodling on guitars and boiling the kettle.
Proper mixing is rarely as simple as setting a few levels and hitting “Export”. It requires intense focus, especially for complex songs with lots of different sections, each requiring a separate mix in its own right. Part of the problem, apart from the obvious lack of time, is the reality of human perception. Mixing can be a quagmire in which it’s possible to exceed your concentration threshold, such that noise fatigue prevents you from making sensible decisions.
I’ll sometimes loop four or eight bars of a tricky passage to work on something specific. After a while, listening to the same bit on repeat scrambles your objectivity. You lose sight of the bigger picture, and the only cure is to step away for the day. Case in point: I’ve been sat on the sofa for hours writing this blog. I’ve had to invert the screen colours because my eyes hurt, and now when I look up, I can still see lines of text burned across my vision. Still, at least Murray’s lying in the middle of the floor looking unspeakably cute, providing some welcome relief from all this typing:
You get my point – intense focus on small details for long periods of time can seriously inhibit your ability to step back and look at the bigger picture. So if you weren’t banking on a picture of a cat being inserted half-way through your mix, it may be sensible to allocate sufficient mixing time to ensure that such questionable decisions are reviewed in the fresh light of a new day.
Mixing With The Band Present
I’ve just touched on this, so you’ll be unsurprised to learn that my opinion is that it’s not usually a good idea. It’s just too hard to concentrate when people are talking or generally being disruptive behind you. Again, if you were sat next to me as I type this, chatting away or questioning each sentence as it falls out of my fingers onto the keyboard, I would firstly ask how you got into my house, and secondly ask you to leave so that I could work in peace.
Aside from the distraction, the psychological pressure it can assert is often detrimental to workflow. For example, sometimes mixing requires experimentation; you might try something – maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. But if someone is standing behind you ready to pounce on every move you make it can damage your confidence and tempt you away from trying such things in the first place. You need to exercise some degree of freedom, and a hyper critical back-seat driver does not provide a context in which such freedom can be enjoyed.
That said, when mixing your music, my goal isn’t to do anything radical that you might disapprove of. “Check out this cool effect I added!” is rarely a welcome comment, and almost always followed by a request to remove it. I know the horror stories about precious producers who can’t take criticism and end up in petty arguments about how the mix “should” be. That’s not how I work. Creative decisions ultimately rest with the artist, not the engineer. My job is to realise your intent, not to hijack it.
Mixing isn’t about tearing everything down and starting again; it’s about refining what’s already there and making it hold together as a cohesive whole. The direction of travel is usually obvious from the session itself, and by the time we reach the mix I already have a reasonably solid reading of your preferences, and that provides a fairly reliable guide for how to take it forward.
Generally, I’ll bring the band in for a final tweak once all the technical work’s done, so they can have their input as they see fit. At that point I’m more than happy to turn things up or down, move things around, add a delay here, lose a reverb there – whatever’s needed to make everyone happy with the result. But the bulk of the work up to that stage is far easier done without distraction.
Getting Someone Else To Mix Your Project
Sometimes it’s the case that I work on a project over a number of days, weeks or months, and then that session is bounced down to individual tracks and handed to a external mix engineer. I am not a fan of this. I’ll explain why:
My recording style is quite specific. I use lots of room mics on the drums, particular combinations of mics on guitar amps, and have a fairly well-rehearsed set of tricks up my sleeve. In short, I know what to do with the stuff I record. I feel somewhat of a responsibility for stewarding the session, and ensuring that every creative decision was to the band’s approval. I had the pleasure of watching them dancing around the control room to their own music, heads bopping with the excitement of hearing themselves sounding great through loud speakers. It’s quite a feeling, and it reflects the shared experience we’ve been having up to that point. A mix has begun to naturally formulate within the project – various plugins have been added and technical decisions have embedded themselves into the workflow.
Then, suddenly, you hit a hard stop, break it all down, and hand it over to someone who’s had no insight into the project – someone inherently unsympathetic to how it’s been shaped so far. They’ll usually have their own idea of what a mix should sound like, and set about forcing the recording – which has, until now, been a genuine collaboration – to conform to their pre-conceived notion of a “good-sounding” mix. More often than not, that means chasing a benchmark that defines 99% of all releases in that genre. For me, a band should sound like themselves. Their character should shine through the speakers as the sum of their own aesthetic decisions. Too many mix engineers, however, treat mixing like an assembly line process that can be applied blindly to everything. That’s why so many records end up sounding identical.
The first thing to go is the drum room mics. For me, they’re an integral part of the drum sound and should be treated in a very specific way, but our external mix guy has no idea of their intended purpose, so in the bin they go. Then all the drums get sampled. Never mind the conversations we had about appropriate snare sounds or the time we invested tinkering with tuning – the mix guy can get through it much faster if he just triggers samples for the kick, snare and toms. Magic! Turns out we could’ve just used a biscuit tin. All that’s left of the original drum recording is the overheads, so a quick bit of high-pass filtering, some compression, and voilà! The cymbals now float above the hit-perfect drum samples with boring, stale precision. Suddenly very little of the original performance remains. Of course, I was also asked to bounce down the DI signals for each instrument, so those are run through the mix engineer’s go-to amp simulator presets. And there we are – a boring assembly line product that sounds exactly like everything else!
I don’t like it, and I don’t think it’s a wise choice. I never recognise the result as something that I worked on, and so we may as well have not bothered.
Mixing a Project Recorded by Someone Else
Occasionally I’m asked to mix projects recorded elsewhere. Okay. I’ll have a crack if you want. But unless the problems are obvious and easy to fix, it’s usually an uphill battle with unsatisfactory results.
If the recording’s been handled by a competent engineer in a decent studio, you should trust them to see it through to completion unless there’s a very good reason not to. They know their own workflow best. Be wary of cross-contaminating production styles by using a different recording and mix engineer without good cause. You’ll most likely end up with a sonic Frankenstein that never quite knows what it’s meant to be.
The moral of the story, as I’ve been saying all along: invest in your recording, not your mix.
How Long Does it Take to Mix a Song?
About 4 hours, give or take.
