How to Set Your Mixing Levels – The Perfect Balance

One of the simultaneously simplest yet most challenging aspects of mixing is properly setting your levels. In other words, this is setting the volume of every track in your mix relative to every other track. There are a number of things to keep in mind, so let’s talk how to set your mixing levels to achieve the perfect balance.

How to Set Mixing Levels

Every mix is going to be different in terms of the perfect mixing levels. Incidentally one of the most common hangups I have with clients when I do commercial mixes relates to the levels with clients wanting X or Y track to be louder. I say that as a reminder that level setting is subjective and the perfect balance is in the ear of the beholder.

With that in mind, here are a number of things to help you set your mixing levels en route to achieving your own perfect balance.

Keep the Faders Free of Automation

Let’s begin with a very practical tip when it comes to finding the best mixing levels: keep your faders free of automation.

Mixing automation is an excellent tool to use to help keep your mix lively and evolving.

While automation can be applied to all kinds of processing to bring change from one section to another beyond the audio itself, volume automation is one of the most practical uses in your mix.

As the term suggests, volume automation refers to actively turning the volume of a track up or down as it progresses in the context of the mix. We can apply this to an individual track, an entire instrument group bus, or even the entire mix via the master bus to emphasize or de-emphasize one section of a song relative to the parts around it.

This is a sneaky, lazy, yet effective way to make a chorus hit a little harder, or emphasize and highlight an otherwise underwhelming chorus.

When we apply that automation to the fader itself, this makes tweaking that fader position more difficult as in most DAWs you need to highlight the entire automation envelope and pull that up or down versus just pushing that fader up or down as much as you need on the fly to better set its level.

Instead, I like to drop a gain plugin at the end of my processing chain for any track(s) I want to apply volume automation to and instead apply the automation to that gain plugin. This allows us to bake in that live adjustment for the relative volume of that track as the mix plays while still keeping that fader clean so that we can tweak it to find that ideal position.

Use Gain Staging

I preach the importance of gain staging a lot for its numerous benefits in the mix:

Aside from helping achieve a better sounding mix by feeding optimal levels into your processing/plugins and creating more mixing headroom which in turn allows you to achieve a (better sounding) louder mix, gain staging goes a long way in setting up your mixing levels.

The basic concept of gain staging is to get all of the tracks in your mix to average -18dB with -12 to 10dB peaks.

Aside from the aforementioned benefits to your mix, this gets them all within a similar pocket to one another and makes setting the levels a lot easier.

At this point it’s just about tweaking the levels to ensure everything remains visible and nothing’s getting lost.

Somewhat in the same vein, I like to pull DOWN faders relative to something which needs to be louder rather than pushing that track up. This keeps that mixing headroom intact and keeps the mix from getting too hot and potentially nearing the point of clipping.

Check Your Mix in Mono

Mixing in mono is just that, forcing every track to the center and taking away the sides of the mix. In my Ableton Live, this is done simply with a Utility plugin set to mono on the master bus.

Mixing in mono helps you identify frequency conflicts between tracks so that you can get a more open mix, even after you remove the mono designation and make use of audio panning.

In the same vein, while don’t need to set your levels in mono, it helps to routinely check your mix in mono to ensure that everything is visible without having to fall back on panning.

Remember that while you’re listening to your mix in perfect conditions (good speakers, a controlled environment, etc. – see where to mix music), you need to account for all of the imperfect conditions your mix will be heard upon its release.

As such, the levels of your mix need to stand on their own in mono as well as in perfect stereo, so check it from time to time. If two or more tracks aren’t gelling in mono despite your best efforts in adjusting their levels, this is a clear sign that some complementary EQ needs to be done.

Adjust as You Go

This is another practical point with regards to setting your mixing levels, but a lot of changes happen over the course of mixing.

That’s what mixing is – constantly tweaking and hopefully improving its overall sound and balance.

This means adjusting all types of processing, most of which will change the volume or perception of tracks as you go like EQ and compression, EVEN if you keep gain staging in mind and continue to adjust that output level with plugin.

While this likely goes without saying, after that initial gain staging and level setting, it’s best to adjust the levels of the mix on the fly to keep the right balance as you go.

Genre Specific

It’s a cliche, albeit one which has beared out for decades, but certain genres have standards with regards to mixing levels which typically sound good within them.

For instance, pop music is all about emphasizing the singer and vocals, so the vocal mixing levels are generally set a couple dB or more to sit above the rest of the mix.

In rap and hip-hop, the vocals are similarly propped up but they share that mantle with the drums/percussive elements/beat.

In rock and country, the guitars are typically pushed up to be more visible in/if not the focal point of the mix.

Of course these are all just rough guidelines – the real takeaway is emphasizing whatever the “star” of that mix is and giving it a subtle or more palpable edge over the rest of the mix without sounding out of place.

Use Reference Tracks

Remember when I said the perfect mixing levels is subjective? You can take a lot of the subjectivity out of it or better said guide your own perception of what is perfect by keeping other successful mixes or better said mixes you like in mind while mixing.

I talk about the importance of reference tracks all the time when it comes to guiding your ears. Having a mix that you like the sound of, specifically one which is similar or relevant to your current mix in terms of genre or energy that you aspire yours to sound like considerably helps keep your ears trained on the goal.

This extends to setting the levels as well. So even better than simply knowing in pop you want the vocals higher or rock you want the guitars more emphasized, you have a concrete example to pull up on demand in real time in your own mix to refocus your context of the ideal levels from a mix which you know is working.

Adjust EQ, Punch, and Reverb for Proximity and Visibility

This is a loaded one, but it’s incredibly essential to remember to distinguish volume from proximity and visibility.

In other words, I’ll oftentimes find in the course of my own mixes that I’ll have the level of a track perfectly set, but it still either feels too close or isn’t asserting itself enough in the mix.

These aren’t issues of the level, but rather things which can be solved via EQ, reverb, or simply taking a track’s transients into account.

For instance, when a track feels too close, we can attenuate some of its top end via a small high shelf EQ cut.

Above I’m showing a boost to bring a track closer; pulling this down a couple/few dB instead would push the track a little farther back with subtlety because of how we perceive high frequencies versus low frequencies with the former seeming closer because of how higher frequencies moving faster.

It’s a similar principle when a track has the right level but it feels lost in the mix. In this case we can add mixing “punch” to a track via transients with boosts in the 3k-10k range (depending on the track) to bring out the percussive qualities of a track, making it feel closer without having to turn up the volume needlessly.

I put together a complete guide on how to add audio transients, so refer to that to give any tracks in your mix which need that extra oomph just that to give them their visibility without adjusting what’s already an ideal level.

Lastly, don’t forget the importance of a bit or lot of reverb to get a track’s third-dimensional position just right, and that’s independent of its level. Check out my many reverb tutorials to find the right balance for any and all types of audio in your mix to get them sitting just right.

Mixing Levels Tips

• Use automation for a more interesting and dynamic mix, but keep it on the tail end of the processing chain to keep your faders clean for easier adjustments.
• Gain stage before you do anything else to enjoy its benefits as well as get your levels surprisingly close to their ideal positions.
• An extension of that last point, make it a point to pull faders down relative to the tracks you want to emphasize to avoid eating up your headroom and making the mix too hot.
• Routinely checking your mix levels in mono helps to ensure that your mix works in all environments aside from the ideal perfect stereo setup you’re working/listening in.
• Adjust as you go rather than trying to set them all at the end as keeping a relatively good balance while you tweak processing settings will yield better overall results for the entire mix when you’re making better informed decisions with the context of the entire mix as it will likely sound around it.
• Keep your genre in mind but ultimately defer to reference tracks for mixes within your genre that you know work well to act as a loose template for setting the ideal levels in your mix with regards to what should be more present over other tracks.
• Don’t mistake a track needing a proximity or punch adjustment for a need for a level adjustment. A lot of problems for a track can better be adjusted via giving it more (or less) punch or moving it closer or farther away from the listener via EQ or reverb adjustments as opposed to moving the fader.