How I Build a Mix From Nothing

The order in which you build a mix matters. Not because there's a single correct approach, but because certain decisions create constraints for subsequent ones — and making them in the right order means working with those constraints rather than against them.

Here's how I approach a new session.

1. Gain Staging Before Anything Else

Before a single plugin is inserted, every track in the session gets gain-staged. I'm looking for a consistent average input level — somewhere around -18 to -12 dBFS RMS across most sources, with headroom for transients. This ensures that when I start inserting compressors and saturators, they're receiving the signal level they're designed to work with. Gain staging is not exciting. It is the foundation everything else sits on.

2. Groups and Busses First

Before touching individual tracks, I build the routing. Drums go to a drum bus. Bass to a bass bus. All melodic instruments to an instruments bus. Vocals to a vocal bus. All of these route to a master bus. This architecture means I can make broad decisions at the group level and detailed decisions at the track level — and they'll interact properly.

3. Drums, Then Bass

I start with the rhythm section because everything else is going to be placed relative to it. The kick and snare establish the energy and weight of the record. Once they feel right, I bring in the bass and work on the relationship between kick and bass — the most important relationship in most modern mixes. If these two aren't working together, nothing else will.

Get the kick and bass right and you've done half the work. Everything else is filling in around a foundation that already exists.

4. Harmonic Elements

Guitars, keyboards, synths, strings — these get placed in the frequency and stereo space that the rhythm section left available. The main task here is carving: removing the parts of each instrument that overlap with more important elements, and reinforcing the parts that occupy unique space.

5. Lead Vocal Last

The vocal goes in last because it should win every frequency conflict. Once the vocal is in the mix, I adjust everything around it — not the other way around. Background vocals come in after the lead, placed underneath and behind it, supporting rather than competing.

6. Effects, Automation, Final Checks