Don’t Worry if Your Rough Mix Sounds Rough
The rough mix is one of the most important things an artist can send me, even if it sounds absolutely terrible.
It might be muddy, the vocal might be far too loud, the low end might be threatening the structural integrity of the building, and the master bus might be getting battered so hard by a limiter that the waveform looks like a paving slab. I don’t care about any of that. The rough mix doesn’t need to sound great. If it already sounded great, there’s a fair chance you wouldn’t be sending it to a mixing engineer in the first place.
What it does need to do is show me where we’re going.
(If you’re not familiar with the term itself, I’ve put together a straightforward guide to what a rough mix is here.)
A rough mix communicates the balance, feel and general vibe of a track in a way that words often can’t. You can tell me you want the song to sound big, warm, aggressive, dreamy, intimate or “more professional”, but all of those descriptions are open to interpretation. One person’s warm is another person’s muddy, one person’s massive is another person’s horrible wall of noise, and I’m still not entirely sure anyone knows exactly what “more professional” means. I certainly don’t.
The rough cuts through all of that because I can actually hear what those words mean to you.
Even artists who insist they’ve absolutely no idea what they’re doing when it comes to mixing will usually communicate far more than they realise. In fact, their rough mixes are often the most instructive. The broad decisions they make tell me what matters to them. They turn up the bits they like. They push the vocal right out in front or bury it inside the track. They keep the drums tight and dry, or make them sound like they were recorded at the bottom of a cathedral. They widen the chorus, pull the verse inward, crank the bass up until the shelves start rattling, and throw enormous delays onto particular words because it felt cool at the time.
Some of those decisions might be technically questionable, but that doesn’t make them meaningless. They show me how you hear the song, which elements you consider important and what sort of emotional world you want the finished mix to live in. That information is massive.
It doesn’t mean I’ll copy every decision exactly. There wouldn’t be much point hiring me if I just recreated all the same problems with slightly more expensive plugins. Sometimes the vocal is sitting in roughly the right emotional place, but the way it’s been pushed there is flattening the entire track. Sometimes the reverb is miles too loud, but it tells me the vocal is meant to feel distant and atmospheric. Sometimes a synth is taking everybody’s head off, but it’s also clearly supposed to be the defining sound of the chorus.
The exact level, processing or effect might change. What matters is that I understand what the decision was trying to achieve before I start pulling it apart.
This is why I think it’s so important for a mixing engineer to respect the rough. When you send a track away to be mixed, you’re not handing over the artistic direction and asking someone else to decide what the song should become. You’re bringing them in to help realise the vision that’s already there.
No artist wants to spend weeks, months or sometimes years writing, recording and producing a track, send it away to be mixed, and then get something back that sounds like the mixer’s used it as raw material for an entirely different song. The fact that somebody knows more about compressors doesn’t automatically give them executive control over your music.
If you send over a tight, punchy drum recording, I shouldn’t suddenly decide that what it really needs is to be absolutely swamped in hall reverb. I might think it sounds brilliant. I might’ve spent half an hour carefully building the greatest hall reverb anyone’s ever heard (and by half an hour I mean four). It would still be completely wrong if that wasn’t the direction you wanted for the song.
My job isn’t to replace your taste with my own. It’s to work out what you’re trying to achieve and help you achieve it more successfully. That means improving the execution without casually rewriting the idea underneath it.
Respecting the rough doesn’t mean treating it as a sacred document that can’t be questioned. It means treating it as an important guide to your intentions rather than an amateur mix to be ignored as soon as I open the session. There’s a big difference between improving an idea and deciding the idea itself was wrong because I personally would’ve done something else.
The other side of all this is that you really don’t need to stress about making your rough perfect before sending it over. You don’t need to spend another three days automating every vocal phrase, hunting down every slightly unpleasant frequency or losing sleep over whether the guitar should come up by 0.7 dB. You definitely don’t need to learn how to mix professionally before you’re allowed to hire a professional mixer. That seems like a fairly unreasonable entry requirement, and one I don’t encourage because I quite like my job.
What I need is the broad-stroke version of the track that feels right to you. Get the vocal roughly where you hear it. Push the important parts forward. Add the effects that feel like part of the song rather than worrying about whether you’ve chosen the technically correct reverb. Make sure the chorus lifts in the way you imagined. Trust your instincts and get it to the point where it makes your head nod and feels like the record you wanted to make.
If it still sounds a bit shit, that’s absolutely fine. That’s where I come in.
Think of the rough as the plan. It shows me where we’re heading and stops me wandering miles off-piste while confidently telling myself that I’m improving everything. I can then worry about the smaller details, sort out the balance, clarity, depth, control and translation, and get the whole thing sounding finished without losing sight of why the track worked in the first place.
So when you’re getting ready to send a song for mixing, don’t worry about making the rough sound like a finished professional record. Make it feel right. Send the version that most clearly communicates how you hear the song, even if there are technical problems all over it.
Your rough mix doesn’t need to prove that you know how to mix. It just needs to show me the record you’re trying to make.
