What if you leave your faders at 0?

If you’ve ever had a mix that you knew sounded really good, but definitely didn't feel great (let alone masterful) and you couldn’t figure out what to do to get it there…

 

Chances are you did things early on in your workflow that would have made it almost impossible for you to reach a top pro mix without starting from scratch, and you didn't even realize it. Like a hamster wheel of mixing turmoil.

 

Using unity gain staging in your workflow is a consistent way to make sure you give yourself the highest possible chance of success as the mix progresses, and don’t limit your final mix quality from the get go.

This technique is something that gets passed down from master mixer to their assistants, for a reason. It’s a very solid way to set yourself up for success with a mix.

Unity Gain Staging in 3 steps:

1. Decide what stems you’re going to use (can you use the wet or will you need to use any of the dry?)

2. Leave all your faders at 0!

3. Clip gain all the stems until everything sounds the same as the producers stems (i.e. production mix)

If you were to quickly match a mix with faders instead of clip gain, it's not that much of an inferior approach, but no need to worry about that if you're not doing either. 😉 

Your best bet is unity gain staging.

Clearly there’s more we can unpack, but it's not complicated. Your final mix is typically not meant to be a drastic sonic departure from the producer/artist vision (remixes excluded!), so adding this to your workflow will increase the likelihood that you deliver a first pass that everyone will love.

Working at the highest levels of music as a mixing engineer means honoring the production while subtly, but with great impact, uplifting the sound. If you're a producer, like so many of the mixers we help, then you can probably appreciate this methodology more than most.

The producer finished a production mix to convey what the artists, and all creative contributors, were in agreement about before sending it for final mix. That mix is likely already a mix quality similar to that of what a second engineer to the masters is capable of. 

A cool bonus benefit of integrating unity gain staging into your workflow is that the critical listening skills required to do this are no joke, and will tell you a lot about how far you have to go.

You can’t sculpt what you can’t hear, and avoidance never helped anyone perform at the highest levels.
 

Use it as a test: how close can you get to the production mix by leaving your faders at 0 and adjusting the gain of each of the audio files in your DAW (you're aiming for everything together matching the production mix).