The Key to Better Mixes: Mixing Is About Taste

Hey guys!

As I progress in my career and work on more records, I realize that part of improving is becoming conscious of random production or mix “rules” that seeped into my brain at some point and can feel slightly paralyzing, and then actively dismantling them.

For example, I was hitting the meter hard with a kick in a mix. The second I noticed, my brain went, RED IS BAD AND SCARY!!! Gain stage immediately!!!

Then it hit me. Wait. The clipping of the kick is actually part of the aesthetic. Once I lowered the kick so it was back in the green, it was honestly just… lamer. 🙂

It made me realize how many “rules” we follow automatically without stopping to ask whether they’re actually helping the emotion and the music. These thoughts are what inspired this blog post.

I had a blast chatting with Latin Grammy Award winning mixer Thiago Baggio to get his take on this.

I asked him: “What’s a mixing ‘rule’ you believed early in your career that you eventually broke- and your mixes got better because of it?”

Thiago's Take on Rules and Taste

He said: “Probably the biggest rule I learned is that there are no rules — which sounds cliché, but it took me years to actually understand that.

When we’re starting out, we tend to copy what other engineers do. We assume that if something works for them, it must be the right way to do it. The problem is that most of the time we don’t even know why we’re doing those things — we’re just repeating them.

Very early in my career I worked as an assistant to a great mixer here in Brazil. He was my mentor in the beginning and I really looked up to him. He had this very romantic and complicated mixing workflow that worked beautifully for him, for his taste, and for the kind of music he mixed.

So naturally I tried to copy everything he was doing — even simple things like the colors in the session and the way he named tracks.

In the beginning that was actually very helpful. Even though some things didn’t fully make sense to me yet, my mixes improved a lot in a short period of time.

But as time went on, I started to run into some barriers. That system that seemed so impressive at first slowly started to hold me back.

The reason was simple: my references were different from his, and my taste was different too. As I got better and started understanding my tools more deeply, I wanted to pursue the sounds I had in my head — and using that very specific workflow started to get in the way.

For a long time I insisted on using it anyway, even though I felt things were becoming more complicated than they needed to be for me. Eventually I realized I had to throw all of that away and start from scratch. That was actually very hard. I had to detach from everything I had learned and figure out what really worked for me. It took a lot of experimentation and a lot of trial and error. None of that time was wasted — but copying his entire system simply wasn’t right for me.

At some point you realize that mixing is really about taste, and taste is personal.

Even now I still catch myself creating new “rules” or using fancy techniques for no real reason just for the sake of doing it. And most of the time, sooner or later, I realize they’re just getting in the way. 

What works for you might not work for someone else. What works in a song might not work in another.”

Finding the Happy Medium

I loved reading Thiago’s take. The line “At some point you realize that mixing is really about taste, and taste is personal.” really stuck out to me. It was a lovely reminder that just like different guitarists have their tone and the way they handle a guitar, we producers and engineers each have our own sonic fingerprint and approach. It’s easy to forget that sometimes, amidst all the online noise and countless videos and approaches. I also love how he highlighted that the process of continuously recognizing the line between intuition and the “if they do it, it must be right” approach is ongoing. There’s a happy medium there, and finding it is where the magic happens. ;)

Thanks Thiago for sharing your insights!

Catch you next blog!