I just posted on my website an article about some tips in order to help take the decision: When Your MIX It’s Ready?

1. Your mix should sound good on many types of audio systems.
2. Your mix should sound close to known similar mixes of the music market.
3. Your mix should be interesting from beginning to end.
4. When any changes worsen the quality of sound, then it’s done, leave it.

Read the full article posted on my website:
How Do You Know When Your MIX It’s Ready?

 

Mix is ready when is exactly the sound you want
And this will never happen...

 

The mix is right when your executive producer doesn't want to give you the master stems,(Devante) so you take the 2trk and mix the vocal on top of it (Timbaland)/(Genuine) and give it to Sony and go triple platinum ala, Pony. The mix is ready when you put it out. Some of the most successful recordings was thought to not be ready. I read somewhere that some "Genius" exec told Nirvana that Nevermind sounded like a demo. That shit went Diamond, a real douche!

 

My mix is ready when I say it's ready

 

i read an interview that Kanye West did recently, and he said to this day, he calls Pharrell/Timbaland/others to help him mix the drums on 'Can't Tell Me Nothin'.

that song came out as a single 6 years ago!

 

That's because Kanye West sucks, he leaves it all to the other idiots in the studio to mix his trash for him

Seriously though, "how do you know when your mix IS ready"... you never will until it's finally out and people appreciate it. The picture of the skeleton above sums it up completely. You will just keep mixing forever unless you have the will to tell yourself "that's it, finished".

Honestly, if you lack that much self confidence then maybe producing or remixing is just not for you right now. Watch, read and learn how others do it. You'll be amazed what you can easily pick up to gain the right skills these days. Good luck.

 

@London007: lol...hey nothing wrong with your opinion on him musically, but my point was that mixes are never done until you feel like they are. obviously he didn't feel like the mix was done on that song, so he's still working on it, six-plus years later, which goes with the point of this thread.

i think Kanye's okay, but i liked him better when he first came out. not so much now.

 

I think Axel Rose from Guns and Roses mixed use your illusion 1 and 2 for ten years.

 

Joe Walsh said that if the Eagles would have had access to to modern recording tech way back when, they would still be working on Hotel California. Ha ha

 

My bad It was Chinese Democracy he mixed for mad years he even threw Butch Vig out of the studio for giving him some advice like I think it's done Axl, and he flipped out on my man.

 

The mix is ready when you are sweating boiling water, have carpel tunnel, ears have detached from your head and are on the ground crying, eyes can only see in midi and wav form, keyboard, audio interface, mixer, and anything else with buttons or nobs looks like it was rapped by bricks and sandpaper, and your computer promps you with the blue screen of death and reads, "Get a fuckin life DUDE!".

 

I usually don't do mixing (more like re/mastering), but I know it's ready when:

-I don't want to work on it anymore
-It's been through some waveform/channels/FFT checks
-I've played the whole song through my speakers (and maybe headphones) and it sounds OK
-The vocal/instrument balance is OK

 

mixes never ending, comes a day they leave

 

A mix is over when the FORCE is no longer with you.........
It's a picture of you and your life at a certain point. there's no clue to tell you when you stop being a child to be a teenager, or a young person to an adult.
It's often funny when you look at your photos back in the days. A mix is the same thing, it builds the puzzle of your artistic life.
A mix is never over but life teaches you to let things go.......

 

When you start hating it...

 

The mix is ready when you get all Marvin Gaye on it synced with the tempo. That's exactly when the mix is done.

 

Inside the studio...

The band: Hey engineer/producer dude - louder guitars, pump up the bass, give the vocal the gloss treatment and make the drums B-I-G!

Engineer/producer dude (using Jedi mind trick): The mix is ready.

The band: The mix is ready.

Engineer/producer dude (still using Jedi mind trick, just for fun): ...and these are not the droids you're looking for.

The band: ...and these are not the droids we're looking for.





(no offence intended to anyone)

 

I thought my mix is ready. But when I raised the volume on my speakers, BOOM! I heard the distortion! It seems that Garritan Personal Orchestra samples are not so good as I thought. The instruments have only one layer/oscillator. This means that for every velocity there will be the same note, same wave file. The clarinet and bassoon were giving me those ugly notes. I had to go to the Kontakt and edit those instruments in Mapping Editor, turn down the volume on some notes and also edit the velocities (Dynamics).

I rearranged the score.

Now my mix is almost ready...ready for what? It's 95% finished.

So, my advice is to try and listen at high volume also, you might hear something that needs to be fixed!

 

My sumarized opinion, if I can

Mix ready is a personal opinion, that you reach when you have consolidated during time a perfect routine for volume levelling, metering, eq.ing, compressing, and stereo imaging, + a perfect knowledge of the plugins you are using. The best when you have a great experience in valuating the relations between different instruments and their influence on the final result (put a limiter on the master for test, but disable it when mixdown), even this means to go back many times.....

Than the game start again with mastering......, same as above, but in this case the final job is made comparing your work with the right commercial reference test track (having a rich data base is a must) and testing it on different devices.