5 Essential Rules to Follow Before Starting a Mix

This week we’ve put together a short video covering the most important rules to follow before starting any mix. These five steps are essential for achieving the best possible sound while maintaining a smooth and efficient workflow.

Here is the video:

1 – Renaming Your Tracks

Use clear, short names for each channel so you can recognise instruments instantly. For example, a bass drum can be labelled “BD” or “KIK”, a snare “SD”, followed by “TOM1”, “TOM2”, and so on.

Create a personal naming scheme and stick to it. Consistency means you always know what you’re looking at, which speeds up decision-making during the mix.

2 – Colour Coding

When working with a large number of channels, navigation can quickly become confusing. Applying a colour scheme makes it much easier to find your way around the session.

For example, you might use red for drums, a different shade of red for percussion, purple for lead vocals, yellow for backing vocals, blue for bass, green for keyboards, and brown for horns. The exact colours don’t matter—consistency does. Using the same scheme across mixes will save you time and reduce visual clutter.

3 – Gain Staging

Always work with sensible levels. A simple rule of thumb is to leave your faders at 0 and adjust the input gain of each channel to achieve a rough balance.

Make sure the combined signal does not hit the master bus above –12 dBFS. This leaves enough headroom as the mix naturally gets louder over time and ensures plugins receive a healthy input level. Many plugins have an input “sweet spot” well below 0 dBFS and perform best when not driven too hard.

4 – Filtering

Remove low frequencies from channels where the low end is not essential, such as keyboards, percussion, and pads. This allows the low end from the kick and bass to remain clear and focused.

If a synthesizer or instrument is intentionally providing bass, then filtering may not be necessary. For most other tracks, however, removing unnecessary low frequencies helps create space and clarity.

5 – Do Your Bus Routing

Divide your mix into logical groups and route each group to its own bus—drums, bass, keyboards, guitars, vocals, and so on.

This approach makes automation easier, gives you additional control points for compression or processing, and helps you manage the overall balance of your mix more effectively.