
When you are up to mixing you should take breaks don’t mix for long period of times especially at high volumes take a lot of breaks mix for 15 or 20 minutes for actual mixing time and then take couple minutes of break there is no rule how long you should mix before taking breaks but its good to give your ears a little bit of rest. You should listen your music on high volume for short period of times but then if you want to go in something detailed you should just solo something for a second like a vocal which you think it is important to listen to vocals in detail or maybe that’s a frequency that’s poking its head out on the vocal and you are trying to identify it you should solo it turn it down and listen it on lower volume so volume and breaks are very important.
And make sure you don’t always only listen in solo when people listening in solo consistently soloing tracks try to always remember that we don’t listen to music in solo we listen to it as a whole so if you are going to solo thing do it for specific reasons because the vocal in particular is always good to listen to in solo because there might be certain frequencies that are poking its head out if you are going to spend three hours on a mix spend most of the time listen to it as a whole.
another issue is people using virtual synths a lot of DAW and a lot of plugins that come with those DAW there widening is really just case of taking the left and right and throwing them out of phase there are some sounds like widened bass sounds that literally all they are is the left over the right and the right over the left inverted its coming out super wide and there is no middle so its fine to do one or two things like that so be very careful for what you choose to be widen.
Where possible use boost in a minimal amount of way and if there is corrective thing go to cut first if you are correcting something don’t correct it by boosting if you are hearing something muddy in there try to find where that is and cut it and get rid of it before you automatically boost if you got a really good analog EQ going in that’s fine you can do some of that stuff but digital stimulations don’t quite do that same thing. Now with logic there’s a lot of headroom there and they have a floating point system where it’s very difficult to clip inside of your DAW but it’s very important on your mix bus. Be very careful in DAW where sending one plugin into another it is important not to send a over driven signal to another plugin if you are sending a distorted signal to another plugin turning that next plugin down is not reducing clip sound.















