Why Top-Down Mixing is the GOAT

Ive been looking to adopt topdown mixing but how would it work with exporting stems? Wouldnt it make the stems sound very different if they go through the chain one by one?

thanx a lot. great advice. subscribing💯

I really like this idea! Def Going to try it

I used to use a 24 channel 8 group analogue mixer with a 16 track tape machine, so it was already set up for this. It even had convenient buttons to route channels to groups or the master. I miss that. Even with 16 tracks I ran out, so did bounce downs and multiple instruments on the same track. Most times I could get away with a single eq for the multiple instruments, but I made a small outboard switcher, to switch 1 track between 2 channels for different eq. Automation was starting to appear, but not at my budget, so some mixes got shelved 'awaiting automation'! 'Flying in' was fun too!

I always think of that as the monitor mix. Thats the logical start point for a mix. Back in the day you used to use the demo as reference

top down mixing also displays the weaknesses in the mix once you crank it up everytime!, so its basically a trial and error of cranking it up to -4lufs, eqing->cranking up again, equing-> etc.. it goes full circle

Gr8!

Im so glad you made this video man one thing i have been struggling with is my mix. I usually end up with about a hundred plugins by time in done and it never sounds they way i want it to and after spending and that time it kills your motivation on the track. You have a lot of great tips for sure very informative and easy to understand. Thank you 🙏🏽💯

Mixing is not the problem its shitty songs and 99% of home studio music has flat weak vocals, give me tracks from the eagles and anyone can make them sound great

I don't understand all the lingo... by "bus" do you mean a sub mix?

Do you do challenges? Maybe we could propose some challenges to you?

Best advice I ever got was to do this but also mix with a mastering chain already applied. Ozone with targets makes this super easy just pick a genre or load in a track that already has the sound you're going for. Then from there you work backwards and build into that sound. Way better than mixing normally then trying to use the Ozone presets at the end. Doing it this way I can normally get a good sounding master even though I don't actually know much about mastering. Just remember to disable your master FX when tracking lol.

Never make mixing decisions on something solo’d

Awesome Joe... My wife is getting jealous cuz I have been spending so much time with you lately!! (between Presonus vids and YT vids - but I am learning a ton)... Can you please link me to a very basic issue - how to actually set up busses for individual tracks?... Seems elementary I know - but I cannot seem to find this - specific to Studio 1 Pro ...... TY!!

Interesting. What you call top down mixing is just "mixing" to me. Trying to mix by soloing tracks is anti-mixing.

Joe, would you use busses in this situation? I typically am recording instrumental electric guitar songs. A drum loop (1-2 tracks), bass guitar (1-2 tracks), and then a bunch of electric guitar tracks. I usually mix the individual tracks, but wonder how I might use busses to simplify all of the guitar tracks. Thoughts?

“I make music better when I make music quickly”
I feel this, so hard. I’ve been trying to make music exclusively in the DAW for so long, no MIDI keyboard or anything. And nothing kills the flow like plotting notes for what feels like hours. Overthinking kills creativity

That's not top down mixing!!!

I started recording and mixing in the mid 70s. All analogue and somewhat challenged on how many compressors and equalizers, and effects, were available to use at one time. The equalizers were 2 to 4 band, sometimes semi parametric, but often fixed Q. Tracks were also limited, in my case to 4, 8 and finally 16 tracks. I could fill 8 tracks and mix them to 2 tracks, and then start to fill the remaining 6 tracks on the new 8 track tape. The first mixers I used had a number of busses that matched what the recorders were - so 4 busses out to a 4 track, 8 busses out to an 8 track and so on. A lot of the mixing had to happen during tracking or when bouncing tracks down to allow for adding more tracks of instruments. When it came time to do the actual mix to stereo, or mono, I would feed the tape deck tracks back through the channels of the mixer, with equalizers off and no external processors like compressors or limiters or noise gates and adjust the faders and pans for the best mix I could from the recorded tracks. I would use the mono and dim buttons consistently throughout the mix process. I would play some of my collection of reference tracks through the system to re-ground my brain's interpretation of the sounds. Only when I had what I considered a decent mix happening would I patch in an equalizer and compressor on the mix buss. The value in this was, the mix incorporated a much overlooked result of mixing - the masking of frequencies across every element of the mix. This is something that even starting with adjustments of the group busses, as you're doing around 9 minutes in, will miss. I would suggest that "top down mixing" is a rather confusing name to give, especially as it takes too many words to describe the process. I'd also say that starting with no processing and listening first to the master buss would be a more accurate way of fulfilling the otherwise confusing name. By all means, group the elements of the drums together through a stereo buss and do a very quick "levels and pans" only mix to that buss, but then quickly move on to background vocals and other groupings that will allow for bringing whole sections of the mix up or down in the master buss. This is assuming that what has been recorded on all individual tracks has been done well enough to not require medical intervention first - which I will consider before loading files into a mix being done of someone else's tracking. As a studio bass player, it became readily apparent that, for most pop music, or music with a lot of midrange instrumentation, doing eq or compressing to the bass on its own was pointless. Making adjustments listening to the bass sitting in the track most often resulted in a very unflattering sound when soloed. Compressing bass along with drums helps to glue the two instruments together, without killing as much dynamic in the performances. By all means, if one is shooting for an effect that hard compression does to either instrument, do some of that - but still, within the context of the mix as a whole.
As for the background vocals (or any instruments), we tended to make pretty consistent use of a high pass filter during the recording process. This would keep those frequencies out of the mix, but it also kept the signal path free of useless frequencies that ate up headroom in the analogue gear. Getting only the frequencies you want on tape or recorded to track means that compressors will work better, not requiring side-chaining an equalized version for keying.
Reverb. I will often introduce the reverb before I equalize any tracks, especially those that are feeding the reverb. Compression on the mix buss alters how the reverb is heard, and thereby also having a effect on the overall equalization of the mix - another reason to always be listening to the mix for context. In this case the mix is "the top".

I am mostly a self taught mixer and have always done my mixes this way. My songs are typically 90% finished after tracking stage. I really make sure all my sounds/tones are working first before I add processing.

I think the drums sound better without the compressor :)

I am a garageband user so busses are new to me (Logic a little bit) When you buss all your drums to one buss, the drum buss
Are the other tracks (drum tracks) still going to the master track. If yes then does the level of the drums really increase in
the mix. Doing that for the guitars and so on must really increase the volume on the master track?

Treating 10xBGV like each is just a note within a chord on a keyboard...great analogy!

I like this video. It's all about the paralysis of analysis. Over the years I've watched plenty of videos where top mixing engineers say they mix a song in a couple of hours. That where i want to be.

It's called top down mixing, you prefer to arrange it from left to right, and you call it "backwards mixing."

Do you realize all three spatial dimensions are being used to try to visualize this?! It's so funny how we visualize things

Are the raw tracks recorded DI or do you have external hardware compressors and such? This is really good info but I feel the overwhelming majority of people who could benefit from these tutorials (myself included) record absolutely everything DI, and in my experience, it doesn’t ever come out sounding as good as you have here with a couple clicks

Makes sense to me!

The arrangement stage is my “stepping in glue“… it has always been such a daunting task as simple as it can be. I have signed tracks to a couple of my favorite labels so I know I’m capable, yet I’ve got piles and piles of projects that have sat on my drives for 10-20 years lol- if it doesn’t happen quickly, chances are it ain’t happening

Joe;
once again absolutely on the money. I WAS struggling to mix, just as you stated on the video and was just about to pack it in. The top down is a stroke of
genius. This approach allows me to use ears first. I just got everything to 'sit' for the first time on this old cowboy ballad by Marty Robbins called 'big iron' .
By far the toughest simple song ever.
I can't thank you enough for these videos. I'm grateful and a subscriber.

Nice method, but just asking, how or shall I include sends?
Like Reverb or Drumsend etc or will it be completely neglected in the process, because sends rarely tend to have overwhelming or massive adjustments, because once set, there's not much to fiddle with it.

Hi Joe, I'm a fan of your channel but I don't agree with your mixing "fast" argument. A great mix takes a lot of time even for the pros. CLA claims he takes about 4 hours to deliver a mix but all the prepping has been done by his assistants. If he did it himself he would probably spent a day or days getting it done. Also, don't forget that hit singles in some cases took months to be mixed and these were of course done by very experienced and talented guys. If someone wants a quick mix, he/she would better off with a basic balance and panning and no plug ins at all. Every automation step you take in a top down mixing situation will hit the bus compression differently. At the end you won't know where the problem is and what to fix. Personally, whenever I took the "fast" route, I ended doing twice and three times the work.

Even though you know this already from me, the top down process I learned from you changed my musical life and is the reason I am releasing music. I was five minutes from quitting. Top Down gives me the formalized process that is flexible enough to allow individualization as needed.

Aye, nice video! And I was able to save $6,000!

I mix before I record anything. I’m not kidding. I don’t even use multitracks anymore. I record everything coming out of my master channel, then arrange my songs with these chunks of master audio.

It's like a race track. It is safer for a beginner to drive a Fiat Punto because then he will arrive safely without causing an accident. But if you want to be the fastest then you take a Formula 1 car. toptown mixing is like driving a Fiat Punto.

How to change zooming keyboards in studio one? I just can't zoom with ctrl+shift+mousewheel. I need a standard ctrl+mousewheel

Makes sense to me. This dude knows his shit. Hear it first, then go down to individual tracks. Hear it as it was performed as a group. Start there and work backwards. Very logical. I've been wasting a lot of time on nonsense tech stuff when it may not even be good for the song. Thanks for teaching me how to mix smart Joe.

Should be named "middle out" mixing

What you call busses are generally known ( by old engineers at least ) as sub-groups. I never really enjoyed studio work, I have always been ( 40 years ) a live FOH engineer.

I use top down mixing with just the master bus BUT, my process has been making the ultimate template for my music. So I songwrite and put in a presaved channel mix then when finished writing I tweak. This has been extremely productive for me. A large amount of templates from previous songs I’ve done.

Just redid a mix from 2021 to see what this method can achieve. Copied the session and threw out every plugin and got rid of every bus. Then I regrouped the tracks and got to work.
It took me less than an hour to come to a mix that is a lot clearer and in my own opinion better than what I did in countless hours back then.
Soooo this is a huuuuge deal for me.

Joe I like the approach of top-down mixing and your explanation in this as well as earlier videos. But I find your drum bus example in this video hardly suitable to show its value. Overcompressing the whole drum kit as a first step, not distinguishing between cymbals and much harder hitting snare + kick drum creates the unnatural pumping effect in the high frequencies we hear in this example. In my opinion, this creates a problem the drums did not have before and complicates things for beginners if they lateron try to fix it in the individual tracks. Drums are too heterogenous to be treated like so in a first step. I would really recommend to point out differences in linear vs non linear effects on busses compared to individual tracks to get a better understanding, especially for beginners.

It's almost like getting to the point of mixing live. I'm a FOH guy who has done a tiny bit of studio work. When mixing live you might make fine adjustments from time to time, but it's simple and you have to build shortcuts into your workflow in order to mix it while it's happening. In a recording studio you have the opportunity to get the best signals you can recorded. You have the opportunity to take your time to make it sound right, but if you're going to have a profitable studio, you can't spend all day on a single mix. If you build the busses and shortcuts in, you can get a great sound quickly, even better than if you had to do it all on the fly like we do at FOH.

Mix in place is the way to go - and it is an itratative process... going back and forwards. Very fast and fun. Don't focus on one sound but on how things work together. Having said that, I do come from the dys of tape and analogue desks and hardware kit.

Owen says you’re balding.😂

you kinda have to mix this way in daws to keep phase. the amount of plugins is a problem if they all add up to too much dely. delpy compensation doesn't fix all problems specially if you add mastering type plugins. This is a good video but i think its mis informed on the why to do this. it does solve all the things you are saying. you should mix this way as the pro's have always done this.