The Mix Bus & Loudness Cheat Sheet: Get Louder Mixes Without Crushing Your Master

This guide is for home and project-studio mixers who keep running into the same wall. You push your mix louder and it starts to pump. The drums get smaller, the vocal gets buried, and the master bus ends up doing damage control instead of finishing the job. Or you slap a compressor on every track because that's what you think a mix needs, and the result is flat and tired. The Mix Bus & Loudness Cheat Sheet gives you a clear order of operations. You'll learn why loudness is built on individual tracks and buses and not on the master. You'll learn how to ask 'why am I compressing this?' before you insert a plugin, and when the right answer is to leave a track alone. You'll see how to use gentle bus compression to glue a mix, and how to use a limiter at the end to finish it, without squashing it by 10 or 20 dB. You'll also get a simple pre-master checklist, so you know when a mix is ready to send and when it needs more work upstream. The advice comes from Warren Huart, a Grammy-nominated producer, songwriter and mixer. His credits include The Fray, Augustana, Aerosmith and James Blunt, and he has worked on X Factor and American Idol. He teaches mixing on Produce Like A Pro. The guide distills what he says in his mix breakdowns and Q&As about master bus processing, gain reduction amounts, and the many tracks in a professional mix that have no plugins on them at all. It's short, specific and written to be used while you mix. Open it next to your session and work through it.