Common Mixing Mistakes – The Chorus Doesn’t Climax – 8 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – Boomy or Thin-Sounding Mix – 1 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – Edgy, Fatiguing Sound – 2 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – No Sparkle and Bottom – 3 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – Large Swings in Spectral Balance – 4 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – Insufficient Detail – 5 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – Not Enough Punch – 6 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – Too Much Compression – 7 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – The Chorus Doesn’t Climax – 8 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – Washy Sound with No Depth – 9 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – Collapsed Stereo Image – 10 of 12
The Chorus Doesn’t Climax
You had high hopes for your new power-pop ballad, but something is holding it back. Your tracks were all captured with plenty of dynamic range, the performances were killer, and the arrangement positively soars during the hook. Yet for some reason, the chorus just doesn’t deliver the big payoff it should in your mix. It’s time to look at your mix-bus compressor settings again.
Sometimes an engineer will set up the mix-bus compressor for a big, in-your-face sound at the beginning of mixdown, when working on relatively quiet verses, and will just assume it’s going to sound even bigger during the choruses and other climaxes. A compressor with too low of a threshold and too high of a ratio will suck the life out of the hook when it hits — sometimes the chorus will actually sound lower than the verses. Raise the compressor’s threshold and lower its ratio to no more than 2:1 to give the hooks room to explode. You might also need to back off the compressor’s attack time a bit.