The Real Reason Your Mixes Don’t Improve
By Daniel Jason Booth
I want to try to explain something that took me a long time to put into words – mostly because I wasn’t sure I could put it into words.
What do I actually do when I mix?
Not the technical stuff. The thinking underneath it.
Here’s what I’ve noticed while teaching this: most people approach mixing like they’re following a method or set of rules. High-pass here. A little compression there. Boost the air. And they do all of it correctly, technically, and the mix still doesn’t sound right. Then they go looking for a better method.
That’s the wrong problem to solve.
The method assumes someone else already diagnosed your situation. They didn’t. They diagnosed theirs.
When I sit down with a session, nothing is assumed. The snare might feel wrong – and “wrong” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Wrong how?
Is it the attack? The body? Is it clashing with something else? Is there a phase problem between the close mic and the overheads? Is it actually the performance and no amount of processing will fix it?
Each question points you somewhere different. I make a call on the most likely cause based on what I’m hearing, a hypothesis, then I test it, and then I revise based on the result.
Sometimes I’m right first go. Sometimes I’m not. The point is that I have a reason for the move I’m making — and when it doesn’t work, that always tells me something useful.
That’s what mixing actually is. It’s not the application of rules. It’s decision-making under incomplete information, with your ears as the feedback loop – provided they’re not fatigued or misguided by your room.
The thing that makes this hard to teach is that some of those decisions naturally contradict each other.
I might cut 200Hz on the kick and boost it on the bass. I might use heavy parallel compression on the drums and barely touch the vocals. That’s not inconsistency – that’s the job. The right move depends entirely on what this song needs in this moment.
There’s no universal answer. Multiple people can form a solution based on vastly different approaches. Some approaches will be better technically, others musically. Ideally, the best solutions leverage both.
If you’re thinking in rules, then these contradictions feel like failures. You followed the rule, it didn’t work, now what?
However, if you’re thinking in terms of strategy, contradictions feel normal. You’re no longer looking for the rule that applies. You’re asking what the song needs and making your best call.
At the end of the day, that’s what experience actually builds. Not a bigger rule book. A faster, more accurate set of questions to ask.
When something sounds wrong — wrong how? Is it frequency, dynamics, space, phase, performance? The faster you can identify the category, the faster you find the best solution.
That internal framework is the difference between a mixer who keeps hitting ceilings and one who just keeps getting better.
It’s also, I think, why so many people plateau after watching tutorials. The tutorials aren’t wrong – they’re just teaching you what someone else did, but not how to think for yourself. And if you don’t know how to think through a mix, you’re permanently dependent on someone else’s answers, presets, or templates to make what you have work.
That’s what I built Level Up around. It’s not a formula. It’s a way of thinking about every decision – the why behind it, how it applies, and learning when something that looks like a contradiction is actually just good musical judgment.
If that sounds like what’s been missing, you can find out more here.
