An Indie Musician's Diary Volume 4: Album two in the making

Breaking the Curse of Mixing Fatigue

Because creating a great sounding mix is a subjective endeavour, you can easily get stuck if you constantly shoot for the stars with every tweak you make in each mix. Mixing has an extremely long learning curve. Maybe you've been spending your first years into mixing learning all sorts of techniques, buying and testing out exotic plugins and watching tons of mixing/mastering videos-  you've grown in your mixing but find that all of the sudden you're stuck, lacking creativity and can't get yourself to sit down and mix at all. I'm there. Right there.

The question is, "Why?".

Maybe you are like me

-  worried that your mixing is never good enough to compete with the over 70 million other songs or even the 100's of thousands within your niched genre.

-  you lack band members, mentors, parents that pat you on the back or others around you who can support you and encourage you. 

Maybe you just need to sleep more, eat more healthy and get some regular exercise.

Maybe you need inspiration.

Perhaps you need just to scale down and be good to yourself. Take a homemade cookie, a walk or a trip to some warm beautiful place.

When you have no more "go", no more desire to mix, something is wrong. It could be on many levels: soul; body; spirit; mindset too! I had this sneak up on me last year and it lead to the mixing fatigue I now am suffering from. There have been days that I have opened a mix just to shut it down without even pressing the play button. I didn't want to start because I feared how it would end...mediocre - even when it sounds pretty good. I feel and have felt during December and January that I need to get to the bottom of this and dig my way out or drop out of music altogether.

After thinking, meditating and praying about this I started finding the root causes and am starting to address them each one by one.

Root causes of the "curse"

Earlier I mentioned that I took a break through Christmas and now I have started exercising again every day. Today it was the rowing machine and a nice long, and brisk walk.

But when I set up the studio again after Christmas, the passion was gone and the fear was back again - the fear of the unknown - when is my mix good enough? Should I master it myself or with Landrr? Where did I leave off, and where should I begin?

There was also the depression that sat in when I saw last year's stats. 

A lasso around my creative legs:

I had to take a good long look at how I felt and why in order to find a better way forward. I started listening to the way I was talking to my inner person. "I have registered over forty songs and only released 15 as of date. I guess I really haven't been mixing all that many songs so I shouldn't be so hard on myself! But, (I answered), they have to be great if people are going to listen...but they don't look at the stats....." and on and on. This cerebral, negative conversation was tackling me daily like a lasso around my creative legs with the cowboy charging his horse off into the sunset. I had to find a way to cut the rope and get that voice to think and speak positively or else I would certainly give up sooner or later!

So, what was the rope, the cowboy, the horse in my analogy?

. the rope were the negative lies

- my legs were the creativity and my skills

- the cowboy = the lies that I'd been listening to

I needed a plan.

My Recipe to get out of the "Curse"