11 Tips for Better Mixes – with Kendal Osborne

Tulsa studio owner and author Kendal Osborne has played a major role in my audio education and that of many of my peers. Through his Recording Lounge Podcast and YouTube channel, Kendal is ever eager to share the fruits of his personal audio journey with his followers. I was fortunate to get to sit down with Kendal and pick his brain about guitars, gear, and making great recordings. In this interview, Kendal shares 11 tips for how today’s recording engineer — those of us who own studios and those of us who record at home — can get the most out of the sounds and spaces we’re working with.
1 — Audit Your Mixes
Kendal: I encourage everyone to do mix audits regularly. If something works in a mix, open up the session and figure out why. Ask yourself, “What’s the secret to that guitar sound? Why did that ride cymbal work so well?” For me, taking inventory leads to big discoveries. I probably do an audit whenever I finish something I’m really proud of. I actually did this a few days ago. I was working on a song that had this snare drum that just really worked — it was super present, but it didn’t get in the way of the vocal. I was like, “Man, how did I do that? What combination of things did I do to make that work?” And from there you can learn how to re-create it in the future.
2 — Visualize the Soundstage
Kendal: Always be thinking about where your sounds are going to sit in a production — front to back, left to right, top to bottom — and what kind of image you’re presenting the listener. If it’s a grungy rock kind of thing, the drums are probably going to sit more in the background and sound roomier and dirtier. If it’s a modern Nashville sort of sound, the drums are probably going to be more up front, a little drier, and brighter. Think about all the factors: the genre, the instruments and voices, their placement on the “stage” — all that stuff.

People often say, ‘You can’t put your speaker close to a wall.’ Well, why not?

3 — Fix Your Room(s) First
Kendal: I know this is kind of the preachy one that no one likes to talk about, but step one to improving your recordings is getting your room acoustics under control. I can speak from experience that both rooms — the live room and the control room — are massive parts of the equation. It really is more dramatic than any microphone or piece of gear.
Think about it: all the gear in the world has become so much more accessible. Plug-ins have gotten better, computers have gotten faster, outboard gear has gotten cheaper. What’s the big difference between a home studio and Ocean Way? Well, it’s Ocean Way. That’s the big difference. People will be like, “Well, but they’ve got all those vintage mics….” But that’s not what makes the Ocean Way sound. That’s not what makes the Blackbird sound, or the Capitol sound. It’s the brilliantly designed rooms.
You can put a $10,000 set of Barefoot monitors in a bad room, positioned poorly, and your response may be inaccurate by +/-20dB, where 50Hz is +18dB and 70Hz is -12dB and 100Hz is +15dB — which is not even close to accurate. Every single decision you make in a tracking session or in a mix is based on what you’re hearing from the speakers.

You see these YouTube shootouts of classic mics versus clones, and sometimes they’re really close. Maybe this mic’s a few dB brighter above 5k, but, like — whatever! That’s nothing! The rooms you’re recording and monitoring in can make a +/-20dB difference!
People often make the mistake of thinking that treatment is the only way to “fix” your room, but it’s not the only factor. Treatment will absolutely help a room sound better, but it can’t magically turn a terrible response into a great one. One of the most important things you can do to get your mix room under control is getting your speakers in the right place. I treated a client’s studio last summer where the position of the speakers was so sensitive that moving them 6″ made a 4dB difference in the low end. That’s massive. In most rooms, you’ve got six surfaces and 12 corners — four wall to wall, four wall to floor, and four ceiling to wall — not to mention a desk and gear, and they’re all interacting with the speakers. Little movements can make big differences.

Don’t worry about what it looks like or what you read on a forum.

My advice is to buy a measurement microphone and software and measure your speaker response at mix position. You can’t just do this by ear. Move your speakers around, move your listening placement forward and back, and get really particular about where your speakers need to live. Take hundreds of measurements. Don’t worry about what it looks like or what you read on a forum. People often say, “You can’t put your speaker close to a wall.” Well, why not? If it sounds good there, if it measures well there, who cares if it’s close to a wall? It all depends on your speakers and your room. The measurements don’t lie.
Once you get your speakers placed, use treatment to improve the room from there. Your goal is a linear frequency response and linear decay times from 20Hz–20kHz. Notice I said linear and not simply flat. A perfectly flat response can sound a bit thin, so generally the response needs a slight tilt from lows to highs to sound right to our ears. How much of a tilt comes down to personal preference.
Another mistake engineers make is thinking their live room has to be just as “accurate” as a control room. But there, the goal is not necessarily to be accurate; the goal is to sound great and be lively and interesting — to be inspiring to the performers. But in a control room, the goal is to be accurate, consistent, and predictable.

Learn more about the actual things you’re recording.

4 — Get Sounds Right at the Source

Kendal: For me, when I record, the source is always king. Some people think engineers spend the bulk of their time swapping out mics and moving them around, and to some extent that’s true, but what’s more important is the source itself. If an electric guitar sounds too dark, my first thought is not “I need a brighter mic”; it’s to brighten up the amp or use a brighter guitar.
My challenge to recording engineers is to always think about the chain from start to finish. The performer and the sound source are the first two things in the chain, and they’re by far the most important. Is the performer playing with their fingers or a pick? What type of pick? What gauge strings are they using? Do they need to roll their tone knob back or boost their gain? Next in the chain is the room these things are in. Should it be livelier? More intimate? Then, after all of that, you’ve got the mic and mic position. While that’s still important, the performer, the source, and the room are what I spend most of my time focusing on.
I also challenge engineers and producers to learn more about instruments, amps, drums, and keyboards — learn more about the actual things you’re recording. For instance, why might you pick a Gibson Jumbo over a Martin 00? Why might you use a wooden snare instead of a brass snare? Those choices make way more of a difference than any mic can. There’s no mic in the world that can make a Les Paul into a Marshall sound like a Strat into a Fender. You can’t make a tiny parlor guitar sound like a dreadnought. No microphone can do that. No mic preamp, no EQ, no compressor, no plug-in — no piece of audio gear can make one source magically sound like another.
Now sure, you can affect the sound in certain ways and move it into different territory. If you want a tiny-bodied guitar to have a bigger sound, you can use a bassier mic or move it to a different spot on the guitar. But the character of that instrument is still very much that tiny-bodied instrument. There’s so much intrinsic to the actual sound of the instrument in the room. That goes especially for acoustic instruments, whether it’s a guitar, piano, upright bass, or drums; it has to be played well, and it has to be the right instrument for the job, because there’s only so much you can do to manipulate it later.
So try to get it right as early in the chain as possible. For example, if a snare drum sounds too dull, start thinking about:

Is this the right snare drum for the job?
Does it need to be tuned differently?
Does it need a new drumhead?
Does it need to be damped less?
Does it need to be played differently?

Once you’ve exhausted the source itself, then you can go down the checklist: “All right, now should I reach for a brighter mic?”
5 — Avoid Harmonic Masking
Kendal: One of the things that has surprised me most is how much I value strong, clear fundamentals. I find that a focused-sounding source with strong fundamentals and somewhat reduced harmonics will work better in a mix than one that’s really harmonically rich. I know that’s counterintuitive to what we’ve always been told, but to my ear, if everything in the mix is harmonically dense, it ends up sounding fatiguing and harsh. You only have so much space for each element in the production, and if you’re emphasizing and adding harmonics on every source, you’re going to run out of space quickly. In short, you’re going to get harmonic masking.
Harmonics are overtones above the fundamentals. They are what make a guitar sound like a guitar and not a sine wave. We need harmonics! They occur naturally, but we can also enhance them or add more of them with saturation and various harmonics processors. That’s great; however, too much harmonic content, and our fundamental tones become obscured and less prominent. The frequency spectrum gets really dense, and the instrument takes up more tonal space. So you can almost think of harmonically dense sounds as a form of distortion. In fact, that’s basically the definition of harmonic distortion!

Think of harmonics like teeth on a comb. If you visualize two fine-toothed combs, one in front of the other, you’re not going to be able to clearly distinguish which is which. But if you have two combs with fewer, wider-spaced teeth, you can clearly identify which is which. More harmonics means more frequencies are present. Fewer or reduced harmonics, to me, yields a more focused sound.
Take acoustic guitars, for example. They can be so rich and so full of harmonics, especially with new strings, that sometimes you kind of lose the actual fundamental tones being played because they’re so harmonically rich. They end up sounding bright and rich, but unfocused.
This is also true with electric guitars. Closed-back guitar cabinets, generally speaking, have more low end than open-backed cabinets. Not just a bigger low end; they literally extend to a lower frequency. So when you’re going for a Stevie Ray Vaughan guitar sound and you want that big low E string to be strong, fat, and present, you might struggle with an open-back cabinet, which tends to emphasize mids and upper harmonics. Closed-back cabinets are a bit more focused.
This especially applies to bass instruments. Depending on how you mic a kick drum, for example, you can get more 120Hz punch, or you can get more 60Hz thump. Focusing on that 60Hz thump, to me, has been much more rewarding, and I find I can do more with it in a mix. When I record a bass guitar, when the player hits that low E, I want that 41Hz to be nice and strong and clear.
So my advice is to capture cleaner, clearer, more focused sounds when applicable. If you need to add more harmonic content later via saturation or whatever, you can. But it’s way harder to make a harmonically dense sound take up less space. To my knowledge, there aren’t any processors that can reduce harmonic content, at least not yet. So from what I’ve seen, capturing more focused sounds tends to give you better clarity and separation in a mix.
6 — Don’t Be So Quick to Reach for New Strings
Kendal: One of the hardest things for me has always been getting an acoustic guitar to sound good in a full-band mix. To make it work, you often have to make it sound small — like a tuned shaker or something. That’s always bothered me.

A few years ago, I was working on this one song and I said to myself, “Okay, I’m going to try whatever I can to not turn this acoustic guitar into a shaker.” I recorded five or six different guitars. I tried different picks, different strings, and different mics. And just because I was going down the list, I picked up this cheap dreadnought with really old strings and recorded the acoustic part on it. It was so dull that I had to use an aluminum pick to brighten it up. And you know what? It worked perfectly in the mix. I was like, “What? Why did my $500 dreadnought work in the mix better than my $4,000 Gibson Jumbo?” And after comparing them on a spectrum analyzer, I think one of the big reasons is that my Gibson was insanely harmonically rich. The Gibson had brand-new Elixirs on it, and the $500 guitar had these old dead strings on it. Not just broken-in, but dead. Like a year old. But it had a more focused, less harmonically dense sound.
So as an experiment, I strung up my Gibson with D’Addario Flat Top strings, which are like normal guitar strings, but they’re ground down on the outside, which makes them smooth and makes them sound a bit deader and chunkier right out of the box. I re-recorded the part with this setup, and it sounded fantastic!
This is a great example of my theory about clearer fundamentals recording better. Sometimes brand-new strings just have way too much harmonic content. The greater the harmonic content of your source, the more frequency space you’re taking up. But when you have a more focused sound that has clearer, stronger fundamentals and controlled or reduced harmonics, it becomes more focused and can poke through the mix a little easier. To be fair, sometimes new strings are the way to go — but not always.
7 — Embrace Digital Technology
Kendal: The processing power in pedals is insane now. Strymon pedals, for example, use the same SHARC DSP chips that they use in the UAD plug-in cards. It’s ridiculous. It’s no longer just an algorithmic, “Let’s see how close we can get to a delay with these numbers.” We have real-deal modeling and heavy-duty processing power in pedals that would tax an actual computer processor. It’s pretty wild. It’s something that excites me as a player. Some players and engineers get caught up in, like, “Well, I don’t use these types of pedals,” or “I only use real analog delay.” I’m like, dude, it’s all delay. Who cares where it comes from? It’s all just a path to tone.

There’s no excuse to not know how to do a basic setup on a guitar or bass.

8 — Learn How to Set Up Your Guitars

Kendal: I know a lot of guitar players who can’t set up their own instruments. These are serious session players. As a guitar collector and studio owner, that’s an important skill to have. I’d be spending thousands of dollars every other month if I had to pay someone else to do it. There’s no way. There’s also the benefit of being able to adjust your guitars exactly how you want. No shop is ever going to be able to get it just right. Fortunately, players today have a ton of resources, like YouTube and Lynda. There’s no excuse to not know how to do a basic setup on a guitar or bass.

9 — ABC: Always Be Challenging (Yourself)

Kendal: To this day, what still drives me is learning how to make a better recording, faster. It’s still that same search: “How can I learn more about getting a better snare sound?” “How can I learn more about drum tuning?” “How can I learn more about guitar cabinets and pickups?” And not only that, but, “How can I be more efficient at my job — how can I get a great tone out of a live amp and not spend an hour on it?” Because you can lose inspiration when you spend too long getting sounds; the band can get frustrated and you lose that flow. The ability to get a great guitar sound in a matter of minutes is really important. Even though I tend to prefer real amps, that’s one of the things I love about amp modelers — you can get hundreds of sounds in minutes, and they’re getting really good.
I’m always trying new approaches. I’m always swapping out speakers and trying different guitar cabinets, trying new pickups, pedals, and plug-ins. I think that really is the driving factor: I’m always trying to impress myself, and of course, the client too.

A happy client is a returning client.

10 — Work for the Client
Kendal: First and foremost, I want my clients to walk away happy, whether that’s because they’re pleased with the sounds or the impact of the music or just that they had a great experience. I’ll go to great lengths to make them happy, even if it takes more of my time than it should, even if I lose money. A happy client is a returning client.
11 — Quit Mixing
Kendal: One of my big career goals is to record a song and mix it with…nothing. Just get the sounds right on the way in, and the mix is literally nothing. I don’t know how possible that is. I love drum bus compression too much laughs. But the idea is, I want to get so good at recording and have the tracks fit together so naturally that it all just works right out of the gate. Being a mixing engineer is a little like making a sundae: you don’t want to be sitting there trying to make the ice cream taste good. You want to spend your time adding the cherries and the sprinkles and making it interesting and fun.

Special thanks to Kendal for taking the time to share his recording tips with Sweetwater. Be sure to head on over to the Recording Lounge Podcast website and subscribe to Kendal’s YouTube channel. If you’re in the Tulsa area, you can catch Kendal at his studio or teaching audio courses at Tulsa Technology Center.
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