After you’ve spent some long days and nights in the studio what’s the first thing you do when you return? For most people it is to listen to what you’ve done those previous days. This is a good practice because as we all know we tend to lose all objectivity after a few hours in the studio. Returning with a fresh state of mind and ears can be quite revealing.
There are some other techniques you may find useful as well. Try listening to another recording or two you like before you listen to yours. This helps to orient you to your speakers and overall monitoring situation. Many people make adjustments that don’t need to be made because they based them on deficiencies in their monitoring environment. This occurs throughout the recording process, but never is it more apparent than when you listen the next day. It’s just as important that you provide a context for that listening.
Another technique is to develop the mix while recording. The modern DAW makes this pretty easy to do. Most users have the mix 3/4 of the way finished by the time they are working on the final overdubs. Then when it comes time to really dig into the mix, save the one you’ve been working on, zero all the settings, and start on a new one from scratch. Build it quickly. Don’t worry about all the little details, just get the main things in place and make it sound like music. Compare this mix to your previous one that you’d saved. You may be surprised at how much of the raw energy and feeling is conveyed in the rough one compared to the one you’d been working on. This is a great opportunity to use the best aspects of both of them in the final product. Quite often we polish the mix until we sterilize the most compelling aspects out of it.