Does this sound familiar: You start your mix with the faders flat and ample headroom on your output. You start slowly making one track louder, then another, then another. You can’t hear the first track the way you want to anymore, so you push it up a bit more. Then you lose the second track, so you push it up, too. By the time you are done you’re pegging your output into the red, and you’ve lost that distinction between tracks and dynamic feel you were going for. Welcome to “fader creep.” It happens to even the most experience mixers if they’re not careful. Here are some tips for avoiding fader creep:
- When you want to boost, cut instead. Do you want your guitars louder? Instead of turning them up, why not turn everything else down? In a song with a lot of tracks, that can be a lot of fader adjustments, so you’ll probably want to group related tracks using subgroups or control them with VCAs.
- Try EQing instead. Sometimes the best way to make a track cut through the mix isn’t to raise its volume, but to judiciously use EQ to bring out specific frequencies. Using EQ to fit a track into a mix not only helps avoid fader creep, but it can also bring out more sonic colors in a very satisfying way.
- Pan instead of boost. If you have numerous tracks competing for the same frequencies, try hard panning rather than boosting. This trick works especially well with doubled parts, so if you have two guitars, for example, rather than raising the volumes of each of them, try panning one hard left and the other hard right.
- Reduce effects. One of the things that can bury a track is if it’s too “wet” — spatial and time-based effects can dull the impact of a track. If one of your tracks that has a lot of effects on it is getting lost in the mix, rather than turning it up, try reducing the effects first. You might find that when the track is drier, it cuts through better.
None of this is to say that you should never raise the volume of a track. But the great thing about these tricks is that not only do they help prevent fader creep, but they’ll also help your mixes be more dynamic and colorful.