How to Improve Your Mixes: 15 Essential Strategies That Work

TL;DR: If you want to improve your mixes, most of the work happens before you touch a fader. Get better at production, use quality samples, record better audio, set up your room and monitors correctly, and use proper gain staging. During mixing, take out instrument effects and use your own, convert MIDI to audio, arrange your tracks, use buses and groups, take breaks, control your listening levels, and always use reference tracks. These 15 strategies will help you get professional-sounding mixes.

How Do You Actually Improve Your Mixes?

Audio mixing gets a lot easier when you put the right strategies in place from the very beginning. Here’s something most tutorials won’t tell you: if you want to improve your mixes, the work starts long before you touch a single fader. A professional-sounding mix begins at the production stage, and if you get that wrong, no amount of mixing magic will save it.

Below, I share 15 essential strategies that will help you improve your mixes. Use these tips and your mixes will get better. I also made a video covering all of them:

Before You Mix: Set Yourself Up for Success

1. Get Better at Audio Production

If you’re an audio producer and want your mixes to sound professional, the first thing you can do is get better at audio production itself. When I started producing music in the box, my tendency was to fill every hole in the mix with different instruments and ideas. That’s great for getting creative ideas out of your system, but you need to stop at some point and make compromises.

Remember: a professional-sounding mix starts long before you touch a single fader. Think about it. First you need an idea for a song. Then you compose a melody. If you want lyrics, there’s the songwriting stage. If you’re including vocals and live instruments, you have the recording stage. All of these steps happen before you even open your mixing session.

If your project doesn’t breathe at the production stage, there’s less chance it will at the mixing stage, unless you remove some tracks during mixing. One important tip: at the production stage, avoid making the bass hit at the exact same time as the kick. This simple move helps you avoid a lot of low-end conflicts during mixing and mastering. For more on getting your mix ready before processing, see my guide on how to prepare your mix for mastering.

2. Use Quality Samples

If you want better-sounding mixes, you need to start using better audio samples and virtual instruments. If your production sounds thin and weak, review the instruments and samples you’re using. This is crucial because a weak production can only be improved to some extent at the mixing stage. Audio production and recording stages are crucial for professional-sounding mixes. Garbage in, garbage out.

3. Record Better Audio

If you want your mixes to sound professional, you need to record better audio tracks, both vocals and instruments. Just like with audio mastering, at the mixing stage you need a good source. While there are ways to repair audio, no amount of processing will truly fix a poorly recorded vocal or instrument.

That’s just a fact. So if you’re recording audio for your sessions, improve your recording techniques. This will directly improve your mixes. If vocals are part of your sessions, my guide on how to mix vocals walks through the techniques I use on every vocal track.

4. Set Up Your Listening Environment

No matter what monitors you use for mixing, the room you’re mixing in greatly affects how sound travels from your monitors to your ears. To make your mixes sound professional, you need to judge and make decisions based on what you’re actually hearing. If what you’re hearing isn’t accurate, your mixing decisions won’t be accurate either.

This leads to poor mixes, frustration, and the feeling that your mixes are the worst on the planet. How do I know? Because that’s exactly how I felt when I started my in-the-box mixing journey more than two decades ago.

Most music producers don’t have fancy professional studios. My home studio is full of acoustic problems. The room is small and boomy. But there are things you can do to improve your situation:

• If you experience long echo or reverb, bring in some clothes and experiment with placement
• Add foam on the walls and see if it helps
• Add bass traps if you’re experiencing boominess
• Use drapes if there’s a window near your listening position

Use whatever you can to make your room more controlled. You don’t need to make it sound dead, just a decent place where you can mix with confidence. For a full walkthrough of building a home studio that doesn’t fight you, see my home studio setup guide.

5. Set Up Your Studio Monitors Correctly

When people complain that their monitors aren’t good for mixing, I always ask: where did you put them? And what does your room look like? If you want professional mixes, take care of your room first, then set up the monitors correctly. Here’s a simple formula to start with:

1. Use monitor stands. Avoid placing monitors directly on your desk near the front wall
2. Keep at least 3 feet (1 meter) between the monitors and the wall behind them
3. Place your chair in your mixing position
4. Measure the distance from your head to one monitor. This should be the same distance to the other monitor and the same distance between the two monitors (forming a triangle)
5. Ideally, both monitors should be the same distance from the front wall and the side walls

If your listening position is near the back wall, you might experience extra boominess. The more problematic your room, the closer your listening position should be to your monitors. This helps you hear a truer representation of your mix. Also use isolation pads between your stands and monitors to avoid unwanted resonance, and make sure your monitors are at ear level.

I’ve been using Genelec The Ones for over 7 years now, and proper setup made a huge difference. You can read my full Genelec The Ones review if you’re considering an upgrade, or check my guide on how to connect Genelec monitors digitally for the cleanest signal path.

How to Improve Your Mixes: Mindset and Workflow

6. Do One Thing at a Time

If you’re a music producer who produces the song you’re about to mix from the very first note, I have news for you: you need to set your mindset straight. When you finish the production stage, it’s done. Now it’s time to make that production even more awesome by mixing it.

We tend to think we can do many things by multitasking. When composing or producing, you start adding compressors and EQs that should really be handled at the mixing stage. You think this will shorten your path to a great mix. It won’t.

As human beings, we’re physically limited. Most of us perform better when doing only one thing at a time. If you’re producing, produce. If you’re mixing, mix. When you focus on one thing, you improve your productivity. No phone, no social media, just you, your DAW, and the song you’re about to mix. If you want more on why doing one thing at a time works (not just for music but in life), check out the book “The One Thing” by Gary Keller.

7. Take Out All the Effects from Your Tracks

When you’re producing, different instruments have effects like reverbs, delays, and choruses. They sound awesome and make your instruments feel big and powerful. The problem? Different virtual instruments like Spire, Massive, Serum, and Sylenth have different-sounding effects, and that’s a recipe for poor-sounding mixes.

Why? Because many virtual instrument effects are poor quality. This is why dedicated reverbs exist, like the TC Electronic VSS4 HD Native, which I made an in-depth review of:

That said, most of the time the stock reverbs in your DAW will do a better job of making your mix sound cohesive. My recommendation: if you want your mix to sound professional, take out all the effects from your tracks and add your own. You can still use instrument effects, but be aware they’ll affect the quality and space of your mix.

8. Convert MIDI to Audio

If you produce the song you’re about to mix, I recommend converting MIDI tracks to audio tracks. Four main advantages:

1. Focus: You’ll work exclusively with audio and won’t be distracted by MIDI tracks (which are always tempting to change)
2. CPU savings: You can deactivate virtual instruments, saving CPU and RAM for mixing plugins
3. Editing: With audio, you can automate and edit parts more easily
4. Gain staging: It’s much easier to gain stage audio tracks than MIDI

9. Arrange the Tracks in Your Session

When producing music, you might start with a piano idea, a kick, a drum loop, or a bass line, then build from there. By the time you finish, your tracks could be all over the place. If you want to mix faster, you need to know where every track is.

In my sessions, I usually arrange from left to right: kick, drums, bass, guitars, piano, strings, lead vocals, and effects. I know exactly where everything is in both the Edit and Mix windows. I also recommend color-coding different track types: one color for drums, another for guitars, another for vocals. These small adjustments help you finish mixes faster.

10. Use Gain Staging

Gain staging is overlooked by so many producers who want to learn mixing. It might not seem like a big deal, but if you want professional mixes, you need proper gain staging. Why? Many plugins emulate real hardware and are built with gain staging in mind. If audio enters too hot, it creates unwanted distortion, which leads to lack of transparency, harshness, and other problems.

Optimal gain staging leads to optimal processing and better-sounding mixes. How to do it:

1. Get a VU meter (plenty of free ones available)
2. Set the levels of your audio tracks to hit around -18 dBFS
3. This gives each track about 18 dB of headroom, which is healthy headroom for mixing

If you want a deeper breakdown of why this matters and how to set it up properly, check my full guide on what gain staging is and how to do it right.

11. Use Buses

If your mixing session has more than 10 tracks, use buses. This gives you more control and lets you divide a big session into manageable chunks. I usually create buses for: drums, bass, guitars, music (other instruments), vocals, effects, plus a mix bus for the entire mix. With buses, you can apply processing to groups of tracks, like compression on all your drums together.

12. Use Groups

While buses help slice a big mix into controllable parts, I also recommend grouping tracks. For example, if you have multiple kick layers or electric guitar tracks, you can set the volume balance between them, then group them. When you need more guitar volume overall, bring all the faders up together while keeping the balance intact. Groups are also useful for muting multiple tracks at once.

Important: If you use groups with buses, check how the processing on the bus is affected by group volume changes. An EQ won’t be affected, but a compressor will. More volume means more compression.

How to Improve Your Mixes: Protect Your Ears

13. Set Up Blocks of Mixing Time

Before listening to the first sample of your mix, set a timer for 45 minutes to one hour. When time’s up, get up. Drink water. Let your ears rest. Don’t think that mixing for five hours straight will give you a professional result. Most of the time, it won’t. Your ears get tired, especially if you’re mixing at unhealthy levels in a problematic room.

When you combine poor acoustics, wrong monitor placement, too many effects, and tired ears, the chance of getting a professional mix is very small. Take care of your ears, not just for mixing, but for your well-being.

14. Control Your Listening Levels

We tend to think louder means better. This is why so many plugin companies set their plugins to sound louder when you insert them, to make you think you’ve improved the track just by adding the plugin. It doesn’t work that way. The same goes for listening levels:

• Too soft: You can’t anticipate what your next move should be
• Too loud: Your ears fatigue faster, you think everything sounds great, and the next day you realize you need to start over

The recommended mixing levels are between 75 and 90 dB SPL. I use my Genelec GLM calibration kit to control levels, and most of the time I’m at 80-85 dB SPL. Why does this matter? At healthy levels, you make better decisions because of how we interpret frequencies at different volumes. Look up the Fletcher-Munson curves if you want to understand this better.

That said, check your mixes at both softer and louder levels, and use a reference track when doing this. If you also use headphones, my guide on mixing in headphones vs monitors covers when to trust each one.

15. Use Reference Tracks

Before listening to your project, play a mastered song that’s similar in genre and production to your track. You don’t need to listen to the whole thing, just 30 seconds to a minute. This warms up your ears and gets them ready for mixing.

Reference tracks aren’t just useful at the beginning. Use them during your session and when you think you’re finished. This keeps your mix on track and helps you make better decisions throughout.

Key Takeaways

• Production matters more than mixing. A great mix starts with great production, quality samples, and clean recordings.
• Fix the room first, then the monitors. Even modest monitors set up correctly will beat great monitors in a bad room.
• Strip instrument effects. Use your own reverbs and delays so the mix shares one cohesive space.
• Convert MIDI to audio. You’ll focus better, save CPU, and gain stage more easily.
• Gain stage to -18 dBFS. Healthy headroom lets your plugins do their best work.
• Use buses and groups. Process related tracks together and keep balances intact.
• Take breaks every 45-60 minutes. Tired ears make bad decisions.
• Mix at 75-90 dB SPL and check at lower and higher levels.
• Use reference tracks at the start, during, and at the end of every session.

Related Articles

If you found this helpful, check out these guides:

• How to Prepare Your Mix for Mastering – Get your mix ready before you hand it off.
• How to Mix Vocals – The vocal mixing techniques I use on every session.
• What Is Gain Staging – Why it matters and how to set it up correctly.
• Home Studio Setup Guide – Build a room that doesn’t fight your mixes.
• Mixing in Headphones vs Monitors – When to trust each, and how to use both.

Ready to Go Deeper?

These 15 strategies will get your mixes moving in the right direction, but mixing is one piece of a bigger system. If you want to learn my complete production-to-master workflow (turning a song idea into a finished, professional-sounding track in less than 14 days), check out the Music Production Masterclass.

Learn more about the Music Production Masterclass →

If your focus is on the mastering side, my Pro Audio Mastering course walks through my full mastering process from start to finish.

About the Author

I’m Adrian Milea, a Mixing & Mastering Engineer, Music Producer, and Educator with 25+ years of experience. My work has been released by Armada Music and featured in DJ Mag. I run adrianmilea.com to help home producers get professional results without the guesswork.

Last updated: April 2026

Until next time, Stay Cool and Make Great Music!

-Adrian Milea