How To Mix In Logic Pro | Learn The Basics

There’s a lot more than just writing lyrics and composing melodies and chord progressions that go into creating an industry-standard song. Generally, every record goes through three primary stages before it goes on streaming services: production, mixing, and mastering.

Production consists of recording instruments, adding vocals, using virtual instruments, and shaping out the structure of your song. Once that’s done, you’d want to proceed with the mixing stage.

In simple terms, mixing is taking multiple tracks and making them all work together—or mixing them; that’s where the word ‘mixing’ comes from.

In modern music production, many elements come into play to mix songs. However, the fundamentals are the same: leveling volume on different tracks, panning, EQ, compression, reverb, and delay. Some elements, such as automations, fall under both production and mixing. Even for things like adjusting volume and gain, the more you control them consciously during production (AKA pre-mixing), the smoother your mixing session will be.

What mixing won’t do is fix a fundamentally lousy song. Before you start the mixing phase, you should ensure all the components in your song from a production standpoint are in place. All of your audio tracks should be properly recorded, your MIDI instruments should all be in place, and the arrangement of your song should be complete.

If you’re confident with your production stage, you can move forward with mixing. But where do you even start? In this post, I will teach you everything you need to know to start mixing projects in Logic Pro.

Getting Started: Prepping Files For Mixing

First, you’d want to create a bridge between the production stage and the mixing session to reduce headaches and maximize your mixing efficiency: this is often referred to as prepping files for mixing.

Ideally, you’d want to create a project alternative to ensure you will keep all progress specific to the production stage. In this way, going back and making changes to tracks is easier.

The first thing you’d want to do is to check to see everything in your Logic session is arranged and organized. It would help if you labeled all of your tracks appropriately. Using colors to differentiate groups of instruments creates visual cues that make navigation through your session much more manageable. Moreover, using arrangement markers to section out different parts of your song helps immensely.

You’d want to bounce your software instrument tracks in place and turn them into audio tracks.

•  Select the MIDI/pattern regions you want to convert to audio.
•  Control-click and hover your pointer on “Bounce and Join.”
•  Select “Bounce in Place…”

Once you’re done prepping your session, the next step is to address the most fundamental aspect of mixing: adjusting gain and volume levels.

Balancing Volume and Gain

This is the most significant determining factor for a good mix. Before you start, you should shift your focus on elements for the benefit of the entire project and not adjusting individually without considering the big picture.

As a rule of thumb, tracks shouldn’t get louder than -10dBs during production to guarantee enough headroom without clipping audio. You should always keep an eye out on volume faders to ensure none of your tracks are peaking.

You can open the Mixer view in the main window by pressing “X” on your keyboard or open it as a separate window by pressing “COMMAND + 2.”

You'll see two numbers above the volume fader and loudness meter for each channel strip. The one on the left, which is always white, shows the current volume of your track. The other number to the right shows its peak since the last time the peak measure was reset.

If it’s green, it’s not clipping, yellow means it’s close to peak, and red means it has peaked or gone above it. Any track that peaks during playback will have clipping noises once you export your song.

From here, just listen to your tracks to get a general understanding of how each track sounds and what adjustments you’d want to make. Taking notes helps a ton here.

You’d want to focus solely on balancing track volumes here. Don’t touch plugins and effects just yet unless you want to address something that directly affects your objective of balancing tracks.

Try balancing tracks generally at first. Then, start soloing different sections to make surgical adjustments. Personally, I usually start with mixing the drums. Soloing my kick and snares, then adding other percussive elements. Once the drum kit sounds good on its own, I start adding other instruments one by one.

Panning Tracks On The Stereo Field

The next area you’d want to address is panning. Think how far your double tracks should be on the stereo field. What about each piece of your drum kit? How about ear candies? Do you want any sound to bounce between the left and right channels? If so, you might want to use automation tools to adjust panning across your track.

Each track comes with a pan knob that allows you to adjust where the sound comes from, considering the stereo field. You can control-click on the knob to change it to a stereo pan. Click here to learn more about different panning options and how to implement them into your projects.

As a rule of thumb, you primarily want to keep low-ends and bass sounds mono and maneuver on making stereo differences on tracks that fill up mids and high-ends.

Moreover, you might be working on a Dolby Atmos or Spacial Audio project. In that case, your options are much more expansive than just a left-and-right spectrum. Click here for more information on mixing Surround and Spacial Audio tracks.

Enhancing Frequencies And Dynamics

This is arguably the most time-consuming part of mixing. You have two objectives here: control the frequencies and dynamics of each track. Your main tools are equalizers and compressors.

Ideally, you’d want to use this as a mixing tool and not for production purposes. The goal for using EQs and compressors during production is to make each individual track sound good on its own, whereas when mixing, we’re aiming to make everything sound good together and avoid frequencies from clashing with one another.

Each instrument should have a dedicated area on the frequency spectrum, and you’d want to control that with an equalizer plugin. Logic’s Channel EQ is a powerful tool for this purpose.

For instance, the low end of your vocals might contain a lot of room sounds and rumbling noises that mix with your drum kicks and bass instruments. You’d want to get rid of those.

Moreover, the mids on that guitar solo may be too saturated, crushing the rhythm guitar and the piano. You can reduce the mids to make the guitar solo track cut through the mix better.

On the other hand, you’d want to use the compressor to adjust the dynamics of your track in terms of volume and gain level. Louder parts of a track might be audible, whereas quieter parts don’t come through when played with other instruments. This is where a compressor comes to help to bring the ups and downs of the track’s volume closer. In another post, I have extensively explained how to use compressors in Logic Pro.

Another important use of compressors is to side-chain two tracks together. When working with bass and kicks, the low end usually gets messy. To tidy things up, you can side-chain the bass channel to the drum kicks. In this way, every time the kick sound comes in, the bass gets a bit quiet to allow the kick to present itself.

Addressing Other Plugins

As mentioned before, the goal is not to reshape the sound of your tracks drastically. That’s for production. Here, you’d want to use plugins in order to glue everything together. Two of the main plugin categories that come to your aid are reverbs and delays.

The chromaVerb, for instance, is an excellent reverb plugin that comes with Logic Pro for free. You can implement it on your tracks to create a virtual atmosphere in which your signal bounces back and forth. Use delays to create echoes and make tracks stand out.

Ideally, you’d want to use buses and sends for reverbs and delays. Not only does this allow you to manage CPU usage in Logic, but it makes creating a unified atmosphere across multiple tracks much easier.

Final Thoughts On Mixing In Logic Pro

If you don’t have a main plan when starting a mixing session, finishing this stage would be difficult. Listen to your tracks a couple of times, take notes to create a main frame of work, and stick to it. If you’re getting tired, your best bet is to leave it aside and come back to it tomorrow with a fresh pair of ears.

I highly recommend checking out my extensive YouTube video tutorial on mixing a song in Logic Pro from start to finish. I go over each and every instrument in a project and show you how I approach mixing.

Once mixing is done, the next stage is mastering. I usually send my tracks to a mastering engineer to take care of it for me, but you can also master your own projects in Logic.

For more lessons on music production, mixing, mastering, and songwriting, check out my Free 6 Pillars To Learn Logic Pro Faster guidebook.