Workflow Wednesday with Headhunterz: Mixing

By Hard News 31 January 2016

Headhunterz is very active on Instagram and he likes treating his fans to daily updates. While he isn’t as active in the Hardstyle scene as he is on Instagram, he has been giving extremely valuable studio-tips for a few weeks now.

‘Workflow Wednesday’ as he calls his tips are something that a lot of our readers will find interesting, because many of them have an interest in pressing buttons and turning knobs. That’s why we’ve decided to publish them on our website whenever he decides to deliver a new one. Yesterday he explained something about ‘Kicks’. Read and learn!

“This is something I had to learn by making many mixing mistakes over the years, until I finally adjusted my workflow to fix it. Many producers get too hung up on the low end. So many times I was totally feeling a track I was making, until I listened to it outside of the studio. I got so disappointed over and over, after the many hours of mixing I had put in. It was the energy coming from the low end that was misleading me into thinking my music was sounding good.

The solution came when I was on tour and started making music on my laptop. What I found was that when I came home and checked what I made on the road, it actually sounded really good already! The volumes were just right and the amount of reverb was perfect. I found that more than often, many eq-ing and stuff I was doing was completely unnecessary. When working on my laptop I was not thinking about mix but just doing what sounded right on laptop speakers. Consider that half the world is listening on laptop speakers!

When something sounds right on those, you’re already halfway there! The low end is just gonna be the final sauce that is going to sit underneath the already energetic sounding track and compliment it nicely when played on bigger systems. Work from top to bottom, instead of the other way around, and mixing might become easier for you. Somebody once said to me and it took me a while to realize this was true: Work on big speakers, you get a small mix. Work on small speakers, you get a big mix. Good luck!”

Check out some other tips that Headhunterz gave below and follow him on Instagram here.

#2. Workflow Wednesday | Low End
#3. Workflow Wednesday | Kicks