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Top Down Mixing: Is This the Smartest Way to Attack a Mix?

Jul 08, 2024

Learn this alternative mixing approach then put it to the test. Can top-down mixing level up the quality of your music production output?

Top-Down mixing

Mixing exists between science and artform. There are ‘rules’, but the overall guideline is to do what’s best for any given song. Anything could end up between the monitors for the next mixing job, and so – to fit any eventuality – a mixing engineer needs to be equipped with a huge number of tools, techniques and ways of working in order to deliver a professional mix. ‘Top-Down Mixing’ is one more mixing tactic you should have at your disposal.

What’s the first instrument you turn to when you start mixing a track? It could be the kick, the vocal, or anything else. In top-down mixing, the idea is to start off further up the chain: apply processing to bus channels and submixes first, getting groups of instruments under control together. Only then do you start drilling down further, concentrating on individual instruments within those groups – usually to correct problems you’ve just brought out.

So what’s the case for this top-down approach to mixing? When could it be used, and what are the limits of its power?

Examples of Top-Down Mixing

Let’s say we want to make a multitrack drum recording sound more cohesive, clearer, bigger and punchier in the mix. There are several ways to achieve this. First, let’s discuss using a limiter, such as Waves L2 Ultramaximizer limiter, placed at the end of a drum mix bus plugin chain.

Mixing into a limiter helps give us an idea how any group of tracks will behave later in the mix and mastering process with a suitable level boost. If we instead applied a limiter after mixing, we may find the sound of our mix has changed in an undesirable way. There’s no right or wrong here, try what works for you. If the music calls for it, leave the limiter in place and carry on balancing your drums with it in, but if all you needed was a quick idea how your drums could end up sounding further down the mix and mastering process then bypassing it would be best.

Try top-down mixing with a limiter plugin

More Top-Down Mixing for the Drum Bus

A great trick on the drum bus is to use tape and tube saturation. Waves Abbey Road J37 Tape is a great choice and can add a lot of fatness, drive and extra warmth to drum mixes out of the box. If you wanted to experiment further with this approach, start by inserting the j37 on the sub group and, if you’re working with multitrack drums, rebalance the separate channels feeding into it. Listen for how the color and character or certain tracks change slightly when pushed louder and harder into the tape processing.

Add tape to your top-down mix

Adding an EQ module to the drum bus can sculpt the sound of the drums as a whole unit, balancing frequencies and correcting any unwanted harshness. A well placed notch cut can tame any unwanted peaks bought out by the saturation. Maybe your drums are sounding too dark and thin. Instead of going into individual hi-hat or top channels, you can simply apply a high boost using an EQ. In the example below, F6 dynamic EQ is applying a boost from around 7kHz.

Top-down mixing with EQ

Compression is a common processor you’ll find on the mix bus. Plugins such as the CLA-76 can even out the dynamics of our drums, gluing everything together and taming transients without squashing them entirely. That said, the CLA-76 is a fairly fast compressor, so if you need a slower, more glue-like squeeze across your drums consider a compressor more fitting for the job of handling busy bus compression. As the name suggests, the SSL G-Master Buss is the perfect choice for bus compression.

With a newly included sidechain filter introduced in V15, the flexibility of this legendary compression has vastly improved. Dialing in the sidechain filter within the SSL Buss compression is super simple. If you find the compression behaviour you have set is slightly too aggressive due to an overly proud kick drum range, twist the sidechain to a point just above the kick’s fundamental frequency. For this, you’ll want to target your sidechain at around 200Hz. This simple move stops the compressor’s threshold from listening to the range of the frequencies below that point allowing for the remaining louder frequencies above that point (which may be in or around the snare range) to trigger the compression instead. The results are far more natural sounding, reducing unwanted pumping effects, and is a very useful approach to take in top-down compression mixing.

Get mixing with a compressor’s sidechain filter for cleaner results

Top-Down Mixing for Vocals

Let’s say your session has vocals spread over a number of tracks and the performance is incredibly dynamic during choruses. Specifically, the vocalist alternates between belted high notes and quieter low notes every other line. In a case like this, using compression across every track may be your first choice to make the dynamics from line to line more dynamically consistent, but there’s a smarter way which uses fewer plugins.

A true time saving method for scenarios like this would be to output all the tracks to the same channel and use a single instance of Vocal Rider, which adjusts your vocal levels automatically, as a one click solution. This method saves you the need to draw each level change in your DAW or manually ride faders for each track. Also, individually treating each vocal channel would be incredibly inefficient and CPU intensive. For example, using Clarity VX on a single vocal bus is way faster than trying to clean all of my vocal layers from background noise separately.

Automatically adjust your vocal levels

Top-Down Mixing on a Synth Bus

A great example of top-down mixing on a synth bus would be using modulation plugins, from simple tape flanging, doubling and chorus sounds to wild textures and soundscapes that deeply shift the source signal, Waves modulation plugins will always provide magic and movement to your mixes. Try Brauer Motion on the synth bus to create new worlds of movement using circular stereo auto-panner. Bring your static sounds to life!

Add instant movement to your top-down mixes

The Benefits of Top-Down Mixing

Primary advantages of top-down mixing include workflow efficiency and speed. Top-down mixes tend to go faster, sorting out the bus first can avoid wasting time on individual tracks. You’d be surprised how little you need to do to individual tracks when your bus has been sorted.

Top-down mixing also avoids over analytical thinking, a common and unhelpful disposition for many producers. Making broad choices serves the bigger picture of the song most of the time. After all, we're always striving to create one piece of music. It's the combination and the relationship of the ingredients that create emotion and enjoyment for the listener.

What Can’t Top-Down Mixing Solve?

It’s important to realize that the approach of Top-Down Mixing isn’t some revolution in the dark art of mixing, or a cure-all for every situation – it’s another option to have at your disposal for the many eventualities you may encounter in your mixing travels. There are certainly some reasons that you wouldn’t use this tactic on certain material….

Errors and Bad Recordings

For a mixing strategy whose whole philosophy is to concentrate on the big picture first before zooming in, you should expect that top-down mixing won’t work on anything other than great-quality recordings. If a mix needs micromanaging – removing hum, clicks and artifacts – then processing bus-first may not always work.

Overly Complex and Hard-to-Process Mixes

A busy mix is often hard to deal with, whichever way you go about it. Top-down mixing might serve you well when you’ve got a very crowded mix with many instruments vying for frequencies and stereo position – but it could equally be to your disadvantage. When you need surgical-style mixing precision to separate elements from each other, starting from a bus may make it harder for you to make decisions as you later start to zoom in with track-by-track processing.

Instrument Types You’re Less Familiar With

Next time you’re mixing a multitracked bagpipe quartet or an underwater flute ensemble, top-down mixing probably won’t be the best way to do it! Silly examples aside, if you’re not used to the sound, reaction and unique nature of an instrument, then starting at the bus stage might not be the right way to play it.

More Ideas for Top-Down Mixing Solutions

Space Rider combines reverb, delay, chorus with a dynamic Rider that allows you to automate your effects in real time. Setting up multiple effect buses and many lanes of automation can take a long time – but not with Space Rider. Inspire some fresh ideas by taking the presets for a spin. Whack the Drum Chorus Delay Rhythm Rider on your drum bus. You won't be disappointed, with some adjustments to the mix knob you can seamlessly blend in a background layer of groove that would be difficult to achieve without Space Rider’s secret weapon, Rider, dynamically responding to the incoming audio signal to morph the different effects, instantly creating movement and interest.

Make reverbs magical

How about Scheps Parallel Particles on your buses? Tweak your music’s attitude, energy, and emotion in seconds. With Scheps Parallel Particles, you can skip complex processes, and focus quickly on energy and feel of your groups.

Add energy to vocals, synth lines, pianos Bite feature, add full body to guitars, drums & more with Thickness, or for you bass heads, create deeper and fuller low end with Sub feature.

Make mixing super simple and powerful

If you’re feeling generous, there’s nothing quite like the magic of huge-sounding analog tube saturation. BB Tubes can make any instrument jump out of the speakers. Use it on your drums buss, vocals buss, synth buss mix bus for incredible tones. Your groups will simply feel “finished” in the mix far quicker than before.

Top-down works amazing with saturation

The Final Say on Top-Down Mixing

We’ve taken you through the ideas behind top-down mixing in this article, and we’ve discussed the reasons for using it as well as what it’s good for and what its limits are. You should now have another string to your mixing bow – one that will make you a better mixing engineer when it’s time to use it.

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