Producer Mindset Mistake #3: Believing the Mix Will Save Your Song

At the start of the year, I asked my newsletter subscribers what they wanted me to discuss more of and the highest ranking answer was "musical artistry (how to stay inspired, mindset, and creative practices)." So let's talk mindset.

As a private Ableton Live coach and faculty member at Point Blank Music School, I have worked with hundreds of producers. These are the four most common producer mindset mistakes I see over and over again:

• Mistake #1: Giving up on a song because you got bored

• Mistake #2: Overstuffing a song because you're insecure about the core idea

• Mistake #3: Believing the mix (and somebody else) will save your song

• Mistake #4: Thinking you’re advanced because you abandoned the basics

Over the next four weeks, I'm going to address each of these mistakes and offer a practical way for you to address them in your own creative practice.

Let's dive in!

Do you believe the mix will save your song?

Music producers,

Ever heard (or told yourself) this before?

"This is going to sound so much clearer/better/fuller/punchier/etc once it's mixed."

I've worked with a lot of producers who believe that the mix will save all but mixing is not a panacea for all your music production problems.

I see this belief most often when producers:

• lack confidence in their own production skills

• have not completed a mix before

Instead of committing to choices and shaping a strong sound during the production phase, they leave things messy and unbalanced, assuming that a mix engineer (or some future version of themselves) will magically pull it all together later.

Often, this isn't intentional - if you've never mixed before then how could you know these things - but the root culprit can often be a lack of confidence, or more precisely fear of the mixing process.

Here's the mindset I'd encourage you to adopt: mixing is not a separate process—it starts in production. Learning how to balance levels, choose the right sounds, and commit to decisions while producing will make mixing so much easier. And if you’ve told yourself that “mixing is something you just can’t do,” it’s probably because you haven’t spent enough time practicing it.

Does this sound like you? Then try this:

Mix somebody else’s song. There are thousands of free multitrack sessions online—download one and try mixing it.

Why? Because when you mix someone else’s stems, you’ll quickly start wishing things had been done differently in production. You’ll want things like:

• Less reverb and delay baked into the sounds

• Fewer competing elements in the bass range

• Cleaner, more intentional sound design choices

And here’s the thing: you’re making these same mistakes in your own tracks. You just don’t notice because you’re too close to them.

This exercise will make you more aware of the production decisions you need to fix before mixing even begins.

Come back next week for the final mindset mistake in this series—it’s a big one.

Til next time,
ZW