Avoid This Common Mistake When Recording and Producing Your Music 

When producing music from your home studio, many people make a very common mistake that ends up costing them time and money when it comes to mixing. This can be easily avoided.

The mistake is recording poor quality tracks and expecting to fix the problems during the mixing process—either by giving it to a professional engineer to fix or by adding a massive amount of processing.

Neither of these is a good option.

If your goal is a professional-quality mix, then you must start with great sounds.

Taking the time to think about the arrangement and choose instrument tones and sounds carefully so they don’t crowd each other in the frequency spectrum will make it that much easier to create space in the mix.

Setting up your instrument and making sure it sounds the best it can before you record it—and making sure to set your input gain properly—will save you time and potentially money when it comes to mixing.

If you have options when it comes to microphones, take some time to listen to a variety and choose the one that best captures the sound you are looking for.

Don’t put a Shure SM57 on a kick drum when you are looking for a big, woofy kick drum sound. A Shure B52 would be a better option.

If you are recording vocals and don’t have the luxury of a vocal booth, get creative and find a quiet closet or use a few acoustic panels to create isolation and block out unwanted background noise. Trying to remove unwanted noise in a recording with plug-ins can sometimes make things sound unnatural.

A Finished Song Is Easier to Mix 

Another mistake that’s often overlooked is recording a song before it’s truly finished.  This is a recipe for frustration—both during recording and mixing. 

When a song hasn’t been fully written, arranged, or worked out, you're essentially trying to build a house without blueprints. You're constantly stopping to make decisions that should have been made before the first note was ever recorded.

Things like: 

-Should this section be half as long?

-Does this key change work?

-What’s the role of this second guitar part?

-Should the chorus vocals have harmonies or not?

These are all songwriting and arrangement questions. 

When they aren’t answered ahead of time, you end up experimenting during the tracking process, which takes longer and often leads to recordings that sound tentative or cluttered. 

That indecision then follows you into the mix, where you’re now not only trying to balance sounds and carve out space—you’re also trying to make sense of a song that doesn’t know what it wants to be.

Incomplete Songs Lead to Over-processing 

When the song structure and arrangement aren’t clear, musicians tend to “fill the space” with more parts, more synths, doubling parts, more guitars, more percussion, etc., because something feels off. 

And while this might seem to solve the problem in the moment, it creates a dense and unfocused session that becomes very difficult to mix.

Recording Too Soon Costs You More Time 

Opting to just get it recorded and fix it later is not a time saver.  Trying to fix rough tracks from parts that weren’t played or recorded well takes up a significant amount of time when mixing.

What usually happens is this- you end up going back and forth between plug-ins, experimenting with processing chains, and tweaking endlessly, trying to “save” a vocal that was poorly recorded or buried under too many instruments.

A well-recorded, thoughtfully arranged song can often be mixed in a fraction of the time it takes to fix a problematic one. When everything is clean, intentional, and balanced before you even touch a fader, mixing becomes a creative process instead of damage control.

If You Want Professional Results, Work Like a Professional  

Part of working like a professional—whether you're in a major studio or your spare bedroom—is having and following a process that supports high-quality results.

That means: 

-Writing and arranging the song until every part has a purpose.

-Rehearsing the performance so it’s confident and musical.

-Consideration of instrument tones and tunings.

-Choosing the right mic and placement.

-Recording in a quiet, treated space where possible.

-Capturing strong, clean performances that don’t need repair.

When you lay the proper foundation, you’ll find that the mix almost “mixes itself.” Instead of trying to fix problems, you're enhancing something that’s already working. That’s when mixing becomes fun, efficient, and satisfying.

Capture Ideas Quickly—But Don’t Confuse That With Final Production 

I know that when the creative urge strikes, you want to just dive in, hit record, and worry about the mix later.  That’s fine if you want to capture a rough idea.  In fact, capturing inspiration while it’s fresh is a smart move. 

But treat those recordings as demos. Let them guide your next steps. Use them to refine the arrangement and identify what’s working and what isn’t.

When you’re ready for the real thing, take the time to prepare properly, and your recordings will end up sounding much more professional, and your mixes will come together more quickly and easily.

Ultimately 

Creating professional-sounding music isn’t about buying the most expensive plug-ins or gear. It’s about taking a thoughtful approach to each stage of the production process.

Trying to fix bad recordings in the mix wastes your time and rarely delivers the results you’re hoping for. 

And rushing into recording a song before it’s truly ready leads to messy sessions, lackluster performances, and frustration in mixing.

Give your songs the respect they deserve. Finish writing them. Work out the arrangement. Choose tones and parts that complement each other. Get your recording setup right. Capture great performances.

That’s how you make mixing easier, more efficient, and much more enjoyable. And that’s how you get a finished product that sounds polished and professional, because it started that way.

By: Michelle Sabolchick