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Most mixing advice stays at the level of principles. This episode does the opposite. Simon and Terry sit down and walk the mixer from left to right, channel by channel, and say out loud what is actually on the kick, the snare, the toms, the rooms, the percussion and the bass. It is two working mixers comparing rigs, which means as much disagreement as agreement, and that is where it gets useful.
The real question underneath it is not “what plugin should I use”. It is “how do you set yourself up so that mixing is fast, repeatable and still creative”. The answer they keep circling back to is the template.
The Mix Template
Both of them run everything through a template: raw tracks feeding a fixed mixer of mono and stereo channels, each loaded with the moves they reach for nearly every time. The clever part is that most of those plugins sit deactivated, dormant, one click from being live. If a trick works once, it goes into the template, deactivated, ready for next time.
“My template is all about what am I going to want to do with this sound pretty much every time.”
The point is not automation, it is removing friction. The predictable decisions are already made, so the energy goes into the song rather than into building the same channel strip for the thousandth time.
The Kick
Both start by blending a subtle sample under the real kick, not to replace it but to even out the hits that do not quite land. Terry still uses the old Motown move of pushing a Pultec for too much bottom end and then pulling it back with a 160 until the low end just tightens. Simon dynamically ducks a narrow band around the song’s root note so the bass has somewhere to sit. And a lovely aside: the kick’s decay changes the feel of the tempo. Shorten it and the chorus feels like it lifts, lengthen it and the verse feels slower, all without touching the actual BPM.
The Snare
This is where they push hardest. A snare is not just a good sound, it is a character in the song. They hunt for something interesting, a crusty sampled spring, a honky sample that is gross on its own but does a job. Simon shares the Andy Wallace idea he keeps in his template: a separate reverb channel driven by a rhythmic pink-noise sample rather than the snare itself, so the reverb can be pushed hard to cut through without making the snare sound like it is playing backwards.
Toms, Hats and Overheads
Toms get expanded rather than gated, because a gate murders the cymbal decay bleeding through them, and panned from the audience’s perspective. On hi-hats, a little delay to fill a groove that was played too sparse, or a phaser sitting dormant for a psychedelic moment. Overheads get almost nothing, on purpose, and this is where a shared rule lands hard: stop high-passing the overheads and rooms.
“There’s more to a kick drum than just a click or a dunk. There’s a whole room being excited, and if you take that out, you’ve told the ear that it’s small.”
The Rooms
The rooms are the payoff. With enough separate drum channels it is easy to forget the kit is one instrument, and it is the room mics, often just slammed 1176s, that put it back together. Bring the rooms up and suddenly it stops sounding like a pile of samples and becomes a drummer in a space.
Percussion and the Fader Hand
Percussion is there to bind the groove, not carry it, so the real tool is the fader. Rather than parking a shaker at one level, they ride it, nudging it up a couple of dB into a chorus, pulsing it bar by bar to build urgency. That kind of thing happens by feel, standing up, hand on the fader, and is one more reason a physical fader beats a mouse.
The Bass
Bass comes down to control. Pick one source of truth for the low end, whether that is a DI, an amp or a clean sine underneath, and let only that own the sub. Split the bass into bands, tighten the lows, and duck the low end out of competing instruments like piano so the bass sits smooth. And the reason for spoon-feeding the speakers a clean sub is refreshingly honest: real speakers simply cannot reproduce that much energy without freaking out, so you give them something easy.
Final Thoughts
The thread through the whole episode is a working philosophy: set the template up so the routine is lazy and instant, precisely so you have the time and headspace to chase the one idea that makes a record special. None of these are rules to copy verbatim, and the two of them mix differently on almost every channel. The value is in hearing two experienced mixers show their hand, disagree in good faith, and explain why. Take the moves that fit how you work, build your own template, and get your hand back on the fader.
