How to make sure your mix is in phase

If your mix is "out of phase", it's going to sound weak, and your music layers are going to be fighting with each other! Phase is the relationship in time between two waveforms. In this guide, you'll learn the essentials to keeping your music in phase.

Make sure your kiCk and 808 are in phase:

If your kick and 808 are out of phase, they're going to cancel each other out. Do you ever create a beat that has a punchy kick, a hard 808, but the low end feels so flat? Even with the volume of the kick and 808 boosted?

This is very often due to the phase. I'm using a free plugin called Voxengo MSED to analyse the relationship between my kick and my 808. First, I'm going to mute every layer except my kick and 808, pan them to each side, and look at the reading inside of MSED.

So the kick is panned 100% to the left, and the 808 is panned 100% to the right. This is the "correlometer" reading. As you can see it's in the negative, which means they are out of phase.

The easiest way to try and fix this is to "reverse" the polarity of your kick or 808. In FL Studio, you simply open up the sample, and click the reverse polarity setting.

Now going back to the plugin, when I play the kick and 808 together, the result is in the positive.

Now all you need to do is reset the panning on your kick and 808, and continue with the track as normal. You should notice that your kick and 808 are much more clear, and hit harder.

If you're noticing that melodies or audio recordings are out of phase, you could try reversing the polarity, or you could slightly change the timing of when the samples come in. For example, if you have 4 recordings of a choir, you may need to slightly delay the recording from a mic that was further away.

In summary, here's how to mix your beats in phase:

1. Pan your kick and 808 to an opposite side
2. Use the free MSED plugin to analyse the phase correlation
3. If your samples are in the negative, reverse the polarity of one of them
4. If your melodies are out of phase, reverse the polarity or slightly stagger the timing
5. Reset your panning, and finish your mix.

I have a video guide for this coming out next week, so come back to this page then and it will be on this page.

I hope this helps with your mixing and mastering.