Stuck on tweaking that chorus for the tenth time? You’re not alone – but maybe it’s time to walk away. As legendary producer and mix engineer Andy Wallace puts it: “There’s no perfect mix”.

And he would know. With a resume that spans Nirvana’s Nevermind, Slayer’s Reign in Blood, and Linkin Park’s Meteora, Wallace has shaped some of the music business’s most definitive sounds.

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In a rare new interview with Rick Beato, the engineer opens up about the creative tightrope that mixing demands: balancing vision with “instinct”, clarity with character, and polish with personality.

“There’s different mixes and there’s good mixes, but there’s no perfect mix,” he says.

For Wallace, mixing isn’t just about nailing the sonics – it’s about serving the artist’s intent and vision without flattening their identity in the process.

“I always like to have the artist input as well. Because it’s their record,” he explains. “I’ve said this many times. It’s their record. It’s not my record. And I can mix it on my own and you know, hopefully it’ll sound great and people will love it, but their input is what makes it their record.”

“I like to make sure that the band likes what I’m doing and they don’t feel it’s turned into a cartoon or something.”

When it comes to knowing when a song is “done”, the mixing legend relies on two gut checks: catching the right “vibe”, and resisting the temptation to overload the mix.

“To some degree even before you start, when you are doing pre-production or something like that you have a basic concept, however ethereal it might be, of what you want that song to be,” he says. “Maybe you know some reference songs, like ‘I want it to sound like Led Zeppelin’s this, that or the other thing.’ Or have that vibe. So you kind of know when you caught that vibe in it.”

Once that vibe is locked in, it becomes a matter of knowing when enough is enough. Or in Wallace’s words, “[it’s] when you don’t feel that it’s lacking.”

“There’s always a temptation to put too much on it and then it gets distracting,” says the engineer. “That’s something I think you learn with experience – when to say that’s enough.”

“It’s certainly possible to add more things that are really cool,” he adds, “but you can’t have everything in there at once or you lose the special, unique quality that you’re looking for because you want that song to stand out and be unique.”

At the heart of it all is a sensibility that can’t quite be taught: “Instinct. I can’t really put a name on it other than that,” says Wallace. “Because it’s the same thing that happens in anything that I that I mix or produce, whether it’s Jeff Buckley or Slayer, the same mindset is happening just with different tools, and sometimes a different objective”

You can follow Rick Beato via his official YouTube channel.

The post “There is no perfect mix”: If you’ve ever been stuck on a mix that never seems finished – you should listen to this stellar advice from Andy Wallace appeared first on MusicTech.