10 Tips for Mixing Jazz Music

We love mixing jazz. Few genres have kept their sound so intact: the recording medium went digital, but traditional jazz still aims for the sound of a band playing together in a room.

That’s why jazz is a good test of a mixing engineer. In pop or hip hop, effects and compression can cover a lot of flaws. In jazz they can’t, because the mix depends on balance and on knowing the music. Below are the ten things we pay most attention to when we mix jazz records.

1. Keep the natural sound

Jazz grew up in clubs, played mostly on acoustic instruments. In a small room, a piano, a double bass, a horn section and a drum kit carry without a PA, and that acoustic balance is what listeners expect to hear.

The goal of the mix is to stay as close to that live sound as possible.

2. Use gentle saturation

The classic jazz records were made on tape and released on vinyl. Those formats added warmth, a little compression and some harmonics, all of it gentle, never audible as distortion.

So before we mix anything, we put light saturation on each channel, for example a preamp emulation, and a tape emulation on the mix bus. Then we start balancing. The other option is to run the tracks through an analog preamp first.

3. Be ready for a live band recording

Jazz is usually recorded live, with the whole band in one room. You’ll get close mics on each instrument plus room mics, and with them the usual live-recording problems: bleed and phase.

Bleed (also called spill or leakage) is sound from one instrument picked up by another instrument’s mic. You can’t remove it, so learn to use it: the bleed is part of what makes the band sound like it’s in one room. Phase issues come from the same sound reaching several mics at different times. Check the polarity and timing of the close mics against the overheads before you balance anything.

We go deeper into live sessions in how to mix a band.

4. Balance is everything

Jazz parts are interwoven. A single chord can be split between two players: one plays the top notes, another the bottom. If one of them ends up louder in the mix, the chord changes colour, as if you’d put an EQ on it.

In jazz, balance does much of what EQ does in other genres, so get it right first.

5. Prefer volume automation to compression

Many engineers use compression for everything. When a solo jumps out or a part drops away, try the fader first.

Ride the levels with volume automation. The piece will sound less processed, and the players keep the dynamics they played. That’s good practice in any genre, and in jazz it’s the rule.

6. Pan the band as it stood

First choose the listener’s position. There are two common options:

• The drummer’s perspective
• The audience’s perspective

We usually pan jazz from the audience’s perspective: hi-hat on the right, floor tom on the left, bass in the middle. The overheads and room mics show where everything stood, so we use them as the map.

Follow the real positions, because every instrument also appears as bleed in the other mics. Pan the piano left and a guitar mic full of piano bleed right, and the piano gets pulled towards the centre.

Don’t copy the stage too literally, though. The aim is a stereo image that works on the record. Some engineers pan the snare slightly off-centre because that’s where it was. We keep it in the middle for better mono compatibility.

Big band panning

A big band has more players but the same rule: follow the seating and the room mics. As a starting point:

Depth matters as much as width. Rows further from the audience get a little less level and more room, the way they’d sound from the seats.

7. Use the right reverb

Strong time-based effects don’t belong in jazz. A room, chamber or ambient reverb does, used on a send so the whole band shares the same space.

When mixing pop music, you might give every instrument its own effect. In jazz, reverb isn’t decoration. It recreates the room, its depth and where the players sat in it.

8. Use classic equalizers

For jazz we reach for classic EQs, such as an SSL channel or a Pultec emulation, before modern surgical ones like FabFilter Pro-Q.

• Classic EQs add the colour the genre expects.
• They keep you close to how jazz records have always sounded.
• Their broad curves force you to EQ gently and leave the natural sound alone.

A modern EQ is still the right tool when you need to fix the recording, like a ringing resonance or a problem in one mic. Use it for repairs, as the exception.

9. Be careful with bus compression

Bus compression gives modern genres their loud, upfront sound. In jazz it can easily crush the parts that should breathe, and any pumping is out of place.

Our order of tools for jazz dynamics:

1. Fader automation.
2. Gentle saturation or a channel-strip emulation, which compresses slightly on its own.
3. Light compression on single tracks, a dB or two at a time, where a part really disappears.
4. Bus compression only if you still need it, and very lightly. A medium attack and fast release usually keep the natural dynamics.

10. Monitor through a mastering chain

Mastering changes balance, and in jazz balance is everything. Compression at the mastering stage can soften the drum transients, for example, and the kit then sits lower against the band.

To hear this while mixing, put a mastering chain on the mix bus for monitoring only, and make mixing decisions through it. Bypass it before you export. The mix you send to mastering should have no processing on the master bus and peaks around −6 dB. More on that in how loud a mix should be before mastering.

If you’re looking for plugins, see these 13 best plugins great for Jazz and Swing music.

Jazz mastering: how loud should it be?

There’s no fixed loudness target for jazz, or for any genre. −14 LUFS is only the level Spotify plays music back at, not a number a master has to hit. Pop masters often land around −9 LUFS. Jazz is usually mastered quieter than that, because the difference between a brushed chorus and a full shout chorus is the music. When we master a jazz record, we set the ceiling around −0.3 dB and let the dynamics decide the loudness.

Need a jazz mix?

Jazz combines the difficulties of a live band recording with very little room for processing, so mistakes show. We mix many genres, and jazz has always been one of our favourites. Whether it’s one track or an album, we’ll keep the sound of the room and the playing.

Rather have an engineer take it from here? Our online mixing starts at $113 per song, the full mix and master from $133, and mastering alone is $50. 2–3 days per song, 6 revision rounds included.