Q: any nifty tips on efficiency or making it sound so damn freakin crisp and wonderful? thanks
A: one weird weird thing i noticed, i was mixing hallelujah for way way too long and feeling trapped and down about it, listening to 'new rules' side-by-side with it and just wanting to die over it, (by the way this was just days before i found out the loudness war is officially over. so now we don't have to worry about that which is huge huge news, but this was right before i realized that) anyway, i had done all this work on the mix for hallelujah, and it's also just a really dense and layered textural arrangement, etc, and whatever, and then i was poking around for reference songs (such as new rules and several other songs done by other people) and was generally freaking out about how much clearer everyone else's songs sounded but (i'm getting to the point of this, hold on) here's the surprise: i accidentally opened up one of my jazz jam sessions (like anything you would hear on the 'jazz' section of this site) and i was shocked to find out that that recording sounded so much more clear, sounded like it was mixed much much better, but as we all know it is not even mixed at all. those are instrumental jams where i lay down each instrument in 1 crazy take, bounce it out and call it a day. and the point is, i found out that that mix (which was no mix) had a lot more punch and clarity than this hallelujah mix which i had so tenderly spent so many long days on. the lesson was , ...... if you use a million instruments it is a real challenge to mix it out of sounding like mud. even if it's very tenderly layered and arranged instruments, the point is, if there are many instruments, they will clog up the mid range, like that troublesome 100-300 range. but if you use only 3 or 4 instruments,  ..... it's just got automatic clarity. so that's something. so this works to my advantage now working under these crazy deadline schedules, because i simply don't have time to make as dense an arrangement, and it is therefore easier to mix. Another thing i learned, on the subject of working faster, is, ... work faster. you gravitate toward what matters. and it is so easy to lose your mind if you listen to that damn thing for too long. you'll just lose your mind ...... another way to get tips is watching a billion mixing tutorials and tips videos until you realize they are all starting to contradict each other, and then you forget it and do what you want