Mixing a Song Is a Lot Like Building a Power Flow Case

I’ve been writing music for several years now. What started with an alto sax in marching band has evolved into 9 guitars, a five-string bass, a drumset and 240 sound panels tucked into a makeshift home studio. And over the years of writing, playing, and mixing my own tracks, I’ve come to a strange realization: mixing a track and maintaining the power grid are essentially the same thing. Not necessarily on the surface-level; it’s pretty clear that a DAW and a power flow case look nothing alike. But in the ways that we think about them? That’s where I start to see the crossover.

It’s Called a Mix for a Reason

As a musician turned audio engineer (turned power systems engineer), it can be tempting to think in individual tracks. You turn up the guitar, add some low-end to the kick, brighten up the vocals. But that mentality breaks down once you take the track out of solo. Every single change you make affects the mix as a whole. Boosting the low-end makes the track feel fuller, but you just buried the vocals. A bit of compression can tighten things up–or make it feel lifeless. Eventually you realize that you’re not adjusting the guitar, or the drums, or the vocals, but the entire mix itself.

Power systems work the same way. In transmission planning, you’re never simply ‘rebuilding a line’ or ‘adding a generator’; you’re altering the power flow for an entire region. Shifting generations or loads in one area will see flows redistribute everywhere. Adjusting the reactive support and voltage won’t just affect that bus, but numerous others downstream.

The issue for both worlds is thinking locally when the reality is always global.

You’re Hearing What You Modeled

In a mix, one of the fastest ways to improve a mix is to think subtractively. Instead of boosting everything you recorded, just clean what you didn’t. Remove the mud, cut unnecessary frequencies, and get rid of what isn’t serving the mix. Just get rid of the noise and pollution so that your instruments can do their job. A clean mix isn’t about adding more, it’s about making space.

We face this same problem in power system modeling, just with different terminology. Whether you have bad data, inconsistent assumptions, or stale models–it’s all just noise. And it shows up everywhere. Flows that don’t make sense, voltages that look off, and worst of all, study results that technically solve but don’t reflect the reality of your system. The real work isn’t in just running the study, it’s cleaning the inputs. You can have the latest and greatest node-breaker model on your side of the Mississippi but it won’t mean anything if your model is stale. Bad data leads to bad flows, bad studies, and bad operations–all under the guise of a clean, converged result. In music, bad monitors make your mix sound fine—until you play it somewhere else. Power system models are no different: you want to find out if a project doesn’t work in your study, not your RTO’s.

There’s No Perfect Answer–Only Tradeoffs

There is no one way to write or mix a song. An instrumental-heavy track will take the focus and leave less space for the vocals while a brighter mix might sound exciting but could become fatiguing. There’s no perfect mix where everything is both punchy and clear, warm yet loud. It’s a constant balance and prioritization of our own goals.

Power systems are no different. There will never be a perfect operating point in our electrical system. We’re forced into a balance between reliability, cost, losses, and constraints, and every improvement throws the stress elsewhere. We can relieve a constraint but inadvertently bind another zone, or improve voltage but also increase our losses. And in doing this, we can end up optimizing in circles; stepping one foot forward and the other back until we’re stuck doing the splits. We need to understand that our goal is not to build the perfect mix or system, it’s to get better at consciously choosing our tradeoffs.

In both worlds, we need to recognize which tradeoffs matter in our context, accept small imperfections in our low-impact areas, and focus our effort where it actually matters. In a mix, an instrument might not sound perfect in isolation but holds the track together in the grander song. In your electrical system, your losses might not be minimized, but the system is reliable and within limits. Either way, we’re not looking for the ultimate solution, we’re deciding which imperfections we’re willing to keep.

The Mixdown

This has been a fun analogy but really, I think it’s more than that. The ability to think in systems is a skill that transfers, and developing one domain only helps you get better in the others. It’s easy to think of skills like music as simply creative and the world of power systems as entirely analytical when in reality there’s such a large overlap between any two fields, creative or not. And by putting them together, we’re able to see connections and create new ideas in ways we might never have if we’d simply stayed in a single lane. Whether you’re a musician, engineer, chef, gardener, or one of the countless others, we’re all working to find a balance–to take a complex, interconnected system and shape it into something desirable. So what else can we find in our lives that aren’t actually worlds apart? I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out.