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Some musicians who are looking for their unique sound often experiment broadly with effects, just letting things flow and let the outcome be the result of whatever happened sub-consciously. This kind of freedom is always important to that next step to finding what makes a song sound original, but it is the element that can very easily cause the mix to stray from being original to just plain mess.
An imbalance of sound just shows listeners you care more about creating an original song than actually creating a quality sounding song. Knowing how to work the effects in a sensible way, but also keeping that element of originality through experimenting is obviously the way to make the most of mixing software.
One of the easiest mistakes to make is to experiment with the master fader/volume. This should always be left alone, but some musicians who are new to this kind of software and the process of editing can find the urge. Don’t. They tend to see a problem with one of the tracks, but then not actually solving the problem, will turn the master up or down. This is definitely the wrong way to tackle this problem since you are punishing the other tracks that were alright. It is in fact one way of destroying the whole mix. The way professionals tackle this problem when one of the tracks is an anomaly compared to the rest is to select it and either change its compression, turn the volume down (not the master!) or simply experiment with other effects.
Another rather obvious problem is to accidentally record ambient sounds. You must eliminate external sound at all costs! For every track that you record, that’s another unwanted sound within the mix you need to resolve. You definitely do not need the hassle later on when you start editing, the process of mixing takes long enough as it is thank you very much. It is so much easier to remove external sound before recording the track so that the problem when mixing does not come up at all. Just remember: it is much harder to edit unwanted sounds off a track then to remove it beforehand. It is as simple as that.
