On this blog post I want to share with you some info about what is mixing in music production. What I’m talking about here is audio mixing so please don’t confuse it with djing.
This is a stage where a producer gets to polish their song to make it sound as good as possible and get it ready for the mastering engineer to put in the final touches.
I will try and explain everything as simple as possible using plain simple English. Let’s dive right in then.
What is mixing?
In music production, audio mixing is taking all individual sounds from a song with multiple channels into a single master channel. It is the process of balancing individual recorded tracks to work well together as one.
You can look at it as a car. For instance a car has got a lot of parts such as the wheels, body, engine etc but when those parts are “mixed together” it becomes a car.
As much as a car wont drive well if the wheel alignment is not proper, same with music, you need to mix the sounds proper in order to get a good sounding mix that plays well in radio and other sound devices.
What Tools Do I Need?
The proper tools you’ll need to get a good sounding mix are equalizers, dynamic processors (compressor, limiter, de-esser etc), audio effects, mixer and a good DAW.
You can choose to do all your mixing using a software or by using outboard gear, it’s totally up to what you can or can’t access. Technology these days is to advanced so I believe it’s possible to get a proper sounding mix using software only.
For me, it doesn’t matter as to what you’re using just make sure that the music sounds good when compared with other songs.
Audio mixing is not only used in music but it also applies in Live stage performance, film, television and video games.
If your recording is bad then you wont be able to fix that in mixing. Make sure all the sounds you have, already sound good before getting into mixing. If you put garbage in then you’ll get garbage out, it’s that simple. Without a good mix you also can’t get a good master no matter if you use the best mastering engineer in the world.
I hope this quick article does help you understand what is mixing and in the next few days I’ll be showing you how to use all the tools to get a good sounding mix. If you have any questions then please leave a comment below, I always respond 🙂
