4 ms·

It's not that easy, unfortunately. Mixing is a lot more complex and involved than it looks. It's a balancing act, making tracks stand out from the background or

by beat 8y ago

It's not that easy, unfortunately. Mixing is a lot more complex and involved than it looks. It's a balancing act, making tracks stand out from the background or blend into the background, and finally putting it all into a coherent-sounding whole. For example, many mix engineers - most, probably - use a buss compressor as "glue" to help blend the whole mix together. Take out something loud like lead vocals or drums, and the buss compressor behavior changes, changing the rest of the mix. A lot of mixers also use sidechain compression to duck parts depending on other parts (like the kick drum taking a few db out of the bass). And besides the mix, it needs mastered (which costs money), and packaged separately from the rest of the album, making it a different product, to be sold separately. On the other hand, some fields actually do instrumental tracks with vocals stripped out as regular products - karaoke and hip-hop tracks are often made from the original mixes. Personally, as a mix engineer, I don't want some home genius second-guessing my mixing decisions.

amelius 8y ago
> Personally, as a mix engineer, I don't want some home genius second-guessing my mixing decisions. But the home user could start from your default settings?
- beat 8y ago
  Not really. Not unless they have my DAW (mixing software), and the plugins I use on it. There's a lot more to mixing than just relative levels. It's kind of a black art that takes years to learn. I've been at it seriously for a decade now, and I feel I'm just beginning to get good (although I've gotten lucky in the past, it wasn't because I really understood what I was doing). Here's an example. I listen critically to a lot of mixes, in order to learn from them, so I hear flaws everywhere. One badly flawed classic song, to my ear, is Al Stewart's "Year of the Cat". It's extremely sibilant on the vocals. Listen to it on bright-sounding headphones, and every S sound in the vocal is shrill and hissy-sounding. Adjusting the level won't fix that. I want to run a de-esser on the vocal. And it's not a knock on the mix in general, which is mostly gorgeous, lush, classic 1970s Abbey Road sound. 98% of it is magic beyond my meager skills. But oh god the sibilance. edit: I should add here that individual tracks, solo'd outside the context of a mix, can sound really weird and wrong - they get manipulated to blend into the whole, not to sound great on their own. For example, I high-pass most guitars at 250-300hz, even though the low E string is way down at 82hz. The reason is to get them out of the bass space, freeing it for the bass guitar/synths and kick drum. So if you solo the guitar, it can sound thin and wrong. But in the mix, you'll never notice the difference - but you'll hear clearer bass.

by beat 8y ago

amelius 8y ago

> Personally, as a mix engineer, I don't want some home genius second-guessing my mixing decisions. But the home user could start from your default settings?

beat 8y ago
Not really. Not unless they have my DAW (mixing software), and the plugins I use on it. There's a lot more to mixing than just relative levels. It's kind of a black art that takes years to learn. I've been at it seriously for a decade now, and I feel I'm just beginning to get good (although I've gotten lucky in the past, it wasn't because I really understood what I was doing). Here's an example. I listen critically to a lot of mixes, in order to learn from them, so I hear flaws everywhere. One badly flawed classic song, to my ear, is Al Stewart's "Year of the Cat". It's extremely sibilant on the vocals. Listen to it on bright-sounding headphones, and every S sound in the vocal is shrill and hissy-sounding. Adjusting the level won't fix that. I want to run a de-esser on the vocal. And it's not a knock on the mix in general, which is mostly gorgeous, lush, classic 1970s Abbey Road sound. 98% of it is magic beyond my meager skills. But oh god the sibilance. edit: I should add here that individual tracks, solo'd outside the context of a mix, can sound really weird and wrong - they get manipulated to blend into the whole, not to sound great on their own. For example, I high-pass most guitars at 250-300hz, even though the low E string is way down at 82hz. The reason is to get them out of the bass space, freeing it for the bass guitar/synths and kick drum. So if you solo the guitar, it can sound thin and wrong. But in the mix, you'll never notice the difference - but you'll hear clearer bass.