In „The magic of the first listen“, I spoke about the massive advantage a hired mix engineer has, compared to the situation of a producer mixing his own song.
But of course, many of you are producers and songwriters or even artists who write, play, produce and mix your own music from start to finish.
There is a lot of confusion around the point that separates production from mixing.
The general answer to that is very simple: production and mix are done by two different people looking at the process in a different way.
Every producer is EQing, compressing, grouping, applying mixbus-treatment etc. and ending up with the best mix they could do.
The mix engineer is then supposed to take that and get it to another level.
Producers usually send me all of their instruments EQ’d and compressed as in the rough mix. That includes the dynamics of sidechained instruments in electronic genres – the vibe of the sidechain is certainly part of the production. Reverbs and delays are not printed, unless they create a very specific vibe that is part of the sound (example: spring reverb on a guitar).
Drums and vocals would be an exception – I prefer to receive them with all plugins bypassed.
A lot of my mix-work involves „recreating“ the vibe of the rough mix, but at a better quality and higher resolution.
For those of you who write, produce + mix their own music, I recommend wearing two „different hats“ for those tasks.
When wearing the „producer hat“, don’t be concerned with the stuff we’re discussing here. Create a vibe, go to extremes, try a lot of things, be innovative, open 100 virtual instruments, etc… your rough mix can be messy and purposely ignoring a lot of „classic audio rules“.
But when wearing the „mix engineer hat“, the focus is on retaining the vibe of the rough mix, improving the audio quality and compatibility to the various mediums the music will be played on.
That involves a lot of deconstructing and rebuilding. With that, let’s dive into the details of this issue.
The “Producer-Hat”
When wearing the „producer hat“, don’t be concerned with the stuff we’re discussing here. Create a vibe, go to extremes, try a lot of things, be innovative, open 100 virtual instruments, etc… your rough mix can be messy and purposely ignoring a lot of „classic audio rules“.
The “Mix Engineer-Hat”
But when wearing the „mix engineer hat“, the focus is on retaining the vibe of the rough mix, improving the audio quality and compatibility to the various mediums the music will be played on.
That involves a lot of deconstructing and rebuilding. With that, let’s dive into the details of this issue.
This was the last of a three part-series called “The magic of the first listen”. Never forget, your own judgement might be clouded once you spent too much time working on a mix – time works against you.
If this article was useful for you, subscribe to my exclusive e-mail list, or leave a comment. I’m very happy to hear from you.
[convertkit form=5236308]