Mixing Music
Mixing music is the art of blending everything together to make one single stereo track. We are taking all the tracks that were recorded separately and combining them into a single stereo audio file. There are 4 main tools we use to do this. These are Equalizing or EQ, Pan, Volume, and Effects. By using a combination of those 4 tools we can provide a sense of separation so our ears will hear each instrument. We can clear up any mud or tracks that are hard to detect.
When mixing music you will also need some physical tools in order to achieve a well-balanced mix. First, you need a room in your studio to mix in that is acoustically tuned. It needs to have the proper soundproofing. It needs to deal with room reflections so certain frequencies and sound waves are not exaggerated or repeated through a natural reverb process.
Next, you need a set of near field studio monitors. You don’t get a true representation of the signal you are mixing from regular consumer speakers. This is because those speakers are designed to make the sound better and quite often regular speakers and headphones exaggerate the frequencies and add a slight distortion in an effort to make things sound better.
The problem with this is you might mix something to sound great on a certain set of normal regular speakers only to find the mix sounds terrible on a different set of speakers. Near field studio monitors will give you a true representation of the audio signal without adding anything that is not in the original signal.
