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Mixing

What is mixing? We want to talk to the simple people. People with no knowledge of music technology, we don't want to make it hard. So let's begin talking about that.

When you record a song you will come up with several tracks. Ussually it is 5-10 channel tracks. When we say channel we mean,each recording of each instrument you make. For example, one channel for the recording for guitar, one channel for the bass, one for the other guitar, one for the lead vocal...and so goes on. You wont make a song and leave (you can record everything in to one poor mix but the overall sound will be not bad at the best). So there comes mixing.

So mixing is about taking these channel-tracks and make them fit together. make them sound good. As good as you can.

Many processes comes in to life at this part.

 

  • Process of clearing the unwanted sounds and frequencies from the mix
  • process of shaping the sound of each instrument so it doesn't "sound conflict" with the others
  • process of creating the feeling and room you want ,ussually using reverb and panning the instruments (imagine that we have two guitars and it is like putting one guitar to the left and the other to the right)
  • process of taking the best out of each channel (extreme equalizing in sounds that we want to change their character and easy equalizing in sounds we want to fit in the mix)
  • process of fitting the sounds together
There are as many processes as needed.
So mixing is the way to take all the pieces from a broken glass and stick them together and achieve to take a feeling, a perfect touching and a perfect ready to drink glass.
 
example of a mixing console


This for example is a mixing console, one of the big ones. You can see the many channels and many buttons. You can use them all to make the sound adjustments I said, like panning, equalizing, volume, all of this and many more. Their prices varies from cheap to huge.
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