A producer and a mixer can be the same person, or different, etc I Am The Lolrus , Jun 25, Location: Frankfurt, Germany. The producer is responsible for the studio booking, arrangements, musicians, microphones, recording medium, mixing and possibly also cutting or mastering of a recording.
He can delegate some or all of these tasks to specialists, but he will still call the shots and pay the bills. The mixing engineer creates a mix from the recorded work parts, i. The mixing engineer can be the same person as the producer, but not necessarily. While you can make music in a number of different ways, for example, you could record yourself yelling and banging pots and pans together, mixing will typically be done in the same way.
This means the mixer will probably throw the recordings into a DAW, add EQ and compression, adjust volume levels, and then things like panning as well. The process, while executed in slightly different ways, will fundamentally be the same. Most artists will have a vague understanding of this process because, at some point or another, they had to mix their own tracks.
As you probably know by now, mixers are doing a completely different job, and a more specific job, at that.
Music producers, more specifically, the artist who makes the music, might have to do a bit of mixing here and there, but for the most part, these are separate practices. But music production can also refer to mixing underneath its umbrella of meaning, so to speak. I'm working more and more to an organic structure. Also forced by using lot's of hardware with no recall etc. Also it seperates the sound design stage from the 'composition' hard to call that when doing techno stage.
From that point of view it's nice to have the main elements of a track recorded and sitting nicely in a folder somewhere. Ofcourse in the end there is some balancing between tracks you could that mixing , some eq here, sidechain compression, limiting.
But if everything is recorded properly, that's pretty minimal. I think you and many people are confusing mixing with sound design. If you have just a kick drum and then you eq and compress it one your probably using the wrong sound :P you're nor mixing it, your shaping the sound, you're not fitting it in with a finished song.
Unless you are snap compressing everything the impact of your drums isnt even that obvious without the rest of the tune, the bass especially. There's no context to judge it by. The reality is you can't mix an unfinished song be default, you can't mix the ingredients for a cake when they're not all present, you can't mix concrete if you haven't but the water in, you can't mix one tune with itself on decks.
Putting devil loc on a buss and sending some drums to it isn't mixing, it's sound design, in the same way that controlling a filters envelope is. You are shaping the sound. One of the main points of an 8 track was that you could work on the sounds when everything was done, and not as is. At the end of the day, it's just semantics to a certain point, but at the same time it should help you avoid confusion. Anyway, thats the theory, but you can also just ignore that and try anything you want.
I have to say the above approach is far easier to stick to when using 'real' instruments. If you want to use that approach to the fullest with electronic stuff, you really just need to spend more time getting the sounds right from stage 1, in some genres you really need to do that anyway. I have a loose rule that if I can't 'fix' any basic drum sound with one of the API eq's, then I have the wrong sound, it works for me.
Compression is a different matter with some styles though, for instance drum and bass kicks generally need to be slammed quite thick, but not like some crazy gabba drums, so you have to do that yourself. Like others have said, it is better to try and totally separate mixing and writing, I would go one step further and add sound design to that. For that to work though you have to have a clear vision of what you want and not be distracted, no point making a ton of kicks or bass patches that have no place to fit in your style.
A lot of the terms for producer, mix engineer, blah blah, get screwed up largely by people that make music by themselves and have none to limited studio experience. But it's easy to see why, it's because that person is doing all the work of potentially 1 to 5 people. However, the general term for both does apply to the "bedroom musician," it's just that most people don't know how to differentiate between the two.
I, personally, think it's much better to have the roles split because during production you're doing all the sound design, futzing around with all the details of just the music itself, and while you're doing so, the producer in your brain is screaming at the mixing engineer to do this for compression or that for reverb when you don't even have a full song laid out.
It's hard, sometimes, to turn both of those little voices off and just be a musician. I mean, if you start out processing a kick before you've got anything else to shape it around You're skipping a lot of steps!
I'm tired and do not care if this is in anyway non-sensical. I do a lot of performance oriented recording where much of the production is already present as part of the performance. When I do "produce" a track, however, I usually work like this: Production and mixing are two distinct processes in the making of a track.
I mostly write songs and soundtracks and come from an "old school" background, so when I begin to sketch something out the first thing I do is shut down the grid I normally want the tempo and flow of the music to be dictated by the music itself -- or my own flights of fancy -- so I avoid imposing a rigid BPM right from the get go. Obviously this approach wouldn't be practical for some music.
Once all of this is done I will then go about mixing it. During a mixing session, there are occasions when things need to be "recalled to the factory" : arrangement errors, tracking errors, production errors, etc.
But the focus is still on mixing which, for me, is the very last step in the process well, almost. This is more suitable for mixing. Not so in Ozone Pro.
In Ozone, the gain range is sized with mastering in mind: the mousable range is decreased, made subtler for the practice of mastering—you can only drag up to 6 dB and down to dB. Ozone Pro also offers linear-phase filtering which is arguably more suited to mastering than the mix. EQ is but one tool that both engineers use which can differ in application and features.
Compressors also differ : Nectar Pro offers an Optical mode, which emulates the subtle harmonic coloration and non-linear attack and release characteristics of classic hardware optical compressors, while Ozone does not. Ozone offers expansion, to breathe life into overly-compressed tracks, typically in a mastering session.
Neutron Pro does not. Mastering engineers often use brickwall limiters to hit these targets without causing too much distortion. For those who are new to the world of audio, mixing and mastering can feel a lot less accessible than production or playing instruments. I hope the points listed in this article have allowed you to achieve a higher understanding of what happens during these important post-production steps, so that perhaps you too will get in on the secret.
Here are ten mastering tips to get a great master on your own, no matter your expertise. Want to know which mistakes to avoid when mixing? De-essing is useful for reducing harshness in vocals and other instruments. Get top stories of the week and special discount offers right in your inbox.
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Music Production Suite Pro. Try for Free. Never Miss an Article! What is mixing? What is mastering? A common misconception: stereo bus processing is not mastering! What does a mix song vs. Differences in mixing vs. A typical mastering workflow goes something like this: Critical listening : what does this song need to hit its market and genre targets? Do I actually need to change anything? How should I order my signal path?
Forensic fixes: are there clicks, pops, and distortions I should take out with RX?
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