When it comes to making an album, recording is just the beginning.
A high-quality mix is essential. The mix can make or break your recording.
As a composer and artist myself, I understand how important it is for your recordings to reflect who you are, so I strive to make sure every client is 100% happy with every mix.
Check out some mixing FAQ's below.
Mixing involves balancing levels between tracks, EQ to enhance or reduce certain frequency bands, compression to smooth out overly dynamic tracks, placing each instrument or mic into its own place within a stereo field, and more. In short, mixing is taking a raw recording and doing whatever is required to make it sound its best.
Mixing is both creative and technical. It requires decisions on which instruments to bring out in which parts of a song and what techniques to employ to shape the overall feel of the song. Even with exceptional artists in the most high-end studios in the world, mixing is almost universally required to make a track sound professional.
What you pay for when you hire a professional like me isn’t just the service of mixing and mastering—it’s years of experience and training, a discerning set of ears, and top-of-the-line speakers in a professionally calibrated listening room. A hobbyist with headphones and a laptop cannot even come close.
While the best mix engineers tend to be musicians themselves, professional-level mixing requires technical knowledge that musicians don't get via musical training. Being a mix engineer means not only listening to and understanding the music, but listening to how the recording of the music sounds—and applying technical knowledge to make the recording serve the music in the best way possible.
If you needed a structure built, you wouldn't hire someone off the street who happened to own a few nice tools—you'd hire a contractor who had experience and proper training in how to use those tools to do the safest and best work possible. So why settle with your music? If you want your recordings to reach their full potential, don't settle for someone who owns a DAW and a few nice plugins. Hire a professional with dozens upon dozens of completed albums and years and years of experience.
Absolutely! I believe that mixing is a collaborative process between the artist and the engineer. My job is to figure out how to apply your ideas in the best way for the song and your goals. Sometimes I will suggest alternatives or explain why something you're asking for may cause technical problems. But at the end of the day, it's your song, and you are in control of the process.
Great question. Click here to read more about my mixing process and policies for clients.