Discussions around a great mix for a mixing engineer are often subjective conversations – there’s never a right or wrong about the type of sound you want to produce, and opinions crutch pretty heavily on the genre you’re in, or the influences you take the most inspiration from.
The skeletal nature of trap-blended hip-hop, soft noise of bedroom pop, spaciousness of electronic music – varieties of clarity in soundscape exist at every level, and are often informed by guidelines rather than set rules.
Having the ear for an idea you want to bring to life is the only anchoring factor here, as the artists’ level of taste heads the helm of the production process, from which arranging, mixing and mastering then emerge as technical necessities.
While the gears that drive the creative process are a little more nebulous, what are the practices that actually encompass the more technical end? At Studio Chaddy, we shed light on areas of audio processing, effects and techniques that typically go into the workflow.
What Does It Mean to Mix a Track?
Within the broader production roadmap, mixing typically places in the middle of the process post-recording. At its core, mixing refers to the combination of several or more tracks into one, to more cohesively define a final song – which accompanies the need to equalise, optimise and augment dynamics, clean up frequencies and more. Preceding the final mastering, the mix often comes as one of the most significant production processes that forms the shape of your track.
Where multitracks sound flat when first imported into a single bus, it’s the job of the mixing engineer to make sure the width of the mix has the appropriate peaks and valleys, to better give it the character it needs. Say that you’re missing an effect or sonic choice to give your high and low end the respective edge or body you’re after – it’s normally in mixing that these decisions materialise. Hearing your recordings in context is ground zero in determining how you want your final track to appear, and the wide realm of the mixing process happens to be the assembly point in this.
So, what practices do most engineers normally interact with when it comes to correcting these issues in their mix?
Techniques Used by Your Mixing Engineer
Equalising
One of the most well recognised responsibilities of the production landscape, equalising (EQ) refers to the toning of your audio spectrum to get certain aspects of your sound to the state you want – whether this means turning down the heaviness of your bass to reduce its load on the low-end, or blunting the high pitch of your high-hats to make them less metallic.
Compression
Compression, by comparison to its associate EQ, involves the taming of dynamic range in your track, as a function of the distance in loudness between your highest and lowest outputs, wherever they fall in your mix.
Customisable to the effect you want to achieve, compressors impact your sound depending on the threshold of sound they’ve been set to detect, and the ratio they reduce this detected sound by.
Panning
When it comes to too many sounds appearing in one frequency, panning comes as an approach in diversifying these sounds into a more palatable spread.
Panning refers to how sounds spatially place in your stereo spectrum, as a solution to elements placed as a sonic wall without texture or distance between them.
Reverb and Delay
To change the environment of the stereo mix, reverb and delay are common effects that give mix engineers spaciousness or intimacy they desire.
Easily confused with one another, reverb revolves around imitating a sound and its reflection off of many surfaces, to give the sense that they insulate your sound in space – as if they are reverberating in distance, in other words.
Delay, on the other hand, refers more specifically to echoes than reverberation – better defined reflections of sound that separate as a distinct instance from the initial, and repeated back as replicated copies (normally more and more quiet over time).
Final Thoughts and Takeaways
How engineers and artists use these techniques are entirely up to their will – music production is an equal interplay between creativity and how they technically manifest, after all.
Absolutely not exhaustive, but these areas comprise some of the most commonly utilised methods for many to achieve the basic principles of a mix they want.
Need an expert opinion? Contact our team at Studio Chaddy for a specialised ear, and start creating the sound you want!
