Mixing & Mastering

Mixing is a vital part of music production. In professional studios, mixing is done in an acoustically treated room using high-end studio monitor speakers. However, in most home studios this sort of setup is not available, and we often need to mix our songs using headphones. Mixing on headphones is similar to mixing on monitors,…

Mixing and mastering are crucial parts of the music production process, yet they are often confused with each other. It has taken me many years of making music in my home studio and releasing music commercially, to achieve a good understanding of the differences between mixing and mastering. Mixing and mastering differ in their purpose….

Mastering is probably the most misunderstood aspect of music production, particularly by home recording musicians. It was only a few years ago when I had to prepare some of my songs for commercial release, that I really learned what mastering is for and how to do it. To master a song, add EQ and Limiter…

Mixing has always been the most difficult part of home recording for me. I have got better and better at it over the years though. One of the things that has enormously helped me to achieve better mixes is learning how to properly perform gain staging. Gain staging is the process of setting signal levels…

Mixing is one of the hardest aspects of music production to get your head around, especially for beginners. With so many aspects such as gain staging, EQ, compression, automation etc. it is difficult to know what your song needs to make it sound great. So what does make a good mix? A good mix is…

Equalization (EQ) was always one of the most challenging aspects of music production for me to learn when I was first starting out. However, I found if the meanings of EQ numbers and settings are laid out simply and clearly, then EQ becomes a lot less difficult to understand and much easier to use. EQ…

In many years of mixing my musical projects, probably my most commonly reached-for tools in my DAW are the EQ and compression plugins. These have been vital in getting my mixes to sound clear and consistent. But it wasn’t until I had been using them for quite a while, that I could really appreciate the…

Even as an experienced musician, when I first started producing my own music it was incredibly frustrating trying to get it to sound how I wanted it to. I soon realized that mixing and mastering are their own distinct skills completely separate from musician’s skills, requiring a lot of time and practice to get good…

Compression is one of those effects that I have used on pretty much all the songs I have recorded in my home studio. It has helped even out the volumes on many of my tracks. However, this does not mean I put compression on every track without any consideration. You should not compress every track…

So you’ve recorded all the tracks for your latest song, and now the time has arrived to begin the mixing process. But it seems like there is so much to learn, and so much information out there about how to mix a track. Where do you even start? To start mixing, edit each track to…