Why Your Mix Sucks And How To Fix It Part I

Why Your Mix Sucks And How To Fix It Part I

The questions I get asked the most always have to do with mixing. Why does my mix suck? What am I doing wrong? In the next few blog post I am going to talk about why your mix sucks and what you can do to fix it. First and introduction to the mixing process.

If you are new to making beats, producing or recording eventually you are going to have to do a mix of your music. What is mixing? Mixing is when you take all the different tracks of audio and or midi and combine them together into some sort of file that normal people can hear on there stereo, ipod or computer. Usually this would be a stereo wav, aiff, or mp3 file. The wav and aiff file can then be burned on to a CD. The mp3 file can emailed, posted on your myspace page or website, and uploaded to your ipod or other mp3 player. Mixing is the final place for you to make changes to your music and fix problems.

What about mastering you ask? Mastering is for the people who do mastering. The point of mastering is to take a collection of music, put it together and make it sound consistent, and press it on a CD. There are certain things that can be fixed and or enhanced during the mastering phase of a project but these things should be done for the sake of consistency. Just to be clear… If you think there is something that needs to be changed, or fixed in your music the last chance you have to do is during the mixing process. That is why it is so important.

Now that you have a basic understanding of what mixing is and why it so important lets move on to the hard part. Why your mix sucks?  Continue Reading