So, what is mixing?

Since I launched my business, I've been telling people about it and I've already lost count of how many times people have looked at me, with exactly the same confused expression, and asked, "So, what do you DO?". It's easy to forget that people outside of musical backgrounds might not realise what kind of process goes into making the music that we listen to, and so I thought I'd take a few minutes to explain what mixing actually means.

When you listen to your favourite song, you hear just one thing; the final, finished product. That one song consists of so many individual elements, depending on the project it could be anywhere from 30 tracks to 200 and even more in some cases. You could have 20 microphones on the drum kit alone, 8 layers of rhythm guitars, then clean guitars, multiple leads, bass guitar, synths, then there's the lead vocals, doubles, harmonies and backing vocals. I've seen some projects with 30-50 tracks of vocals alone! Needless to say, if you heard all those tracks as they're imported to a session, without being mixed, the result is cacophonous. Nobody wants to hear that. That's where mixers shine. We take each and every element and we give it its own space in the frequency spectrum, we prioritise the most important elements for the song and ensure that every piece can be clearly heard when it needs to. It's our job to make sure that you hear every snare hit, that every vocal line is clear and audible, that the guitar solo sits on top of the rhythm guitars just right. You put so much passion into your music that it deserves to be heard the right way. It needs the right mix.

The wonderful thing about mixing is that it's an art form in itself. You could give your track to 50 different mixers and get back 50 versions that each sound totally different, even though it's the same song made from the same raw elements. Personally, I love to have a nice thick bass tone with added grit on top. I love to make my drums sound huge so that you can feel every hit; I usually achieve this through EQ and parallel compression, and will happily add some multi-band saturation to make tom hits slam even harder. I like to try new things with every mix but I've definitely found a core sound that I'm happy with.

Hopefully that clears it up a little bit.

- Dan