Our job as your mixing engineer, is to mix your
song so that a listener can feel the emotion of the song through their
speakers. What exactly does that mean?
Imagine yourself in a movie theatre or even your own living room
and your watching your all time favorite movie. The movie starts and instead of
hearing the music or special effects from the surround sound speakers, it sounds
like your listening to the movie through a telephone. Takes the “magic” out of
the movie doesn’t it? It’s even more dramatic for music since there’s no video
to help support and tell the story.
A mixing engineer takes all your
individual tracks and mixes them into a single, well-balanced, polished song where
all the instruments (and vocals) have their own place to tell their part of the
story. This is accomplished through setting proper volume levels, EQ settings,
panning placement, compression, etc, in order to have everything come together
just right. Sounds simple to do and there’s a lot of software programs on the
market that have all these tools available for the “home studio” musician.
So why doesn’t your song sound as good as the stuff on the radio? Like any
other trade, simply having the tools doesn’t make someone a master at the
trade. It takes experience and knowledge to be a good mixing engineer and that’s
what we offer – the knowledge and experiencing on how to take those tools and
work some magic!
So what are some of the tricks we can do? Of course,
we’re always limited to the quality of the material we’re given so when you’re
recording, try to get the best quality from your recording instead of trying to
“fix things in the mix”. If the singer coughs while singing a line, there isn’t
very much anyone can do so rather than let it go, invest the time up front in
redoing the part – you’ll be glad later! (check out our Recording Tips section for more helpful information)
The sample below is of a
good quality raw recording but there are some noticeable problems with it – the
singer goes out of tune and the acoustic guitar strumming goes off-tempo.
In this next clip, we’ve fixed the singer’s tone problems and
also got the guitar back on-tempo.
And finally, in this last
clip, we’ve added EQ, effects and even some studio-created backing vocal
harmonies to fill in the song. Amazing what can be done in a studio!
If you’re interested in applying some of this magic to your songs, click
on the “Contact Us!” button and drop us a line.
Remember that we offer
our no-risk free song mix sample so why not give us a try?
