Why Mixing is IMPORTANT ?

What does a MIX do ?

Mixes all the sound to create final sound like ingredients do to a recipe !

it adds depth to the music, it puts the music in a sonic space, Highlights important elements at the right time & etc.

It’s been said that... 

"Behind every great song, is a great mix”. 

There’s a lot of truth to this.  A great mix brings out the BEST in a song. It makes it SOUND great. It makes people want to listen to it again and again.  Of course, a great mix doesn’t guarantee a great song, but even the BEST of songs can be ruined by a poor mix.  The bottom line is this, if we want our songs to sound great, we need to get a great mix.  The only problem is that mixing can be a daunting, confusing, and sometimes just downright frustrating process. 

Story Time !

I started playing  Keyboard as a kid. and along with that I regularly started watching popular musician’s interviews. One day I was watching an interview with A R Rahman, who mentioned the name of the person (sridhar) who mixed his album. Mixed? What did that mean, I wondered? So I asked my Mentor. “Mixing is when they take the recordings of each instrument and adjust the volumes to make the sound you hear in the recording,” he explained to me. “Wait,” I asked, “you mean they record everything separately?” This was my introduction to mixing, starting with the revelation that songs weren’t just recorded live in a studio by a whole band standing around a few microphones (at least not anymore my mental picture of recording may have been shaped by years listening to early Ilayaraja’s Songs which did involve much more “live” recording). After all my years of listening to music, I had never known. With that revelation in mind, I knew from then on what “mixing” meant.  Well, sort of.

There was much more to it than I thought For the next several years, I thought mixing was simply a search for the right volume levels. While that’s not completely untrue, it was still a very incomplete picture. It wasn’t until I started learning directly from professional mixing engineers that I finally began to fully understand how important–and complex mixing really was. I tell this story because I think it’s pretty common for musicians and very common for non-musicians to underestimate the power and importance of mixing in the world of music. It just so happens that it’s an aspect of recording that, when done right, most people don’t even notice. However, just because it’s an unsung hero of the recording process doesn’t mean it’s not extremely important. But to really understand how important it is, you need to know what it is in the first place. Mixing is more than just adjusting the volume levels of individual instrument and vocal tracks.  Of course, that is a big part of mixing, but it’s by no means the whole story.

Ultimately, it all starts with ONE QUESTION...  What really makes a GREAT mix? 

Without knowing the answer to this question, everything we do in the mix is GUESSING.  If we want our songs to sound GREAT, we need a GREAT mix, and if we want a GREAT mix, we have to know what MAKES a GREAT mix.  It took me over half a decade to figure out the answer to this one question, and I’m going to share that with you in our sound engineering courses. 

At Stario School of sound & Musictech we provide attendees with the opportunity to learn from one of the industry’s experts in mixing and music production. The focus will not only be on the technical aspects of mixing but also the artistic and emotional choices one needs to make when balancing various elements of a song. This course will explore what mixing means from a creative and technical standpoint, demonstrated through a mix session live . Aimed to enlighten and inspire artists, songwriters, producers, bands.

Here is a link to a track before and after mixing for better understanding of why mixing is essential part of good music.

http://bit.ly/whymixingisimportant

#soundmixing #Importanceofmixing #Whymixingisimportant