How to Mix Music Professionally

The difference between a fantastic piece of music and a mediocre one often has nothing to do with the actual melody or music itself. Often, one music tracks sounds much better than another simply because it has a professional final mix while the other has been sloppily recorded and thrown together without skill or experience. Creating a great mix is simply a matter of knowing what to do and the following tips will assist.

1. Use the most professional sounding recordings and samples to build your track in the first place. Bad audio recordings is the surest way to have a terrible sounding track.

2. Use EQ to cull out spaces for each instrument. For example, cut the bass drum at 80Hz so that it doesn't interfere with the bass guitar and cut cymbals around 1KHz to keep their noise from interfering with lower instruments.

3. Use at least some panning for most of the instruments to create a nice stereo field. Cymbals, percussion, and strings sound great panned though the bass drum and bass guitar and usually kept center field.

4. Give each instrument some power by learning and using compression. Without any compression, individual tracks feel limp and weak.

5. Before mastering, play favorite tracks from CDs in the same genre as your project and compare the overall sound quality. Determine if your track sounds like these professionally released mixes and if not, why not.

6. During mastering, or the final mix, use a limiter to crunch down the highest peaks of the recording, allowing you to bring up the level of the entire mix without distorting.

When all is said and done, put your mix onto a CD or into your .mp3 player and listen to it in a variety of speaker systems such as in your car or a friends living room to make sure it sounds as good as possible in as many places as possible.

Tagged with: mp3

Filed under: mp3

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