Demystifying The Difference Between Mixing And Mastering
So, if you are like most musicians trying to make it, you like to pretend you know the industry lingo. Don’t be ashamed. We’ve all done it. But, the truth is that if you are going to move from a hard working artist with skill on your instrument to a professional musician who knows the industry, you need to understand terms.
One of the biggest sources of confusion for artists is the difference between mixing and mastering. The fact is that they are both important, and they both cost time and money. So, I’m going to help you understand the difference between the two and why you need them both.
What’s the Difference Between Mixing and Mastering and Why Do I Need Them?
Mixing and mastering are two very different processes, both are vital to a finished recording that sounds professional, that sounds polished, and sounds like a song on any potential listening system. The distinction can be very confusing unless you work in the audio field. It gets even more confusing, because many engineers do both processes simultaneously. An engineer who I look up to and who has done some of the best sounding extreme metal albums of the last ten years once went as far as to say in an interview, “I mix straight into my mastering rig, that way when it’s done, it’s done.”
Today, I want to demystify the differences that make each process unique.
“Mixing is 90% of the work that it takes to turn raw recordings into a finished song...Mastering is the final 10%.”
Mixing
I’ll start with a brief breakdown of what goes on during the process of mixing. When mixing a song, you start with a session in your DAW that has every single individual track in a song, labeled and organized. The tracks are all in their raw form, which is the way they sounded recorded through the microphone and preamp.
Mixing is where the heavy lifting of making a song sound good happens. It’s going through each element of the song and meticulously and decisively processing every single element in a way that makes them all work cohesively. It’s EQing, compressing, creating effects, reamping guitar and bass, drum sample replacement and augmentation, adding frequencies here and taking frequencies there to ensure that every element of the song lives and exists together in harmony. Mixing is 90% of the work that it takes to turn raw recordings into a finished song.
Mastering
Mastering on the other hand, is a very straightforward process. You’ll notice that I use the word “straightforward” instead of using the word easy. There art of mastering is an art of subtleties. Mastering is the final 10%. It’s taking the 90% from mixing and pushing it the rest of the way to being a polished, release ready song. Yes, at this point your work has gone from being a recording, to being a mix, and after mastering it will be a song. When mastering you have only a single track in the form of a stereo file of the mic of a song.
The amount of processing used is a lot less heavy handed than when mixing. Mastering is making sure every track in your album or ep are consistent levels. It’s very subtle EQ, maybe very subtle dynamics processing/saturation, and limiting in a way that it will reach a level that is perceived as professional by your listeners and ensure quality sound across a variety of listening sources. At this point, people listen to songs a million different ways. Headphones, car speakers, lap top speakers, phone speakers, stereo systems etc. mastering ensures quality playback across the board. When your song comes on a playlist next to industry leading bands, it wont sound out of place, because it will have commercial polish and level.
“When your song comes on a playlist next to industry leading bands, it wont sound out of place, because it will have commercial polish and level. ”
Should you hire separate mixing and mastering engineers?
This is a question that is heavily debated in the recording industry. There are engineers who say you should absolutely hire separate mixing and mastering engineers, and there are engineers who say it doesn’t matter. Some of my favorite engineers always master their own mixes and some of my favorite engineers always hire a separate mastering engineer. Most engineers in independent studios are well versed in both mixing and mastering. There are of course engineers that only do one or the other.
The ultimate answer to this question depends on several factors, not the least of which is your budget. Some projects with crazy budgets will have separate engineers for recording, editing, mixing, and mastering, and there are some projects where one engineer handles the whole thing from pre production all the way to mastering.
The majority of projects now, have one band member who serves as the recording and editing engineer and they outsource to a more experienced engineer, usually one person, for mixing and mastering. The choice is up to you. As long as the engineer is competent and puts out a quality of work that sounds good to your ears, your project is in good hands.
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Interested in professional mixing and mastering for your project? I can help.