Creating Music? Connect With A Mixing Engineer To Sound Your Best

By Author: Bob Smith
Total Articles: 192
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For the independent recording artist, sounding amazing isn't a luxury only available to hit artists anymore - it is a necessity. Music sales may have went down, but that doesn't mean that recorded music is going away any time soon. Far from it. More music is being consumed on more devices by more fans than ever before in history! Musicians are making their music available on internet and satellite radio, online music streaming services such as Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, Deezer, and YouTube, selling on direct-to-fan sites such as CD Baby, Bandcamp, and ReverbNation, and still pushing sales through ‘traditional' online retailers such as iTunes and Amazon MP3. Let's face it, there is no excuse for an artist to release sub-par recordings.
For some people, audio engineers are still an enigma. To others, they are ‘evil' manipulators of music, creating phony, auto-tuned, robots out of untalented artists. This, however, is far from the truth. Every recording, no matter the genre, gets taken care of by a tracking engineer, mixing engineer, and mastering engineer. The recording engineer uses many of microphones and technique ...
... to accurately capture and record the artist's performance as it occurs in the recording studio. The mix engineer takes all of the separate audio tracks and crafts the music to sound convincing and convey the song's emotion. He sets correct levels, panning, EQ, compression, and adds special effects where needed to enhance the musician's vision. Finally, the mastering engineer uses specialized equipment and highly trained ears in an acoustically sound room to subtly polish and prepare the track for final release and ensure the music plays back well on a variety of playback systems. "While many audio techniques can enhance the final production, we engineers are not magicians and can't replace a poor performance or terrible recording," says Scott of Virtual Mix Engineer.
Recordings are more often used as promotional vessel for artists and labels. The big dough these days is in touring, publishing, sync placements, and merchandise. When a listener connects with an artist's music, they'll listen to their music, comment, and share the music with their friends. The fans want to support the artist and buy tickets to their concerts, purchase apparel, and follow and interact with the artist through social media. As the group grows in popularity, their music may be chosen for sync placements in film and TV, which not only provides great exposure, it also pays well. To make it to this stage however, it all starts with a great song and quality recording.
The rise of DIY recording has led to more musicians releasing music than ever before. With a powerful PC, some mics, a DAW, and a little know-how, anyone can record and distribute music. One area where many artists fall short is failing to recognize their weaknesses in audio engineering. An experienced engineer has the right tools, but most importantly the skills to make a production reach its full potential. Though it can be hard for an artist, letting go and trusting your engineer will take your productions to the next level and help you stand out from the masses. Fans are instantly attracted to a well-written and performed song that sounds like a hit.
Spend the proper time in pre-production, ensuring your song and arrangement are as solid as possible. Then and only then, go to the best studio you can afford to lay down your basic tracks. Hire a local or online mixing engineer within your budget whose work and personality you gel with, and tweak the mix until you're satisfied. Finally, send the songs off to the mastering engineer for that final touch. Once your production is complete, you can get the music into multiple outlets and into the ears of your listeners and fans. Scott Horton is the epitome of today's cutting-edge mixing engineer/producer/songwriter. He has worked with an endless number of recording artists the world over in all musical genres ranging from Pop, Pop-Rock, Hip-Hop,RnB, Urban and more. His online mixing and mastering service, Virtual Mix Engineer, provides recording artists with superb sounding mixes which make impressions that count. Get in touch with Scott at http://www.virtualmixengineer.com