MIXING COMMON OBJECTIVES

Mixing is Kind of Having 2 Different Objectives..

It's :

1. Artful: It's on you! Make it sound the way you want it to sound, be expressive and kind of injecting your personality into what you are doing. Make it sound cool to you, use effects, do stuff, blow my mind. Start to play around with things and experiment! Make aesthetic decisions that would kind of make it stand out or make it seem different than another podcasts. And that is something that can't really be tought, that is kind of about what you are going to bring and what you think is cool. And that is the great part of mixing.
   
   
2. Technical:

• Balance and Clarity : Taking sounds and putting them in specific places in the mix so that you kind of hear the different sounds on that, not all the sounds are fighting for the same sonic space. If you have good balance you will also have pretty good clarity but the objective of clarity is to make sure that sound that bring crucial information is audible and as clear as possible.

• Sonic Zone : You can create a great mix in your portable studio or your home studio and it sounds great like a million dollars. But the reality is that most people are going to take that and listen to it in a completely different circumstance, maybe in headphones, in their living room, or in their car. But if you can make a mix that lives in the sonic zone, the sound will still good enough anywhere and on any playback device. Try to create mix that lands in this sonic zone, so that is easy for other people to enjoy.
  

BASIC MIXING CONCEPT

Mixing is the Crucial Stage in the Audio Production Process!
It's :

• Determining the relationship between multiple sounds: This is where you take all of different things you have there and figure "what the relationship is going to be to each other?".
  

• Involves working on each sound/track independently: You take all the sounds that you have and everything that you are working with and trying to make each sound as good as it can be.
  

• Involves working on the combination of all sounds/tracks: By thinking about what's the relationship of all of these sounds together, you are working on setting up some kind of the balance between all of these sounds and creating the sonic space they are going to live in.

• Determines the final character and quality of your audio production: You go in and make the bass guitar sound a little bit bassier, turn down the pan of flute a little bit, make some EQ changes to the tambourine, maybe change the tonal character of the voice and the voice over, make sure that the EQ and the music that you writting up under your podcast is good not too thumpy and it's even, add some compression, more plugins to change and manipulate your sounds so that they blend well together.
  

• Takes all the tracks and commits them to a final "mixdown": Generate either a mono/stereo file that is the product where the sum of all the different tracks combined.
  

So mixing is the process of deterimining what that final file is going to sound like. And that is the file that you will burn into cd's, put in mp3 players, and listen in your living room.