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.