A Day Away

No regular article today, but here’s a little something to tide you over.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

So…yeah. I’m not going to be able to get an article up today, because I’m going to go help The Daylates with a recording project. (Also, sorry about that Wednesday I missed a little while ago. I was busy writing a guest post for another site.)

However, this seems like a good time to answer a question that’s been put to me in various ways: “What’s the difference between mixing and mastering?”

Mixing is the process of taking a bunch of sounds and making them fit together as parts of a song or similar, singular performance. What you do to make all those sounds fit together may be very mundane, or incredibly bizarre. For instance, you might end up having to yank a ton of “body” out of a guitar so that it will play nicely with everything else. By itself the guitar will sound “all wrong,” but with everything else around it? That odd sound may actually work beautifully. The point is that you’re getting each individual part to take it’s proper place.

Mastering, on the other hand, is the process of taking a completed mix and making the whole (possibly bizarre thing) sound good. For example, if the contortions required to get everything in the mix left the entire result too “thin,” this is the place where some bottom end can be added.

The mastering process is also the place where the big battles of the “loudness war” are fought. A mastering engineer with a brickwall limiter can HAMMER the peaks of a song down so that, when the resulting signal is raised back up to the maximum allowable level, THE MUSIC IS REALLY LOUD ALL THE TIME.

Mastering additionally includes the process where a number of mixes are made to sound cohesive in a collection, like an album or compilation. Tonal, volume, and ordering decisions are made so that everything in the collection seems to belong together. This is also the process of making the complete collection work properly on its release media (vinyl, tape, CD, digital, whatever). This process still has its place, even with album-oriented listening being out of style and modern release media being far less sonically limited.