Advice for Creating a Professional Music Mix

The difference between a fantastic piece of music and a mediocre one often has nothing to do with the actual melody or music itself. Often, one music tracks sounds much better than another simply because it has a professional final mix while the other has been sloppily recorded and thrown together without skill or experience. Creating a great mix is simply a matter of knowing what to do and the following tips will assist.

1. Always use the highest quality samples and get the best possible recordings to make your track. Horrible initial recordings will definitely make a mix sound bad.

2. Utilize equalizers to cut out spaces in the audio spectrum for each instrument. For instance, cut cymbals at 1KHz to keep them in the higher registers and cut bass guitars at 100Hz to keep them from muddying up with the bass drum.

3. Create a nice stereo field by panning some instruments. While the bass drum and guitar should stay in the center to give the track stability, other elements such as cymbals and strings can be panned to add depth and sonic intrigue.

4. Understand and use compression to give clout to presence to each instrument. Tracks sound weak and lame without compression and is often a main difference between professional and amateur sounding tracks.

5. Before mastering, play favorite tracks from CDs in the same genre as your project and compare the overall sound quality. Determine if your track sounds like these professionally released mixes and if not, why not.

6. Let your track achieve maximum loudness by employing a limiter on the final mix which smushes down the highest peaks and allows you bring up the whole mix.

After you’ve mixed down to CD, play your fresh new track in a variety of speaker systems to make sure it holds up in all listening environments.