Best Methods for Creating a Great Audio 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. Use EQ to cull out spaces for each instrument. For example, cut the bass drum at 80Hz so that it doesn’t interfere with the bass guitar and cut cymbals around 1KHz to keep their noise from interfering with lower instruments.

3. Pan most of the tracks either left or right to varying degrees to build an interesting stereo mix. Strings and percussive elements, for example, add much depth when tilted left or right, although certain elements such as the bass drum should remain front and center.

4. Give each instrument some power by learning and using compression. Without any compression, individual tracks feel limp and weak.

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. During mastering, or the final mix, use a limiter to crunch down the highest peaks of the recording, allowing you to bring up the level of the entire mix without distorting.

Finally, after you’ve burned your new mix onto a CD or into your .mp3 player play it in your car, your living room, your buddy’s house to make sure that your hit single sounds fantastic in all types of speakers systems.