In this guide, we’ll tell you all the basics – what it is, how it’s done, the tools involved and a step-by-step workflow to help you improve the sonic qualities of your music, whether it’s an instrumental beat or song arrangement (learn more), with or without vocals.
Learning how to mix and master your music can feel like a dark art at times – and believe me, in some ways it is.
But don’t be too intimidated. You can get a clean, professional sound for your music by following a few basic tenets.
Ready to get into it? Let’s go…
Article Table of Contents
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Mixing and mastering are two separate audio engineering processes done to give a work of audio a professional level of sound quality. They are most common in music, film/tv and podcast/audiobook applications.
Mixing is the process of taking several different individual tracks of audio (whether they’re vocals, instruments, etc.) and literally “mixing” them together to make the final product something that is balanced (ex/ nothing too quiet or too loud), clean (ex/ no harshness, etc) and polished (ex/ not too dull/cold/lifeless).
Mastering is the final stage of the audio engineering process. It involves mostly correcting any imperfections in the “mixed” audio (from the above mixing process) in a finely tuned environment using special equipment. Mastering also adds a final “layer” of polish to the overall work and maximizes it’s “loudness” (how loud the overall track is) while maintaining as much “dynamic range” (the difference between loud parts and quiet parts) as possible.
Overall, the goal of mixing and mastering is to have a polished piece of audio that will translate well (i.e. sound relatively the same) across different types of sound systems.
Contrary to popular belief, mixing and mastering starts long before you send your tracks to an audio engineer.
THIS IS IMPORTANT: The process starts from the very beginning – the recording and composing process WILL affect your final mix/master.
So it’s essential that you try to get the BEST possible recordings of your vocals (learn more) and instrument tracks.
If you’re composing a beat (like we teach here), that means you need to use high quality sounds and choose sounds that don’t clash with each other or fight for space in the mix (learn how).
The better you are at doing these things, the easier it will be to get a stellar mix/master of your song or track.
Remember these words: garbage in, garbage out.
— Related Article: How to Make Your Own Sounds – Read More —
But once that’s all taken care of, actual mixing and mastering is done by using a DAW (digital audio workstation) or a mixing console (like you see in pictures of big studios), along with tools like equalizers, compressors, reverbs and more (either software or hardware versions).
The essence of mixing and mastering is to:
Important Note: In this guide, we’re only talking about mixing and mastering inside a DAW (using your computer) using software plugins/effects.
There are a lot of tools (and variations of tools) that can be used for mixing and mastering music. They all provide a piece of the overall puzzle. Depending on your preferred workflow, all of these tools can be software-based or pieces of hardware you run audio through.
Below we get into the general tools you’ll use to mix and master, but it isn’t an exhaustive list. There are lots of specialized tools out there too that all do specific things. It’s a rabbit hole…
Here’s a general overview of the different things involved:
When you’re mixing and mastering, it’s important you have a good set of neutral speakers or headphones to listen on. If you use a regular old set that you would to normally listen to music casually, you’re not getting an accurate enough sense of what’s happening in your mix. A lot of consumer-grade headphones and speaker systems have a hyped up sound (often in the bass or the high-end). You need a set of studio monitors that are neutral, and not “colored” too much.
Mixing and mastering on headphones is a contentious subject that has a lot of differing opinions. Some say it’s possible, other’s say you shouldn’t. I’ve done it and will continue to do it. If you want to mix using headphones, take a look at our top picks for the best studio headphones.
A digital audio workstation is a piece of computer software that mimics hardware mixing consoles you see in a lot of big studios. It’s not exactly “beat making software” in the most literal sense, but does often allow you to make beats too. You can import audio into a linear timeline with full “mixer” controls and digitally adjust all of it’s parameters. DAWs provide a lot of flexibility, and so are often also used in combination with hardware effects and consoles and third-party software plugins.
BUT, you can do EVERYTHING you need to with ONLY a DAW – they all come with included plugins for the rest of the tools below.
Usually we think of distortion as being bad. And usually we’re right. But for the purposes of mixing music, you can often add character to a sound by applying subtle “harmonic” distortion. This harmonic distortion complements a sound and is often pleasing to the ear in small amounts. Other types of distortion (like “digital” distortion or clipping) are NOT good and should be avoided at all costs.
EQs are a type of tool that let you shape a sound’s frequency range. Every sound you can hear falls somewhere within the “frequency spectrum” of human hearing (20 Hz to 20,000 Hz – measured in “hertz”). An equalizer will allow you to either boost (increase) or attenuate (decrease) a specific part of a sound’s frequency range. You can carve and sculpt sounds so they fit well together without clashing or fighting for space in any part of the frequency spectrum.
Compressors are tools that literally “compress” an audio signal. Every audio recording has “dynamic range” (the difference between the loudest and quietest parts of a sound or several pieces of audio). Compressors allow you to control this dynamic range so that if the differences are too far apart, they can be made more balanced/tamed. The louder parts are turned down and/or the quieter parts are turned up – the dynamic range is “squashed.”
These effects are things like reverbs and delays. They play with our sense of timing when it comes to audio. Reverbs add “ambience” to a sound to make it sound like it’s coming from a specific type of space (like a concert hall or a bathroom, for example). Delay’s, on the other hand, are used to add echoes to a sound. These effects help give a sense of real life to recorded audio, which is often naturally very clinical sounding (in other words, dull and lifeless).
It’s important to keep in mind you won’t always use each and every tool available to you all the time. But all of these tools are used to clean, polish and embellish sounds in a mix and across an overall song. They’re used to heighten the listening experience and make the listener feel like they’re hearing the music in real life (or get as close as we possible can).
A general workflow on how to mix and master your own music.
