Advice for Creating a Professional Music Mix

The superiority of one music track over another in terms of quality often has nothing to do with the music or melody. Frequently, the better track is superior simply because it has been professionally mixed whilst the other has been constructed without an audio skill set. No matter, because creating a sweet mix is merely a result of acquired knowledge and skills, some of which are listed below.

1. Always use the very best and cleanest recordings or samples to create your music track. Terrible recordings will only muddy up the mix and make it sound amateur and dull.

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. Use at least some panning for most of the instruments to create a nice stereo field. Cymbals, percussion, and strings sound great panned though the bass drum and bass guitar and usually kept center field.

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. Find favorite CDs in the same genre as your track and compare it to yours. If your track doesn’t sound as good, or has too much bass for example, then figure out why and fix the issue.

6. During final mixing, limit high peaks with a limiter which will let you increase the loudness of the entire track to its highest potential 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.