MIXING

WHAT IS MIXING?

Under the term Mixing (also "mixing") one arises the merging of all in Recording recorded audio tracks in a song or project into a holistic sound image. While the individual instruments and voice recordings are still available in separate, independent tracks during the recording, they are combined into one unit, the so-called mixdown, during mixing. The advantage of initially treating each sound source separately is that the shortcomings and errors it contains can be worked on selectively. When creating the mixdown, it is important to compare the sound patterns of the different tracks with regard to their Volume, dynamics and panorama settings in the different tracks to a single one Sum signal (English "stem") to merge Mixing normally begins with the volume adjustments and panorama settings for the individual elements, such as instruments, voice tracks or soundtracks. This raises the question of which audio tracks should be heard, how loudly, from which direction. These tracks are then processed with various dynamics processors (e.g Compressor, gate, limiter), equalizer (graphic EQ, parametric EQ), effects (e.g. reverb, delay) or amplifier (e.g. guitar amp, bass amp) mixed so that all tracks sound exactly as intended. At the end of the mixing, all processed tracks are converted into either a stereo mix, a 5.1 mix or a Dolby Surround mix or Dolby Atmos (e.g. for cinemamovies) merged. Mixing plays a particularly important role in the production of music: the quality of the mixing can be decisive for whether a song is successful in the end or not.