diffrence between mastering and mixing

  • Thread starter Thread starter SMproductions
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Anywhere from a $100 to $1000 per song, depending on who is mastering and how big the artist. :)

You can search the forums...there's about a million topics covering your question.
 
Mixing is when you take all the various recorded tracks and you realize they're all recorded at different levels and you maybe want to put different effects at different points on different instruments or voices and you start tearing out your hair and getting depressed because it sounds like a mush and you burn lots of CDs and run out to the car to listen to what you've done and it sounds awful even though it was awesome when you tested it on the computer etc, etc, etc, and the night ends with you selling the whole lot on ebay and kicking the cat or your kids or the postman and cursing the Queen, the President or Fleetwood Mac and then you break down in tears wondering why God isn't answering you right then........

then you wake up and discover it was all a dream. And you take all your recorded tracks and blend them in a way that makes the song in question easy to hear, pleasant to the ear and hopefully, interesting. Your song should be mixed before you get it mastered, if you're going to get it mastered.
I think it should sound good before mastering, which should make it sound better. Mastering sure ain't mixing ! I guess it's a process that enables the mix to sound at it's best at all volumes on whatever machine that mix is played on.
 
SMproductions said:
what is the diffrence between the two?
Click to expand...

Simply put, with mixing you're taking the individual tracks that were recorded for a song and processing and blending them to make a cohesive 2 track version of that song.

With mastering you are taking the 2 track mixes and fine tuning, optimizing and finalizing them to make a cohesive version of the album that is ready for replication, broadcast and distribution.
 
so mixing is for example adding eq and stuff like thattt
 
(more or less just an addendum to Tom's post)

When you're mixing, you're working with individual elements simultaneously.

When you're mastering, you're working with finished mixes in succession.
 
Yeah, but what plugin do u use to add tha bass to get that polished sound?
 
oo ok ok i got it mastering is everything together and mixing is each individual part
 
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