Music Mixing

Music: A Structured Art of Sound

Music is a structured art of sound that individuals can present either as a melody or harmony, in case they are more than one whose presentation is accompanied by voice(s) or instrument and with a primary purpose of implying the presenter’s emotions and or ideas (De Man et al. 33).

Making Music More Attractive and Enjoyable

Many a times music is produced at massive aspects of entertaining the audience that affiliate to it, as it also serves a role of educating the target group over many issues in the society. It must be attractive enough to the audience to retain their attention otherwise people may neglect its purpose. To make music more attractive enjoyable to the audience aspects of instrumentation and vocals should be considerable enough, thus makes it necessary for introduction of mixing elements both in video and audio music.

Formula for Music Mixing

For music mixing to begin, it’s crucial that one comes up with a formula of how the flow of mixing steps shall follow each other consciously to avoid confusion of music levels whenever integrating from one song to the other. It’s thus vital for the Djs to have a useful roadmap on how to include both components of music groups, busses as well as necessary balance to produce a continuous rhythmical flow of music. Other elements to guide the DJs in the production of quality music mixes, is employing the use of equalizers, delays, reverbs and sound compression can also apply (Gelineck, Steven, Morten and Jesper 89).

Grouping Similar Sounding Instruments

As a Dj, it is encouraged to have all similar sounding instruments grouped such as the drums, guitars, synths, and vocals to channel them all to a specific reverb for excellent results. Proper grouping encourages the smooth flow of the mix as instruments dependently bond with each other to perfect in the modulation of genres (Ma, Zheng, Joshua, Reiss and Dawn 134). By effectively grouping your mixing requirements, it will be easier for the mixing master to get full control of various soundtracks from a single channel on the mixer. If you have a subgroup for the instruments, drums, and vocals, it will be easier to notice which among them needs to be adjusted to further balancing. I.e., when the instrumental subgroup is higher than the vocal and drums, you can change the instrument’s fader low enough to match the other subgroups, and this can apply to all different subsets.

The Role of Busses in Music Mixing

Proficient music producer must know other more important aspects that should be used along with the grouping to facilitate quality work of mixing, and it is hence essential to understand how busses can align with cluster and instruments. “Musically, the bus simply refers to a specific sequence that facilitates routing of one or more audio channels to a particular destination.” In this case, all grouped musical components like the instruments, vocals, and drum with each having its independent channel signal are channeled altogether by a bus to a master group fader or multi-track recorder. It gives the music master (Djs) ample time to take full control of the instrumentation, following the development of a mater group channel that busses all similar categories of components. There is little confusion as a result because the controller will have an easier time to manipulate changes required on the fly, unlike in the absence of buss, where he/she may not have the freedom to attend to all aspects at a time to produce harmonious lyrics. Buss allows the controller to be in full control of the required levels to all groups created by the Dj, various instruments, vocals, and drums all fine-tuned together can be controlled at the moment. “It is through the aid of busses that musicians can create series of foldback headphone music to listen to, before the live introduction of the same to the audience” (Gelineck et al. 117).

The Importance of Instrument Balance

Instrument balance is yet another vital aspect in music mixing that when not properly taken care of, all other adjustments and tuning are worthless. Instrument balancing is as essential to musicians as having their mixes set by almost fifty percent, through ensuring that all instruments are not placed at the same volume. “A systematic adjustment to the volumes of assorted musical instruments, drums and vocals are essential to avoid each dancing out now and then during the process of mixing audio music” (Müller 17). It is, therefore, more encouraging for the musicians to pay much attention to the instrument balancing, as early as at the beginning of their mixing tasks to curb adjusting challenges they may encounter after the mix is underway. Proper instrument balance will make mixing fun to the sound engineers all along their process, as it will produce rhythmical and enjoyable music for the audience to listen to without having to give up. As the mix progresses, it is advisable for the sound engineer to keep applying necessary rebalancing to get more appealing results on compression, equalizer and sound effects he/she wishes to employ.

The Role of Equalization in Music Mixing

Though it is a tactical music requirement that needs critical thinking for a musician before he/she may have to do it, equalization is an essential aspect of music mixing. In music, equalizing is an act that stands in to showcase the efforts of the engineers in grouping, application and instrumental involvement into the genre. Equalization helps to reduce redundancy of different groups applied in a song. By boosting the low group, equalizing aids in promoting role uniformity for each category, so that in a song production process one group should not be heard dominating the whole narration/lyric. Reverb and delay, on the other hand, are two common sound effects that are used interchangeably; their application is most active between a chorus and a verse in a song to make them sound more significant than they are (Müller 29).

Overcoming Challenges in Music Mixing

The first step to begging finding solution to challenges engineers face when dealing with the multi-track system is to familiarize them with the phase of the mixer. By so doing the musician gets it more comfortable to fix every aspect in its right position(s), to effectively and resourcefully use the blender. It is equally essential for the music technicians always to listen carefully to facilitate successful comb filtering, which occurs more frequently when recording is made from microphones in different positions. For an excellent musical genre, it is vital for filtering to curb “destructive interference” (Ma et al. 154) that may affect detriment track levels. Last but not least, “it is necessary for the musician to inform himself with usual suspects such as the multi-track drums and stereo acoustic guitar as well as any other recorded instrument if available to eliminate wider scope of phase challenges” (Ma et al. 161).

The Complex Task of Music Production

Music production is not an easy task as many who are not involved may think, the work to come up with musical and harmonious genres people hear come a long way. It takes the technicians some skillful application of instruments applicable in the music. The journey starts by grouping all available tools and assigns each a part to play, then buss application follows. Successful buss resolute in the lyric call for instrumental sound balance that if keenly taken care of, makes the mixing task for the Djs more fun as it also creates a definite rhythm in a song(s). Challenges commonly encountered by multi-track system operators may be solved either through familiarizing themselves with the phase before they use it, listen carefully to facilitate comb filtering and to get to interact with suspects frequently used, i.e., multitrack drums and stereo acoustic guitar(s).

Works Cited

De Man, Brecht, et al. "Perceptual evaluation of music mixing practices." Audio Engineering Society Convention 138. Audio Engineering Society, 2015.

Gelineck, Steven, Morten Büchert, and Jesper Andersen. "Towards a more flexible and creative music mixing interface." CHI'13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2013.

Ma, Zheng, Joshua D. Reiss, and Dawn AA Black. "Implementation of an intelligent equalization tool using Yule-Walker for music mixing and mastering." Audio Engineering Society Convention 134. Audio Engineering Society, 2013.

Müller, Meinard. Fundamentals of music processing: Audio, analysis, algorithms, applications. Springer, 2015.