Mixing vs Mastering: 6 Key Differences
Mixing and mastering allows your music recordings to truly stand out and be different.
Everyone’s taste in music is unique, however, when you get to apply proper mixing and mastering techniques, someone is bound to enjoy listening to it more than the millions of songs populated on streaming platforms.
The techniques involved make music become much richer and more lifelike. It means you get distinct bass notes instead of a muddy rumble, sharp and clear treble notes that won’t set your teeth chattering, and mid-range tones that are much easier to tell apart. This can be further enhanced through the addition of various audio effects to make your mix more special.
Although mixing and mastering might have some techniques and tools that are common to one another, they both are quite different.
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What is Mixing?
Mixing involves adjusting and combining individual tracks in your mix.
It requires technical ability as well as creativity to make it interesting to listeners. It’s also arguably one of the most fun but challenging aspects of music production.
Developing your mixing workflow is key when it comes to creating a professional mix. It creates a foundation on top of which your creative genius can happen more efficiently when mixing music. The result is the ability to a offer a wholesome listening experience with effortless ease.
Through mixing, it ensures your mix is ready for the final step of the audio production process, which is mastering.
What is Mastering?
Mastering is the final step in preparing a song or album for commercial release. It involves processing your mix into its final form so that it’s ready for distribution.
In the earlier years of music production, a mastering engineer’s role was to create master mixes in order to be used for mass vinyl production and distribution. With rapid advancements in music technology, the functions of a mastering engineer have gone beyond that.
Today, a mastering engineer is required to learn mastering techniques and skills that enable them polish and enhance tracks that form a song or an album to sound great played from any source – whether it’s a smartphone, car speakers or a home audio system.
6 Key Differences Between Mixing and Mastering
1. Stage in music production
Mixing is the second last stage in the music production process.
Mastering is the final step which involves enhancing the overall mix so that it’s ready for release and distribution.
2. Multi-track vs Final mix
Mixing involves processing several individual tracks like vocals, drums, bass, or piano to become one final mix.
Mastering involves processing only the final mix and making it sound louder, brighter and wider.
3. Effects Processing
Mixing involves adding effects to individual tracks so as to make them have a desired sound. Here, its about combining different ideas and techniques to give the final mix a unique and creative touch.
Mastering involves adding minor effects to enhance the final mix so as to make it sound more polished. Here, you’re also making minor adjustments, fixing any problems that the mixing engineer may have missed.
4. Loudness level
Mixing involves combining individual tracks so that the final mix level has enough headroom, usually around -6dB. Later on, this gives plenty of room for the mastering engineers to enhance the final mix without clipping. Clipping results in harsh, unpleasant distortion that you want to avoid. But not all clipping is bad or unintentional. For example, a hard-driving electric guitar player may intentionally induce clipping through an amp to create distortion for musical effect.
Mastering makes use of the headroom to add effects and increase the loudness level similar to other songs on radio, TV and on streaming services which is at around -0dB. People prefer loud. When all other variables are kept constant, listeners reliably prefer the sound of a piece of music when it is played back at a higher volume versus a lower volume.
5. Project range
When working on large projects like an album, mixing mainly focuses on processing several individual tracks of each song into a final mix. This means there can be several mixing engineers working on different songs in album.
In mastering, your working on each song while also looking at the entire project as a whole. Your aim is to create a cohesive listening experience, where you make everything flow properly from one song into the next. So it’s generally a good idea to have one mastering engineer taking care of the whole project.
6. Technical Ability
If you’re a music producer or artist, mixing is something you should always make an effort to learn and do. You don’t have to be a professional, but you should at least try to give each of your songs a rough mix whenever possible.
Mastering requires much more intensive knowledge and experience than mixing so it can be costly when done by a professional. It takes years to become good at mastering. For most people, it’s not an absolute necessity.
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