All people who have little knowledge about sound production must have heard about sound mixing & mastering. These two operations are much needed in the making of modern songs. Because of this technology, we can now listen to several balanced harmonic sound patterns. Sounds with capture in the recorder are full of noises and unwanted clicks. All these make the song uneven, and not fit for the modern music industry.
Mastering and Mixing complete the making of a song. Mixing makes sure that you hear each instrument & vocal clearly no matter how low it is. This helps the song display its full potential. After the recording, the Sound mastering procedure optimizes songs for several audio/video platforms such as YouTube or Spotify.
Finally, both serve to create a sound masterpiece that can stand out in the cut-throat competitive environment of the music industry, optimizing all the sound for commercial uses.
Clearly, the domain of mixing & mastering is huge and they demand exceptionally skilled people.
In this article, we will share with you 11 reasons why you should opt for Mixing & Mastering a song.
1. To Grab Listener’s Attention:
Entertainment industry has cut-throat competition. The music industry is a part of it and you dare not expect any softness from it as well. If you are a musician, let me tell you the data. Spotify alone has over 50 million songs with a daily addition of 40000 songs. That’s a huge number and any low-quality song will go in the dustbin instantly. Along with your song lyrics and music, you must also opt to equip your song with the best sound quality as well. Your listeners may not know the technical stuff but they surely can catch the falls. A muffled vocal or overpowering bass will affect the performance. Volume evenness, distribution over stereo space, clarity of vocals, and a strong end. Any deviation from these norms will make you lose your listeners.
2. Ensures that All Elements are Heard:
Modern music is made up of several instruments playing simultaneously with a balanced loudness. Each of them must be there to make an impact on the whole song. Your listeners must get a taste of all these musical instruments. This doesn’t mean you need to set up all of them at equal volume. Set all of them in a way that would create depth in a song. Some of them will come in the foreground and others will give depth from the background of the presentation. The job is to mix each sound in balance. EQ, Panning, Compression, and Delay Effects are some techniques to do so.
3. Balances the Volume:
Pick up any old song and you will go through a common issue. Some parts of the song will be so loud that you must lower your volume. Some will be so low that you need to raise your volume. There is no in-between balanced volume level at which you can leave your device and rest. Classical music has high dynamics in comparison to today’s music.
Modern music has uniformity over the entire song that makes it more audible to ears. Both mixing & mastering adds this harmony to songs for making it suitable to new aged listeners.
4. Keeps Good and Removes Bad:
No matter what equipment you record your voice with. You are going to see some clicks, pops, and unwanted noises in it. You will then need EQ to operate and cut down all those unwanted sound frequencies from your audio. Moreover, you can boost the loudness of the frequencies suitable to the song. This gives you freedom from the room & background noises. You can do it per instrument with mixing or can go for optimizing the final product of a full song with Audio Mastering.
5. To Meet the Genre Expectations:
Modern music has several genres and each song follows the no-said rules of that music genre. The genre decides its sound design, characteristic, instrumentation, and relative levels of each part of the song. Mixing and mastering are the reason and processes why you do this tailoring.
Below are some examples of the process-
- Putting vocals at expected volume with other instruments.
- Making drums or beats heavy/pitchy.
- Putting guitar on a higher scale if the song is led by guitar.
- EQ each instrument to get a particular genre.
- EQ the complete track.
- Use Autotune.
6. Consistency across the Listening System:
Being a musician, I know you meet this difficulty very often. You have recorded a fantastic song and it sounds nice to you on the device you used to make it. But when you play it on other devices, it then doesn’t sound well. You try everything from your car stereo to your Hi-Fi system but the results are the same. Here come the Mixing and Mastering techniques into their roles.
Mastering the whole song makes it sound better not only on your device but on each device available in the market. The range of a song rises after mastering and is suitable for all kinds of devices from earphones to the DJ music systems.
7. To Meet Modern Music Expectations:
Music has no limit and it changes with time. You can listen to 90’s music from a modern band. That would be bizarre and people will surely dump it from their playlists. Check out all the other available old songs. You can tell the time of the songs just by listening to their sound design.
Today’s sound engineering is different than before. As a musician or a sound engineer, you need to understand that music today demands mixing & mastering to match the present technology used in the music industry.
Being creative doesn’t mean being stupid. Create your own music but be open to letting technology help you in your creativity.
8. Commercial Viability:
I know and I admit that creative people don’t like to talk about money. That’s fine but you must know that being a creator also means you are making your personal brand. Your music is your personal brand and you must sell it to earn money. I certainly am not directing you toward being world-famous and making millions. But if you want your music to sell and make even a small amount of money, you must make it business-friendly. Mastering your song will make it good for selling purposes. It optimizes your song so that you can sell it to mass people and studios.
Of Course, you must intend your songs to be commercial unless you want to lose your heart of creativity.
9. Achieving Similar Volume to Other Songs:
It’s 2023 and you can’t expect people to jump off of their comfort to raise or low the volume to listen to your song. Rather they will prefer to remove it from their playlist. Being a music streaming service or radio station, no one wants music that annoys its listeners like that. That is why maintaining a standard sound level is important in modern music.
Mastering and mixing processes use limiting & compression to keep your song on comparable levels without any unwanted distortion.
Conclusion:
Mastering and Mixing are an integral part of today’s music industry. If as a musician you are not using it, you are going to fall behind many others. This technology helps you to enhance your talent by representing all the equipment at its rightful pace and without any unwanted disturbance.
In this article, we have discussed the need for both technologies for making today’s masterpieces. I hope this article has added some value to your account. Thanks for reading.