Audio Recording

The biggest questions you have after mixing an audio material at home are as follows:

1.) Am I doing the mix down correctly?
2.) Did I arrive at the professionally sounding mix?
3.) Does this audio mix translate nicely to any other audio monitoring systems?
4.) Does this pose a problem in the audio mastering stage?

The only way you can improve your audio mixing skills is to have someone critique your work. But who? Of course it’s not your mom; girlfriend or your best friends that can give a sound advice which could make a great improvement in your mix. You need someone with an in-depth back ground in music production industry.

Example of these professionals are recording producers, engineers, recording artist with long experience in studio music production (not the new ones), mastering engineer and A&R in recording labels. I submit my raw audio mix for critique about 4 to 5 years ago to some of these professionals when I just started mixing my own projects. I get tremendous amount of quality inputs that shaped my audio mixing skills throughout the years. I am even doing this until now but not so often as before. I still recognize that there is still some room for improvement for my own skills.

If someone is going to review and critique your audio mixing skills; be prepared to face negative feedbacks. For example, you might encounter some harsh and offensive words during the review process. It’s because each person has a personality of their own. There are some nice persons that are too careful with their words (saying it constructively instead of destructively) while there are just persons that are tactless and do not care about you.

Without the Internet, it will be very difficult to have someone review your work and provide some inputs to improve your audio mixing skills. With the Internet, things will be a lot easier and manageable. Below are the some of the tips you can get your work to be reviewed:

1.) Some music production forums do accept critiques for audio mixing work. Examples are:

a.) MP3 Mixing Clinic in Homerecording.com

Again you need a place in the net to host your files. Some will be using MySpace, ReverbNation, etc. Make sure you are uploading materials that you entirely own.

b.) Broadjam.com

2.) Or you submit your work to me and I will review it. In this case, it will be published in this blog and will be open for the public. So in this case, not only me will be reviewing the work but audio professionals who will happen to drop by and listen to your mix. I will moderate comments and publish only helpful review. Make sure you agree with the site terms and conditions before submitting any material to me. Contact me using the site contact form.

The advantage of doing this is that you can get a free hosting of your files in my site; although I will be accepting an audio mix review that will open doors to a lot of learning opportunities for any audio mixing beginners. For a very good audio mix, it will not be posted. Instead you will receive an email from me that your audio mix is good enough and does not need major adjustments. The above are free ways that you can obtain reviews about the mix you are doing.

What are you expecting from a good review or critique?

Of course since the method is free and public. Some of these reviews are entirely just “noise”. One line comments such as “you have a great song!”, “your mix is bad” or “great talent, you have a potential” do not offer much help in improving your skills. You need to look for a good review about your mix. These are the things to look at:

a.) Assessment of your musical arrangement, the timing and the tuning in general.
b.) Comments about the quality of recording. For example what the reviewer can say in details about the recording of the vocals, guitars, bass and drums.
c.) What does the reviewer say about the EQ and compression of your mix and how it translates to other monitoring systems?
d.) The presence of noise if undetected in your monitoring system.
e.) The panning level of your musical instruments in the mix and the depth of your stereo field.
f.) The level of reverb applied to the instruments and to the entire mix.
g.) The balance and clarity of the instruments.
h.) The effects you are using. Some reviewer may feedback about the excessive use of some audio mixing effects that can ruin or lower the quality of your mix.

As you can see there are a lot of check points about consists a good audio mixing review. Once you receive a couple of good reviews, compile it and start analyzing what are the common problems reported. The information you can derive reveals your general weakness when doing a mix and in this way you can start implementing steps to improve your skills.