When can you call yourself a Mix Engineer?
There are many modern production techniques for your own mixes using a Laptop or in a home studio these days. Due to the current trend of getting DAW’s for cheaper and the plugins at a good deal, the traditional or the conventional way of mixing is really missing these days as they have not even seen the old Analog mixers and also not even heard the 2-track or 16-track tape machines and how it sounds.
Today, as we are all in the Hard Disk based (NLE - Non Liner Editing) bases system, everything is in random access and we can do anything at any time. The traditional workflow has totally disappeared. So that’s why we face a lot of sample based recordings and also there is no contact with the musicians either! Even a teenager is now calling himself a mix engineer, all produced on a laptop! Everybody wants to call themselves a “MIX ENGINEER” and sit in from of the big screen. I really appreciate this, but what I insist is to know the old school style of analog mixing workflow and then follow that in the DAW.
In those days, the artistes use to practice well and prepare themselves before they step into the studio as time and cost was a major factor. Then recording them all together in the same room with lots of Mic Bleed was a great challenge for the Engineers and also mixing sounded very musical, meaning that so called BLEED from one mic to the mic was the beauty! Then the Live Drum with the Bass Guitar amp was so well glued together in the mix and the whole band sounded very lively.
As things change today, each artist comes separately and sings on a click track and never meets the other band members and the guitarists or bassist come at different times and implement their ideas and because of today’s modern lifestyle, even the hearing is changed. So many people today hear only in the small Ear Pods and judges the mix and complaints to the engineers that the Bass is Not good! Well, I wonder how can a small Diaphragm produce tonne of Low end and extreme High Frequency?
What we miss in our modern digital Recording is the analog warmth, Depth and noise and Tape saturation which is not present in our DAW using the modern audio interfaces. So to get that big sounding analog feel in our music production, I highly recommend to have analog modeling plugins in your DAW to get that Analog sound and feel in your mix to make it more Musical rather than the machine generated sound. In the digital process, many use countless overdubs, playlists features by DAW or Comping which we call and using unlimited samples from various sources on the internet and creating complex automation to make sound different, these are the few factors which make sound so different when compared to the traditional approach.
So, to finally call yourself a “MIX ENGINEER” one should go through the tough path of learning the analog mixers and how to handle it a live situation in a studio or at a live concert and then have a feel of those preamp how they sound in your mix. Not only that, I highly recommend the young laptop producers to know the mic placing technique to get the best during the recording process instead of having a mindset of “I will FiX IT IN THE MIX”!
Happy Mixing and Learning!