For the independent musician, sounding good isn’t a rarity only available to big time artists anymore – it is essential. Music sales may have wanted, but that doesn’t mean that recorded music is going away any time soon. Far from it. More music is being consumed on more devices by more fans than ever before in history! Artists are making their music available on internet and satellite radio, online music streaming services such as Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, Deezer, and YouTube, selling on direct-to-fan sites such as CD Baby, Bandcamp, and ReverbNation, and still pushing sales through ‘traditional’ online retailers such as iTunes and Amazon MP3. Simply put, there is no excuse for an artist to release sub-par recordings.
For some people, audio engineers are still conundrum. To others, they are ‘evil’ manipulators of sound, creating phony, auto-tuned, drones out of terrible artists. This, however, is far from the truth. Every record, no matter the type, gets taken care of by a recording engineer, mix engineer, and mastering engineer. The recording engineer uses many of microphones and technique to accurately capture and record the artist’s performance as it happens in the recording studio. The mixing engineer takes all of the separate audio tracks and crafts the music to sound correct and convey the song’s emotion. He sets proper levels, panning, equalization, compression, and adds special effects where needed to complement the artist’s vision. Finally, the mastering engineer uses specialized tools and highly trained ears in an acoustically accurate room to subtly polish and prepare the music for final release and ensure the music translates to a variety of speakers. “While many audio techniques can enhance the final production, we engineers are not magicians and can’t replace a poor performance or terrible recording,” says Scott of Virtual Mix Engineer.
Recordings are more often used as promotional tool for artists and labels. The real money these days is in live shows, publishing, sync placements, and merchandise. When a listener connects with an artist’s music, they’ll listen to their records, tweet, and share the music with their friends. The fans want to support the artist and buy tickets to their shows, purchase t-shirts, and follow and interact with the artist through social media. As the artist grows in popularity, their music may be chosen for sync placements in movies and TV, which not only provides great exposure, it also pays very well. To make it to this stage however, it all starts with well written song and polished recording.
The rise of do-it-yourself recording has led to more artists releasing music than ever before. With a powerful PC, some microphones, a DAW, and a little know-how, anyone can record and distribute music. One area where many artists fall short is failing to recognize their weaknesses in audio engineering. An experienced mixer has the right tools, but most importantly the skills to make a production reach its full potential. Though it can be hard for an artist, letting go and trusting your engineer will take your recordings to the next level and help you stand out from the others. Listeners are instantly attracted to a well-written and performed song that sounds like a hit.
Spend the proper time in pre-production, ensuring your song and arrangement are as solid as possible. Then and only then, go to the best studio you can afford to lay down your tracks. Find a local or online mixing engineer within your budget whose work and personality you connect with, and tweak the mix until you’re happy. Finally, send the songs off to a mastering house for that final touch. Once your production is complete, you can get the music into multiple venues and into the ears of your listeners and fans.Scott Horton is the definition of today’s contemporary mixing engineer/producer/songwriter. He has worked with multitudes of artists the world over in all musical genres ranging from Pop, Pop-Rock, Hip-Hop,RnB, Urban and more. His online mixing and mastering service, Virtual Mix Engineer, provides recording artists with great sounding mixes which make impressions that count. Come say hi to Scott at http://www.virtualmixengineer.com This article is copyright protected.