For the independent musician, sounding great isn’t a luxury only available to big time artists anymore – it is essential. Music sales may have diminished, 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! Musicians 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 a mystery. To others, they are ‘evil’ manipulators of sound, creating false, auto-tuned, drones out of terrible artists. This, however, is far from fact. Every recording, no matter the genre, gets touched by a tracking engineer, mixing engineer, and mastering engineer. The recording engineer uses a plethora of microphones and technique to accurately capture and record the artist’s performance as it occurs in the recording studio. The mix engineer takes all of the separate music tracks and crafts the music to sound great and convey the song’s emotion. He sets correct levels, panning, EQ, compression, and adds creative effects where needed to enhance the musician’s vision. Lastly, the mastering engineer uses unique equipment and highly trained ears in an acoustically accurate room to subtly polish and prepare the production for final release and ensure the recording plays back well on a variety of playback systems. “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.
Recorded music is more often used as promotional tool for musicians. The most income currently is in touring, publishing, sync placements, and merchandise. When a fan connects with an artist’s music, they’ll listen to their music, comment, and share the music with their friends. The fans want to help the artist and buy tickets to their concerts, purchase apparel, and follow and interact with the group through social media. As the group grows in popularity, their music may be chosen for sync placements in film and TV, which not only provides great exposure, it also pays very well. To make it to this stage however, it all starts with a great song and polished recording.
The rise of DIY recording has led to more musicians releasing music than ever before. With a powerful laptop, some mics, a digital audio workstation, and a little knowledge, anyone can record and release music. One area where many musicians fall short is failing to recognize their weaknesses in audio engineering. An experienced engineer has the right gear, but most importantly the knowledge to make a production reach its full potential. Though it can be hard for an artist, letting go and trusting your mix engineer will take your productions to the next level and help you stand out from the crowd. Listeners are instantly attracted to a well-written and performed song that sounds like a hit.
Spend a good amount of 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 basic tracks. Hire a local or online mixing engineer within your budget whose work and personality you like, and tweak the mixdown until you’re happy. Lastly, send the songs off to the mastering engineer for that final touch. Once your production is finished, you can get the music into multiple sites and into the ears of your listeners and fans.Scott Horton is the ultimate example of today’s cutting-edge mixing engineer/producer/songwriter. Scott has mixed for multitudes of artists world-wide in all musical genres ranging from Pop, Pop-Rock, Hip-Hop,RnB, Urban and more. His online mixing and mastering service, Virtual Mix Engineer, delivers recording artists with superb sounding mixes which make impressions that count. Visit Scott at http://www.virtualmixengineer.com This article is copyright protected.