For the independent artist, sounding good isn’t a luxury only available to major label artists anymore – it is essential. Music sales may have tapered, 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 listeners 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. Let’s face it, there is no excuse for an artist to release poor recordings.
For some people, audio engineers are still mysterious. To others, they are ‘evil’ manipulators of music, creating phony, auto-tuned, drones out of unskilled artists. This, however, is far from the truth. Every recording, no matter the genre, gets taken care of by a recording 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 happens in the recording studio. The mix engineer takes all of the separate music tracks and crafts the music to sound convincing and convey the song’s emotion. He sets proper levels, panning, equalization, compression, and adds special effects where possible to complement the artist’s vision. Finally, the mastering engineer uses specialized equipment and highly trained ears in an acoustically sound room to subtly polish and prepare the track for final release and ensure the music 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.
Recordings are more often used as promotional vessel for artists and labels. The real money these days is in converts, publishing, film and TV placements, and merchandising. 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 shows, purchase t-shirts, and follow and interact with the artist through social media. As the musician grows in popularity, their music may be chosen for sync placements in film and TV, which not only provides great exposure, it also pays quite well. To make it to this stage however, it all begins 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 PC, 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 mixing. An experienced engineer has the right tools, but most importantly the knowledge to make a recording reach its full potential. Though it can be difficult for an artist, letting go and trusting your mixer will take your recordings to the next level and help you stand out from the masses. 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 strong as possible. Then and only then, get into the best studio you can afford to lay down your tracks. Find a local or online mix engineer within your budget whose work and personality you like, and tweak the mix until you’re happy. Lastly, send the songs off to the mastering engineer for that final touch. Once your production is complete, you can get the music into multiple outlets and into the phones and computers of your listeners and fans.Scott Horton is the ultimate example of today’s modern mixing engineer/producer/songwriter. Scott has mixed for an endless number of music groups 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 musicians with industry standard sounding mixes which make impressions that count. Come say hi to Scott at http://www.virtualmixengineer.com This article is copyright protected.