For the independent artist, sounding amazing isn’t a rarity only available to well-funded artists anymore – it is essential. Music sales may have diminished, but that doesn’t mean that recorded music is on its way out. 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 poor recordings.
For many, audio engineers are still conundrum. To others, they are ‘evil’ manipulators of sound, creating false, auto-tuned, robots out of untalented artists. This, however, is far from fact. Every recording, no matter the genre, gets taken care of by a tracking engineer, mix 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 mixing engineer takes all of the separate audio tracks and crafts the music to sound great and convey the song’s emotion. He sets proper levels, panning, EQ, compression, and adds special effects where possible to enhance the artist’s vision. Finally, the mastering engineer uses special equipment and highly trained ears in an acoustically sound room to subtly polish and prepare the production for final release and ensure the sound 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. The real money these days is in touring, publishing, sync placements, and merchandising. When a listener connects with a band’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 concerts, purchase apparel, and follow and interact with the band through social media. As the group 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 quality recording.
The rise of DIY recording has led to more bands releasing music than ever before. With a powerful computer, some mics, a digital audio workstation, and a little knowledge, anyone can create and release music. One area where many musicians fall short is failing to recognize their weaknesses in mixing. An experienced mixer has the right gear, 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 mix engineer will take your recordings to the next level and help you stand out from the others. Fans 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 composition and arrangement are as solid as possible. Then and only then, book time in the best studio you can afford to record your basic tracks. Hire 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 polish. Once your recording is finished, you can get the music into multiple retailers and into the phones and computers of your listeners and fans.Scott Horton is the epitome of the cutting-edge mixing engineer/producer/songwriter. He has collaborated with countless artists and labels 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 artists and record labels with industry standard sounding mixes which make impressions that count. Get in touch with Scott at http://www.virtualmixengineer.com This article is copyright protected.