On some songs I see people credited with doing mixing. I looked it up and I don’t understand. Is there a difference between mixing and throwing a vocal and instrumental together?
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Studio recordings are usually done as a collection of individual tracks. For example, the main singer may be recorded on one track, each backup singer will be on individual tracks, guitar will have its own track, bass will have its own track, and so on. There may be dozens of tracks, each carrying a different performer or instrument.
A separate process is then undertaken to “mix” all of these separate tracks into a pair of tracks, the left and right stereo recording that is the final release. There are several goals here:
* Adjust the relative volume of each track.
* Position the track between the left and right channels of the final recording.
* Add any effects to the track like reverberation, tone filtering, pitch correction, or whatever else is needed.
Any or all of these can vary over a course of the piece, for example some horn player gets too loud at a certain part and needs to be turned down, or the whole ensemble needs to be faded out at the end of the recording.
It’s quite complex to do a mix like this, commonly involves a lot of people, and requires artistic judgment of its own to produce a good result.
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