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?
In: 6
Imagine you have 2 images and want to blend them together. You can’t just cut out part of one and throw it on the other. You will definitely be able to tell it was photoshopped.
You need to blend them together by changing shadows, colors, hues, lighting, contrast and everything else.
Mixing in music is the same. Throwing a vocal and an instrument together alone will not do the job.
So what does mixing do?
Mixing groups together different musical elements to make them flow as one. This is achieved in many ways by editing both the instruments and the vocals so that they don’t clash into one another. The simplest form of this is equalization. You want every musical element’s frequencies to have their own space, so you might remove the lowest frequencies of the voice and remove the highest frequencies of the bass (Extremely simplified. IRL it’s not so easy).
The second layer of mixing is about adding extra effects that make the voice and instrument come together. This would be like blurring the edges of the cutout to make it look like part of the original image. In music this is done through lots of effects such as reverb, delay, and compression.
Latest Answers