Music Producer's Guide to Mixing

Welcome to the Music Producer’s Guide to Mixing! This is the complete guide to helping you get perfect, professional-sounding tracks, no matter what music you make, and is brought to you by the experts at Computer Music magazine. It used to be the case that you could only really get a professional-sounding mix after years of experience working in a ‘proper’ recording studio with a (often huge) hardware mixing desk. Nowadays you get all of that mixing power – plus a lot more besides – in your software DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). So if you use one of the many DAWs out there – Cubase, Logic, Ableton Live, FL Studio, Bitwig Studio. Tracktion Waveform, or one of many more – then this guide is for you, and you already have everything you need to create perfect mixes on your PC or Mac. All you need in addition to this software are a few mixing ground rules and insider tips and tricks, and we’re bringing you all of these in this special Music Producer’s Guide To Mixing bookazine. We guide you through the basics on p10 with our Fast Guide To Mixing, and then take you step-by-step through a complete professional mix in our Fix Your Mix feature on p12. There’s everything you need right there to create a pro-sounding mix, and we even give you all of the plugins mentioned in the feature in a huge, free 80-plugin download that comes with this guide. It’s the world-famous Computer Music Plugin Suite and has all of the mix effects you need, plus lots of synths, drum machines and samplers. Elsewhere we guide you through some other mixing essentials, including automation (p52), dynamic processing (p92), and vocal mixing (p58). There are masterclasses on several detailed mixing themes, such as adding width to your mixes, mixing bass and kick drums and using reverb on vocals – all essential techniques to learn for great-sounding mixes. We close with an extra-special guide on how to bring an analogue and more human sound to your mixes. Using a computer can lead us down a too digital path, and this feature will help you bring warmth and character to your music. As well as the 80+ plugins in the Computer Music Plugin Suite, we are also giving you over 3,000 samples with which you can create complete songs and practice the new-found mixing techniques that you will hopefully – definitely! – pick up from this guide. Enjoy this special mixing issue and I hope many of the features help to bring a professional sheen to your music. Keep on mixing!