Well thats what I find anyone eles it is so boring trying this and that I would love to send it out but do they put reverb that you like, the delay, make a chant etc... do you put all that stuff on the say mix it

im learning all the eq and all the rest but it is so time consuming
I see a lot of people just use other peoples loops is that a musician ?

put this bass loop on this drum loop and add effects
it seems that engineers are the new musicians when it comes to dance music.

anyway

now to eq the hihats and put some verb on them and call it a day for now

I am not an engineer I create music as a hobby

 

My view is that they are two different things. Although you will find some mix engineers are musical it is not a necessity.

Remember there are thousands of so called mix engineers working at advertising agencies, television stations and radio stations everyday and none needs to be especially musical.

 

Blame or thank technology for it. Who would have thought of "mastering" in a bedroom, with cracked $100 plugins, and headphones, 20 years ago? Nowadays we have one-man-does it all tracks all over the place. This is why there is so many crappy sounding tracks out there. The majority of people listed as engineer, and mastering engineers on some those tracks would not be able to find themselves in a real recording studio. And it is not only EDM. In other genres, it is equally bad. With a capital B.

 

Musicians and mix engineers are two different things, you can be both at the same time but if someone is making electronic music it doesn't necessarily mean that they're a mix engineer. Also, one can not be harder than the other as it all depends on the person, some are just better musicians, some are better engineers.

With other genres like rock, jazz and so on, it's all about your instrument, what you do with it and how skilled you are with that instrument. What you play, and how you play it, will dictate what music you're going to make, just with simple electric guitar you can make music in pretty much every genre.
Electronic music is mostly about sound design and it is equivalent to being your "instrument", in my opinion. You're the luthier and the orchestrator at the same time, you create your own instruments and arrange them to play the things you want them to play.

While the process of making a rock song compared to EDM song is very different and requires different skillsets, in the end both people are still making music and therefore both are musicians. A guitar player using different amps, cabinets, pedals and effects to create his sound is the same as electronic musician using his synths, samples and loops to create all kinds of sounds and then modifying them with eqs, reverbs, delays to fit in with what they're trying to create.
This doesn't mean that they're mix engineers, they're just using the tools available to them to create music they want to make. Experimenting with your instrument, whatever it might be, is essential process that every musician will go through to come up with ideas, achieve what they want and make them better. Throwing effects here and there doesn't make you a mix engineer. To put it simply, the goal of a mix engineer is to take musician's idea and make it sound good.

 

I started in the 80s with a PortaStudio and later a Tascam Studio-8 and turned pro in the 90s with ADATS. As a musician first it just became natural to "do it all'; play, engineer, mix and (later, reluctantly) master. One one hand you can argue well, that's good, you have a vision and you see it through to the end and that vision isn't compromised. The flip side argument to that is well, maybe you have tunnel-vision and you lose out on objective ideas that might help your music. When I record other people I can be that producer but when I record myself it's the Todd Rundgren approach. What I wouldn't give to somehow, some day, walk into someone else's studio and have them do all the damn work and I could be 100% about playing and artistic decisions!
Is this on topic? I don't even know. What most people today are doing that they call "making music" is what I would call "being a programmer."

 

Wow some really good points, I like what Trurl and Pirate.. said as an old guy with the Commorde 64 BBS;s FTPs the hard oldays 1200 baud modem USR and I think SEQ was called Sounus.
I staterd Programming but that did not lead me in to music insted i went into IT for my carrer. Now i just did early retirment, helped by this
pandemic and i find myself back were I began, my first love. so Im starting a House label registered, Got My ISRC codes got my Domain name and Social media stuff I never have used or had
Security reasons now retired does not matter LOL kids give ther info away for free
but I never sang so im doing a house track all on my own as my first challenge singing i have never done cant sing and everything eles
So in a weird and wonderful way this Pandemic saved my soul.. and Mixixng is STILL HARD so is recording my voice LOL

 

On the contrary, mixing isn't hard at all, when your source material is good, and your front end is high end. As someone who's recorded and mixed, my own songs in a million dollar studio, as opposed to my $2,200 setup at home. I realized that my problems mixing wise, have been almost exclusively monetary. Hell room treatment alone goes a long way. Once you can kill standing waves, reverberation, fluttering echoes, etc etc 60% of the job is done..lol

 

Correct. The process of mixing is easy. Producing is difficult. Most mixes suck because of bad production material. What you heaven't fixed in the production is unlikely to get fixed in the process afterwards. And then such things as "resonant filters" come across people for trying to fix things that shouldn't be there in the first place. And the reason why most productions suck is because people do not care about miking, they've never read a "boring" book but rather watch entertaining videos. And then they say "I'am interested in mixing/mastering". Can't stop laughing everytime I read this.

 

Last edited: May 12, 2020

If mixing is difficult to you no matter what you do, maybe you shouldn't mix.

Mixing is:

1) Hearing the ideal sound before it exists.
2) Achieving that sound with the simplest means (tools) and in the shortest time possible.

90 percent of this is done by the trait of "hearing well", the remaining 10 percent is gear. Gear maybe even less.

You should be able to hear what the final mix should sound like the moment you hear the rough mix. And then provided you know how your tools work, it will take you only a few hours to achieve that sound. If you can't hear what the final mix should sound like before it begins to exists and you just go and meddle with the tools and tweak knobs here and there and experiment with the sound and try to find a destination for the song to go, like a stranger trying to find his way in in North Korea, then no, that's not mixing and you will never be a mixer that way.

The only thing you can do at that point is train your ears so you can hear what stuff should sound like.

 

People making music at home on their computer, using VST instruments are not all making electronic music. Just look at the variety of VSTs and instrument emulations out there, from Jazz, the huge Classical Kontakt libraries to World/Ethnic and Rap/HipHop, Ambient and the rest. Any active home-producer very quickly comes to realise that producing and mixing as you create your pieces of music is all part of the art. Musician, Producer and Mixing have consolidated into one new art of music making. Now, of course, just like Microsoft Word does not automatically make you an author, nor does a mobile phone make you a roving reporter nor YouTube make you a TV star, the lines between pro and amateur are slowly being blurred. Consumers are caring less about the video/audio quality and focusing on the content (some may say that, that is what it's all about anyway). As a pro media man myself I still cringe when I see those hard, jerky edits when someone is talking, to the point in many cases where many can't speak a complete sentence without an edit. It's horrible to watch...but I am starting to cringe less because the info I am getting from the vid is worth it. To round off, a tool is a tool is a tool. This includes old, wooden, plastic and metal instruments, just tools. But hundreds of years ago some musicians also became composers and conductors, what now?

 

without reading anything except the title let me counter that with another question ?

arent all "mixers" mearly "musicians that gave up on "chace the dream" ?

arent said "mixers" beeing played yet again, like they where when they called them self "musicians" or "artist" but now they get played by other people for bigger sums of money for gear/studio/rent/matinence/plugins?

is it not "just another dream chace?"

ofcourse its not that simple, and we make it far more complex with more layers in our minds..... but still ....

maybe i should just read the post and you guys pitches :D

As you where!

 

Sup brother! thats my era too.

You Saved your soul! You whent back home. Home where you belong all along.
Back to your roots.

Enjoy the ride man!
try not take it TOO SERIOUS - ALL THE TIME, remember to PLAY and have FUN too.

practice practice practice!

 

some advice?

be fearless
make TONS of music.
you will make LOTS OF BAD stuff. just accept it and keep moving!
eventually you will hit some diamonds and some rough gold.
when you hit those moments, dont be precious. You will strike gold again. dont worry about it!

 

Mixing engineers are the new musicians?
It aint anything new

George Martin
Alan Parsons
Trevor Horn
Hank Shocklee
Stock, Aitken, Waterman
....
first names that comes to my mind, feel free to add

 

This is so true imo. In 2020 it is so much about home studios and about hearing and having a vision. If you can make music in your bedroom and sound like $1M I see no problem.
And at least in EDM everything is a part of the composition. Even mastering is a part of the composition and it's common practice to write/produce/mix straight to a master buss with limiters and other stuff on, to stay close to the vision. It's a high skill genre in many ways (e.g. compare EDM arrangements to rock or rap) and its funny when people talk about it in the forums like you just press a couple of buttons. This happens more in some traditional and highly regarded genres (mixing/mastering-wise).

 

Partly on point. Some of those musicians saw themselves more as arrangers, sound designers, and producers than engineers. The one exception is Alan Parson. The others were not as talented as Alan Parson when it came to mixing, but smart enough to delegate to others who were more adept at it the mixing part of the projects.

 

Send those newbies who don't know how to install omnisphere to me, I will teach them whatever they need

 

Yes, anyone can put a bass loop over a drum loop and call themselves a musician. Just like anyone can switch between Neutron presets and call themselves a mixing engineer.

You're making a pretty unfair comparison here.

 

I know that mixing is an art you have to have great ears and understanding Im trying to find someone here in Toronto that does house but everyone does Hiphop so it a generational thing but house is now back Disco House yea!!