Continued from The Basics of Mixing (Part 2)

Special Effects/Spot Effects
Special Effects and Spot Effects are like the engineer’s solo in the song. These are the parts that the band may not have been able to do without the help of the engineer. The trick here is to use the effect sparingly and tastefully. Again just because you can do it does not mean that it supports and enhances the song. As the engineer you can take pride in adding these effects, but you also must listen to the band if they do not think that it matches their artistic vision. This is job security territory so that is about all you’re going to get out of me, but keep a copy of all the work you do and experiment when you have time on a slow an rainy day.

Finishing Touches
The finishing touches include any last minute edits or mix tweaks. Remember to apply a dither if you are bouncing down for CD (you did track at 44.1kHz or 48kHz with a 24 bit bit-depth right, there is no good reason not too anymore). Dither is one of the hardest things to describe, everyone understands that it makes a 24bit file 16bits but what does it really do? The best analogy that I’ve heard is this: Imagine a painting in the distance, you are viewing the painting through a window that you are holding. The window isn’t quite big enough to allow you to see the whole picture at once, but if you move it slightly in any direction you can see that edge of the picture. Now imagine that you could shake that picture very fast, like inhumanly fast. If you shook the window frame fast enough you would no longer see the frame and you would be able to see the whole picture (like looking through a fan). This basically what dither does to sound, but most of us can see a loss or resolution when looking through a fan, and some of us can hear the loss of resolution due to dither. Dither does effect the resolution of the sound so it’s a good idea to apply master fades after dithering the mix. I don’t think we will use dither too long as the only drawbacks of publishing audio as 24bit files is slightly more storage space and the fact that most hardware does not yet accept it, but things will change, the always do.


If you are going to have you track mastered don’t dither anything, just bounce files that are the same data type as the rest of your session. A mastering engineer (especially one that masters digitally) can do a lot more with a 24bit file than a 16bit file because there is more head-room. Chances are the mastering engineer will have a nicer dither algorithm as well. Another note when prepping for a mastering engineer. Leave them some headroom to work with, this will let him or her do what they are best at, instead of trying to apply work-arounds to a mix that has no head-room left. Usually 2-3dB is a nice amount for them to work with. The higher the quality of file you can bring them the better, I’ve even heard of people brining the computer and interface they recorded with and bounced the mix directly into the mastering engineers hardware. (check to see if your mastering house offers this and if the charge more/less for that kind of thing)

Test Monitoring
This possibly should have gone before for the later step, but many find that this is where the mix is really completed. When you have bounce your mix be sure and demo it on as may practical sources as possible. Play it in your car, on you iPod in headphones, on your home stereo, on a boombox, through your cheesy computer speakers (or nice ones if you have them). Make sure that your mix has consistency from player to player and adjust accordingly. One of the olds sayings is that if you can get a mix sounding good on a pair of Yamaha NS-10s (studio monitors that are very unforgiving) then your mix will sound good anywhere. If you get a chance listen to some of your favorite CDs thourgh NS-10s you’ll be surprised at how hard they are to please (or get anything pleasing out of). That’s it easy as pie right. Good luck and have fun.