Mixing and mastering are the two most important steps an audio track must go through before release. Very often people do not understand the difference between these processes. If you are interested in learning more, follow https://www.majormixing.com/complete-mixing-and-mastering/.
Now let’s understand each of these steps of song creation.
Mixing is very important in the recording process because without it, you will not get a music track. Any album has to go through this stage. Mixing is about working with sound files, adjusting the sound of instruments. Digital audio processing is carried out in a balanced manner. Any track includes several audio tracks. These are vocals and musical instruments, for example, guitar, synthesizers, drums, piano, and so on. All of these fragments individually are “raw material”. To turn this into a single song, you have to go through several stages:
1. Normalization
Normalization is responsible for increasing the volume of sounds at certain points.
2. Compression
The principle of compression is that it reduces the volume of the sound in those moments when it reaches a certain limit. That is, the audio track is aligned.
3. Equalizing
Equalizing is aimed at equalizing frequencies, and it is especially difficult to do this process with vocals.
4. Noise removal
This is also very important since there are often extraneous sounds on the recording, which should not be.
5. Panning
To make the sound even better, it must be split into different channels. There are two channels: left and right. Due to this, the track sounds more spacious and full.
6. Adding effects
This includes, for example, reverberation, that is, the reflection of sound waves from different surfaces and delay, that is, multiple repetitions of the original sound.
If mixing is a group and individual processing of instruments, then mastering is the processing of the entire track. If mixing is a group and individual processing of instruments. Then mastering is the processing of the entire track. Mastering means balancing the finished track and processing the audio track for playback on different media (now it’s mostly online listening).
Mastering is a kind of set of manipulations due to which the recording is subjected to final processing and reaches the highest possible level of quality and sound fullness. This process has three stages:
1. Installation
At the beginning of work, phonographs are opened in the audio editor and then arranged in the desired sequence at certain intervals. Sometimes at the beginning and at the end, the sound can be output and decay. Also at this stage, defects are eliminated, that is, noise, crackles and other unnecessary sounds.
2. Final sound processing
At this stage, dynamics processing takes place, as well as tone correction. Soundtrack volume leveling optimization of general sounding.
3. Transferring a composition to different media
In this article, we have told you about the two most important processes in creating a music product, as well as explained the difference between them and sorted out their key features. Thus, mixing is the stage preceding mastering, at which all the instruments and parts of the music file are processed, and mastering is already the process of finalizing and preparing the track for release. This is where the last volume adjustments take place, stereo panning expansion, etc.