What is the difference between mixing and mastering?
There’s still a huge chunk of time between completing a studio cut and releasing the finished product to the music world.
We’re all very aware of how much time it may take an artist to actually begin recording. Material has to be written, jammed, and rehearsed. Eventually, a demo is laid down. The artist submits a collection of demos to the producer and studio team, who select the best ones. Even then, tracks from the sessions are often shifted aside for B-sides, while the rest may remain in the vault, never seeing the light of day.
But once the studio time has been met and the artist’s duties are now up, what then? It’s easy to imagine that the material is ready for the big Friday streaming release from the word go, or sat on the shelves awaiting its lacquer cut for imminent vinyl manufacturing. However, a whole extra step of sonic attention has to be followed once a recording’s in the can, any single, album, or EP having to pass hands via the mixer and master before copies are finally packaged and sent off for music store shelves.
To the uninitiated, it’s likely your guess as to what the post-production process entails will pivot to some form of sonic polish and tweaking, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But just what exactly falls under the remit of the two roles can stump even the most longtime music fans.
So, what is the difference between mixing and mastering?
The song’s been cut and edited and submitted to the mix engineer. It’s now their job to ensure that the sum of the piece’s instrumental and vocal parts all work to a pleasing balance and harmony. Each song submitted is made up of the individual tracks and stems that form the piece. For instance, a garage punk band may only need as few as four tracks for their drums, bass, guitar, and vocals setup, whereas a chamber pop maestro’s symphonic prog rock opus may be built by as many as 200 individual stems to realise the mammoth, orchestral sound.
So, be it ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ or ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, the mixer will shape the separate parts to all get along with each other as best as possible and befitting the creative demands of the song. Then there’s the EQing. Once the artistic check has been made, the mixer needs to ensure the frequency of each stem is equal to each other and free of unwanted noise like low-level hums or harsh spikes, as well as amend the prominence of certain instruments. Perhaps that guitar lick just sounds better in the background, while the punch of the drummer’s snare lifts the piece and pushed front and centre.
Once the mixer is satisfied that the material is afforded the sonic character it deserves, it’s time for the master. A mastering engineer will have received the former pieces made up of multiple stems in a single stereo file to the mixer’s satisfaction and handed as many single files as the album or project is intended to have.
A single file is a completed song. Now, in the mastering phase, each song is ensured to sit together with cohesion in the album, optimising and altering as is necessary to create a shared audio standard and character that doesn’t seem out of place with the rest of the record. Then, a final check is carried out to make sure the album’s free of slight imperfections and tailored to the intended format release, as well as encoding data information into the final files where supported and International Standard Recording Codes embedded so royalties can be tracked.
The process between mixing and mastering can take anywhere between one and three weeks, and that’s not accounting for potential drafting and revisions, but those final checks stand just as essential to any song’s life once out in the pop world as the songwriter’s lyrical pen or the band’s performance in the recording studio.
