Mixdowns explained

- This course is designed to teach you how important it is to prioritize the mixdown aspect of producing a track. Generally, in the process of creating a track, you will have something resembling the following phases. So it starts with creating the track idea where you're gonna be writing out the parts, you're programming your synths, doing any kind of sound design, establishing the groove, getting your drum sounds together, your synth sounds. Then we have recording the parts which is, you're recording any live instruments, any kind of singers, songwriters, instrumentalists, that sort of thing.

Then we have arranging the song form where you arrange how you want the song structure to be. If you want the breakdown to be longer, shorter, et cetera. Following that, you have mixing the song down which is the main focus of this course that we'll be discussing. And that's basically getting your mix balance to sound musical, punchy, and dynamic. And then once you have the mixdown finished, we have final mastering of the track. And that's where we give it to mastering engineer and he polishes the last elements of the track to make it sound commercially ready.

So, all too often, the mixdown process, because it's one of the later phases in creating a track, suffers some neglect, simply because most of the effort goes into the earlier production of the melody, hook, and groove aspects. Also, most tracks that get released have great ideas, but the mixdown is the one thing that holds them back from reaching a larger audience or getting support from DJs, which can also affect overall sales. It can also affect how well the track sounds, what we would call translation, on different sound systems.

And this is a key factor in garnering better reception from listeners as well as your peers. It should also be noted that when it comes to sending your tracks to mastering, the better you can mix your track down, the easier their job becomes. Mastering engineers want to make your track sound the absolute best that it can, so you owe it to yourself to do the best mixdowns you can possibly do on your tracks. If there's one thing I hope you take away from this course, it's that you should never downplay the importance of mixdowns, and that they are as crucial, if not more crucial, to the track's wow factor than ever.

Throughout this course, we'll discuss all of the various elements that go into a mixdown and how to optimize these for success.