Find a Recording Team to Help Your Next Project -- Part 2

This week, we will continue with our series on finding help in the studio. Walking through the different roles and jobs you’ll find, this week we will cover the mixer and the mastering engineer. Now, these are tricky because some studios blur the lines between roles or even outsource these to someone else. However, this information is still important in how you begin to view the studio process as a whole.

Mixer

The mixer mainly focuses on taking all of the tracks and putting them together. This would be the sandwich maker of the process, taking all of the work done before them and putting the bread, meat, and cheese all together. In this process, the mixer helps take the vision from bits-and-pieces and really begins to mesh the entirety of the project into one cohesive unit.

Mastering Engineer

The mastering engineer is going to be one of the last people to see the project before it’s considered “done” (assuming there are no major changes made, but entirely possible). They will largely be in charge of overseeing quality control, adding the compression, EQ, etc., and making sure the music translates well to different speaker systems. Because of these nuances, they would have a well-tuned room for in-depth listening. With this process, though, they also usually add a bit of their touch-- imparting their own sounds and feels to the tracks before sending them onward.

The studio can seem like a hectic and obscure place sometimes, so we hope this short series helps you have a better understanding of the inner workings of such a cool place. Ultimately, there’s a natural progression to things that is quite beautiful when you start to see how it drives the entire music industry. If you have any questions or want to start your recording journey, contact Blue Sky Studios so we can partner with you in your next steps!