Modern artists wear many hats, and this even extends to being the last pair of ears before their music is released to the world. With the line between mixing and mastering getting ever more blurred, there are new ways to do the heavy lifting…
Many Hats
In the last twenty years or so, the music production landscape has shifted considerably. The computer especially has found itself front and centre of all things recording, when at the start of this century it only got switched on to print off the invoice at the end of the session… The rise of the computer and the DAW in recording has been more evolution than revolution, but the way it has democratised the use of high quality recording and mixing tools still cannot be underestimated. Perhaps one of the biggest shifts is not how things are done, but more who does them. While previously making a record used to involve dozens of people who weren’t actually the artist, today’s climate means that the artist might be the only entity handling the whole process right up to distribution.
The Process
The artist producing their own music from start to finish has a lot of hats to wear. Understanding the whole music production process takes a lot of time and knowledge, and that inevitably eats into energy that the artist could be putting into the music itself. If all the stages of any process are written down to be learned by someone else, it’s always surprising how complicated that process actually looks on paper. Music production is certainly no different.
Why Learn When Something Else Will For You?
Mixing a song is often something that the artist will want control over, as this to them is undoubtedly the final interface between the music and listener. Understanding levels and even processors such as EQ make sense to the artist, and their active involvement in mixing dates back to the middle of last century when they were finally allowed into the control room! That said, when it comes to exporting that mix and preparing it for the next stage, many musicians are wilfully unaware (or even intimidated) of concepts such as mix bus processing.
It could be argued that those artists who are not interested in the numbers side of music have the right to concentrate on the art rather than on the science. After all, surely the whole endeavour is about making the end result as good as possible. The modern artist has the luxury of plugins that learn the music using AI to apply the appropriate mix bus processing for them.
The Best Of Both
Plugins that know what the music is doing promise the artist and listener the best of all worlds: freedom to create and to take technical control only when desired for artists, and the best quality listening experience possible for fans. What’s not to like?