More about mixing

What mixing is like, metaphorically speaking
If this was about food instead of music, mixing would be creating a delicious dish out of ingredients already bought—everything standing nicely on the kitchen table, and just waiting to be transformed into a nice meal for good friends.

So—the ingredients are there already—that's the individual tracks of your song—and what remains is to take these ingredients, and help doing the transformation into the dish that you had in mind when the gathering of the ingredients took place.

Of course—the ingredients need to have high quality and taste good—still, some magic cooking may help making the difference and lift the dish from a possible ordinary or ok experience, to new heights, with that sparkling touch of great sounding vocals and professional polish.

What it really is about...
Well, the tools of the trade is a good mixing platform—in my case Pro Tools 8—and processing tools to enhance and alter the sound of each individual track, if needed; like equalizers, compressors, reverbs, echos,choruses, tape or tape-simulators, special effect processing; dynamic eq, de-essing, dynamic echos, and more.
The idea will always be to have the overall feel of the song in mind, and trying to enhance the vibe and emotional impact.

In many ways, mixing has more to do with sound-design than 'mixing', it's about shaping and 'coloring' each of the individual sounds and tracks, and also shaping and coloring the overall 'vibe' and 'attitude' of the song. 

The emotional factor, is by far, the most important.
All technical things are there just as tools to make that happen.

Experience is the greatest helper here, listening to something that doesn't sound right—without experience—it's difficult to know what to do to make it sound right.

With experience from previous mixes, one will much easier think of things that can enhance the sound and emotional impact.
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Prepare for mixing

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