Mixing vs Mastering: What's the Difference?

Mixing is baking a cake. You have all the ingredients: the kick, the drums, the synths, the vocal. Like flour, eggs, milk. You need to put the right amount of each in, mix them together in the right way, bake it, and it should come out nicely.

Mastering is making that cake look pretty. It comes out of the oven, you slice off the rough edges, cover it in icing, stick on the strawberries. One is the fundamental base of the track. The other is tidying it up.

A lot, actually. But it's all broad strokes. Big, wide EQ curves to adjust the overall balance. If you're doing lots of surgical, precise work at the mastering stage, you probably need to go back to the mix.

If the bottom end is too boomy, I can push that in and the top end will shine through. If there's one hi-hat poking out way above everything else, I can target that with a precise EQ or compressor, push it down, then bring up the rest of the high end. If the kick is sticking out too far, same thing. Push it in, bring up the rest of the track.

The stuff that works at mastering is about taming things that are too loud or boosting broad frequency ranges that are too quiet.

If you've got a vocal sat way below your top-end drums, that's a problem. I can't turn up the high end without making the vocal more brittle and distorted. If the top end is too loud relative to the synths, separating the two becomes very difficult.

The rule of thumb: if it needs broad strokes, mastering can handle it. If it needs specific instruments moved relative to each other, like a buried glockenspiel that needs to pop out, that's a mix problem.

When producers come to me for mastering and the track actually needs a mix, I can usually tell within seconds:

Sometimes you can have four or five parts in a track and it just sounds flat and boring. With the right movement and interaction between those parts, you can get the same production sounding really groovy. Same sounds, just a good mix.

I send it back and tell them what the problem is. If the mix is terrible and they want a stereo master, I'll let them know exactly what's wrong. I'll give them a detailed breakdown of what needs to change. I'll tell them I can do it and give them a price. If they'd rather fix it themselves, that's fine.

Sometimes they go away, make the changes, come back, and it's still not quite right. So I give them more notes. They go away again, make more changes, come back. It can be a back-and-forth process and I don't mind doing it at all.

Nobody minds being told their mix is wrong. Because it means it's going to get fixed.

If a track comes in and it genuinely needs producing, if the track just isn't a track yet, mixing and mastering can't build that foundation. The money is better spent on getting the production right first.

I do both, so I'd obviously say you don't need separate people. And I genuinely believe that. I like having complete control. I don't think I'd want someone else mastering my mixes, because it's not going to sound the way I want it to sound. I've got a pretty clear vision of how things should end up.

That doesn't mean everyone works this way. Plenty of people mix a track and want a separate mastering engineer. What I do in those cases is gear up the mix so that whoever gets the pre-master, all they've got to do is turn it up 10 dB and they're good to go.

You don't need a separate mix and mastering engineer if the person doing both can execute what they want correctly.

Honestly? They shouldn't think too much about it. Producers should focus on making the track sound as good as they can, creatively. Same with mixing. Don't worry about it too much during production.

When I was at uni, there was this culture of you have to do everything yourself. You're a one-man band. I learned very quickly when I got into the industry that everyone has their speciality. Management, A&R, label bosses. On the creative side: producer, topline writer, instrumentalist, mix engineer, mastering engineer. They've all got their place.

Being blinkered into thinking you have to do all of it yourself is something perpetuated in learning institutions. When you get out, you realise you can focus on your one niche. A producer doesn't need to spend three hours crafting a snare to fit with a clap. That's what a mix engineer does. The producer just needs to make sure the sound palette is right and the track is creatively where it needs to be. The mix engineer fits it all together. The mastering engineer brings it to life.

It comes down to confidence and capacity. Some people want the professional process from day one. I'll get their very first track come through, and sometimes I'll say it needs more work. But they've got the right idea. They want it done properly from the start. Not everyone has the budget for that, and that's fine.

The point where DIY stops making sense is when you want to focus entirely on the creativity and not have to worry about mixes and masters. For a producer, the mix and the master can take twice as long as the production, because that's not what they're doing every day. They're producing every day, but they're not mixing and mastering every day. It can be a long, hard, painful process.

If you're starting to get stuff signed and the pipeline is getting busy, it makes sense to hire someone. Focus on what you're good at and let someone else handle the technical side.

And the number one reason people come to us? "I want to sound like that guy." And he's one of our clients.