Do you have to be good at mixing in order to be a music producer/sound designer?

[I_V_502]

I love creating sounds on my synthesizer and recording samples to use in my music. I also love composing songs, creating different textures, and arranging them. However, I must admit my mixing skills are very poor, and because of that, I always end up hiring a mixing engineer and a mastering engineer to do that part of the work for me.

I should add that I work as a producer for myself only. I don't work for other people.

[imrae]

It depends what you are trying to achieve. If you want to get your own ideas out into the world, and you are happy with what the professionals do with those ideas, then all is good. If you want to work for clients, they will expect release-ready results. Subcontracting is an option but takes time and money.

If you want a record contract, the consensus seems to be that labels are lazy these days and expect any demo you send to be release-ready. Given the typical success rate of demos sent to labels, that could get expensive unless you can mix well enough to get feedback on which tracks are promising.

[Unaspected]

I regard mixing as a sub category of sound design - which includes so many more disciplines. A sound designer should understand principals employed when mixing audio but a mix engineer doesn't need to understand DSP.

To be a producer you have to know how to network and operate a telephone.

[Chr!s]

Generally speaking: Yes.

However, keep in mind that the caveat to all this is that a lot of "mixing" is actually in the composition and arrangement itself. You have to remember, for most of history recording music wasn't possible, but they still got good "mixes" anyway.

That being said, it's my biggest gripe about being a musician and composer today. When I started, I just had my guitar, my mom's piano, and guitar pro 4. My friend had a 90s Rompler keyboard which had "string" sounds and stuff. That was as high-tech as it got and that just blew my mind back then. How it worked is I'd just write a song using Guitar Pro and my instruments. I could probably finish a song this way in a single day or even a few hours.

After, jamming along and listening to the fairly crap General MIDI playback, I'd say "This is gonna be so great when the band gets together and plays it and records it in a studio one day!" and then move on with life. I could focus just on what I was good at. Hell, I could just write the melody and write chord names above it, show it to any competent band, and we'd have the song going in a matter of seconds.

Then, in the mid-late 2000s, I was taught of DAWs and VST instruments/sample libraries. That was so amazing! I could record from my own home and have access to any instrument imaginable! This then consumed most of my early 20s.

However, after I started getting professional composition work and such, what I've come to realize is that the problem with all this is that whereas most technology seeks to remove workload from a single individual, music technology does exactly the opposite: It seeks to put the entire process on one individual.

This then turned music into an office job. To meet deadlines and such, I'd be sitting at my desk the entire day, staying up sometimes until 6 in the morning to get stuff done. Writing, recording, re-recording, mixing, screwing around with MIDI CCs to get the performance right, etc. precisely because I'm the guy who has to do EVERYTHING, and the budget just isn't there to outsource some things.

Today, especially since I'm not doing music composing for hire much anymore, I can spend months on a single track.

Sure, the end results are spectacular, but because it's possible for one person to wear all the hats, it is now an outright expectation that you can and you will. In the video game industry for example, it is now even starting to become an expectation that composers are also sound designers ffs.

So yes, if you want to get into doing freelance work for tv/film/game/whatever clients, even down to the indie level they are all going to be expecting you to write the music, mix it, master it, and everything else. A one-stop shop for all things music and audio. If you refuse, they will almost certainly just hire someone else who can because there are so many who just do whatever "the industry" demands of them.

The way around this is to just do music for libraries to license out, but it could take many years to see a ROI with that.

Alternatively, just writing music for people to listen to and not bothering with "clients", but it could get expensive...

[I_V_502]

Generally speaking: Yes.

However, keep in mind that the caveat to all this is that a lot of "mixing" is actually in the composition and arrangement itself. You have to remember, for most of history recording music wasn't possible, but they still got good "mixes" anyway.

That being said, it's my biggest gripe about being a musician and composer today. When I started, I just had my guitar, my mom's piano, and guitar pro 4. My friend had a 90s Rompler keyboard which had "string" sounds and stuff. That was as high-tech as it got and that just blew my mind back then. How it worked is I'd just write a song using Guitar Pro and my instruments. I could probably finish a song this way in a single day or even a few hours.

After, jamming along and listening to the fairly crap General MIDI playback, I'd say "This is gonna be so great when the band gets together and plays it and records it in a studio one day!" and then move on with life. I could focus just on what I was good at. Hell, I could just write the melody and write chord names above it, show it to any competent band, and we'd have the song going in a matter of seconds.

Then, in the mid-late 2000s, I was taught of DAWs and VST instruments/sample libraries. That was so amazing! I could record from my own home and have access to any instrument imaginable! This then consumed most of my early 20s.

However, after I started getting professional composition work and such, what I've come to realize is that the problem with all this is that whereas most technology seeks to remove workload from a single individual, music technology does exactly the opposite: It seeks to put the entire process on one individual.

This then turned music into an office job. To meet deadlines and such, I'd be sitting at my desk the entire day, staying up sometimes until 6 in the morning to get stuff done. Writing, recording, re-recording, mixing, screwing around with MIDI CCs to get the performance right, etc. precisely because I'm the guy who has to do EVERYTHING, and the budget just isn't there to outsource some things.

Today, especially since I'm not doing music composing for hire much anymore, I can spend months on a single track.

Sure, the end results are spectacular, but because it's possible for one person to wear all the hats, it is now an outright expectation that you can and you will. In the video game industry for example, it is now even starting to become an expectation that composers are also sound designers ffs.

So yes, if you want to get into doing freelance work for tv/film/game/whatever clients, even down to the indie level they are all going to be expecting you to write the music, mix it, master it, and everything else. A one-stop shop for all things music and audio. If you refuse, they will almost certainly just hire someone else who can because there are so many who just do whatever "the industry" demands of them.

The way around this is to just do music for libraries to license out, but it could take many years to see a ROI with that.

Alternatively, just writing music for people to listen to and not bothering with "clients", but it could get expensive...

That's an interesting answer. I guess I missed adding to my post that I make music for myself only. In that sense, there are certain advantages because I don't think I could ever work as a producer for other people; If it's not my thing, I can't put the same effort into it. However, in your case, you were working for other people, and I imagine you had to deal with a lot of pressure because most people today take the producer as a synonym for mixing engineer.

[BONES]

I find this a weird scenario/concept. In my experience mixing is something that just happens organically as I work. It is not something I put much specific effort into at all. Yes, it takes me a very long time to get to a point where I am satisfied with a song, 6 months minimum, but that's 6 months of trying different instruments and/or different patches, playing around with the arrangement and adjusting levels to make it all work together. I honestly can't imagine separating it from patching synths or creating riffs or arranging or any of the rest of it.

It was easy in the old days, in a commercial studio, because you had to get everything onto tape before you could even think about mixing, and every track had to be recorded as loud as possible to keep the noise floor at bay. So I'd spend one weekend (and $1500) getting everything to tape, then come back the next weekend (with another $1500 to give to the studio owner/engineer) and mix it all. But these days mixing starts as soon as I have two instruments loaded into my host and it doesn't end until I render out the finished song. The old paradigms are completely subverted today.

[BertKoor]

... to be a music producer/sound designer?
I make music for myself only.

Like me, you have music production as a hobby only.
You'd call yourself by your name, perhaps also a job title.
Not by your hobby.

You could ofcourse say (but to whom?) "I'm a music producer... a very bad one"

[Mrs_Midi]

No, you don't have to be good at mixing to do either, but it does help a lot.

[CrystalWizard]

IMO mixer, sound designer, and producer are three different roles that Could be done by one person or by three people but as commented those are all being condensed into one. Perhaps finding someone who is good at mixing and starting a team?
Once again, i agree with Bones, mixing itb starts when i add a second source of sound, but not everybody works that way.

[Memsterrr]

Mixing becomes fairly easy once you learn the art of gain-staging... or so I've been told lol. I struggle with mixing too.

[BONES]

Gain-staging is another anachronistic process that has no place when you work ITB. Gain-staging is all about managing the noise floor but when you work in-the-box, noise is not an issue, so gain staging is not something you need to put much, if any, effort into.

[Memsterrr]

Gain-staging is another anachronistic process that has no place when you work ITB. Gain-staging is all about managing the noise floor but when you work in-the-box, noise is not an issue, so gain staging is not something you need to put much, if any, effort into.

Elaborate please?

[BONES]

In the bad old days, you went into a studio and you recorded all your music onto multi-track tape. The first thing you did as a synth player was to turn your instrument up to the maximum volume, to maximise the signal and minimise the noise. If you play hardware synths, you learn to do this early on, just by doing. That was the first stage of gain-staging.

Tape is noisy so you didn't record anything mixed, you recorded each channel at the highest volume you could manage (without clipping, of course). To record an album that may have taken a week or more so you weren't doing anything but getting the maximum level you could for each part and getting that part down on tape. You may have had to provide a very rough mix for the artists to play along to but you mostly didn't even think about a mix. And if, for example, you had a quiet passage of vocals and a louder passage, you would record them separately so that you didn't hear more noise behind the quiet vox. At every stage, you wanted to maximise your signal to minimise the background noise. That was the second stage of gain staging.

When you started mixing, you were always turning things down, not up, which ensured you had less noise, not more. But you also wanted to keep your master level as high as possible, again to reduce noise when it eventually was recorded to tape, too. More gain staging. Also, in an analogue studio you had a lot of noise everywhere - cables running into patch-bays and around electrical sources and all the rest of it. And effects processors were often quite noisy, too. So there was noise inherent in pretty much every step of the process, so at every step, every stage, you wanted to have as much signal as you could so that there was as little noise as possible. But it was more something you had to be aware of, rather than something you had to learn. I did it for 20 years without ever hearing anyone call it anything. I first heard the term "gain staging" only a few years ago.

Today, working in the box, none of that matters. You can keep all your levels as low as you like, -36dB across your whole mixer if you want, and then render it out as a floating point file, open it in your audio editor, normalise it to 0dB and there won't be any more noise than if you had gain-staged the shit out of it along the way, because it's all just 1's and 0's.

Of course, if your whole process doesn't happen ITB, then some gain staging might help to ensure than when you get those external sound sources into your computer that they aren't bringing in any more noise than is necessary but it's nothing like the necessity it used to be. It certainly isn't anything I worry about when recording vocals and it's easier to keep the level a bit lower than it needs to be, just to be absolutely sure there is no clipping. Then, of course, are the crazies who use plugins that actually emulate all that noisy old shit but there is no hope for them, I'm afraid.

[Ploki]

For once i agree with bones.

Recent “gain staging” trend on various audio channels is f**king ridiculous

[melomood]

Thank you. I recently saw a pootube video about gain staging & was looking at it sideways like 'is this real?'