MIXERMAN’S Ultimate Guide to PRODUCING Records, Music & Songs
Everyone’s a Producer
Mixerman’s Ultimate Guide to PRODUCING Records, Music & Songs is built on the reality that these days, everyone is a producer. Artists have to be producers, songwriters and musicians have to be producers, even engineers have to be producers—and all of those producers now have to operate as recordists, mixers, and mastering engineers.
Rather than reject that premise in an attempt to hold on to some archaic elitist notion of the past, I decided to write a book on Producing that addressed everything for everyone.
Well! That was a monumental task! Nearly 600 pages later, and we have the most comprehensive book I’ve ever produced.
The Antidote to Misinformation
Each of the disciplines—recording, mixing, mastering, and producing—requires many thousands of hours of practice in order to do them well. The engineering is technical and tedious, and takes time to understand. And it can be difficult to get accurate engineering information and strategies online. Misinformation and bad advice run rampant, and strategy is all but ignored.
An important part of the Producer’s job was (and still is) to keep the technology out of the way, and that was often achieved by hiring engineers and mixers. This way, the Producer could concentrate on the arrangement and performances, the Artist could focus on being an Artist, and the engineer could mind all the technical details of the capture and the mix.
Today? You need to learn it all. Which is a little bit of a problem, because it took me nearly my whole life (thus far) to learn everything that I share with you in this Guide.
“My only fear is that the people who need to read this most will be the ones who skip past it, thinking they already know it all or that someone else’s experience won’t relate to their own recording paths. These people are completely wrong...”
Larry CraneTape Op Magazine
The Structural Dynamics of Flow
For most of my career, songwriting, sound design, mixing, and mastering were separate jobs and processes. But they’re actually wholly interdependent. All of the decisions that you make along the way directly affect what comes next in the process. The mix is the culmination of your recording and arranging decisions. The quality of your master depends on your mix. And all of your decisions need to relate directly to the song itself.
I take a more holistic approach, so that you can better arrange your productions from the ground up. This way, by the time you get to the end of the process, you’ve produced a track that does everything it should.
A 41st NAMM TEC Awards finalist. Get your paperback copy of MIXERMAN’S Ultimate Guide to PRODUCING Records, Music & Songs today—and produce your records exactly as you hear them.
Enjoy,
Mixerman
More Books by Mixerman
