Faculty & Influencers
Mixerman PublishesEveryone’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 to 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.
How It Was
Each of the disciplines—recording, mixing, mastering, and producing—require 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.
What You’ll Learn in Mixerman’s Ultimate Guide to Producing
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.
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.
I set out to arm you with strategies to help you achieve your vision, and to create music and songs with intent, exactly as you hear them. Ultimately, music is meant to evoke feelings from great songs, and sound is just a means to that end. This is art. There is no right or wrong in art. There is only your intent, and how that intent ultimately connects with an audience.
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