The way that I look at it, mixing is using the recorded elements to create the product and mastering is adding that final sheen to make the finished product shiny. A well-mastered song that was mixed badly still sounds like a bad mix. Likewise, a poorly played song with great mixing and mastering is still a poorly played song. To get a great sounding song, you want it all. You need a well written piece, played with excellence and passion, recorded cleanly, mixed so all the elements fit together, and mastered so it's got that professional gleam. There's only so much an engineer can do with a bad song. In the same way, there's only so much a mastering engineer can do with a bad mix. I like to think of the mix as balancing all of the elements of the song and the mastering as polishing and tweaking. 
 
That probably doesn't help. 

Hey UbiquitousBabba!

On the contrary, that actually does help! In fact, in some ways, what you said seems to mirror my thought that I'm having currently, but expands on it quite a bit.
It's kind of what I heard that mixing used to be: simply a balancing of the tracks. In present times, though, that's expanded to whole new depths, but at the core, I feel as though all of mixing boils down to balance.
Like for instance, the piano solo here is awesome, but guitar A and B are masking it, what needs to be done to balance these three parts out?

As this thread moves forward, I'm certainly expanding to see mixing in new and exciting ways!


Thanks for your response!
-Hypocrita

I'm probably being too 'old school' here, but I've never quite got the term 'mastering' when applied to an individual song, to me it just needs the very best mix you can give it.
 
'Mastering' to me, is polishing, sequencing and adjusting relative volumes of a number of tracks/songs so that they sound cohesive when listened to together -  you know, like an 'album' used to be

Also, when a producer listens back to your tracks and says, "Don't worry. We'll fix it in the mix." What he really means is that he's going to replace you with loops. I'm just sayin'...

A good EQ strategy is to start with shelves, just using them as simple tone controls. Listen to the sound you're EQ-ing in the context of the mix and ask yourself "does the treble/bass poke out too much?" If so, apply a low or high shelf as required. Sometimes I find that masking problems can be fixed with simple shelves rather than fooling around with complex "complementary" EQ curves. But not always.

bapu

Hypocrita
In the end, what really matters to me is not the method I use, it's the end result! 

Yup. That in the end is all that matters.
 
Techniques are what you make them.

Mesh

bapu

Hypocrita
In the end, what really matters to me is not the method I use, it's the end result! 

Yup. That in the end is all that matters.
 
Techniques are what you make them.

Yup, I quaysinart all my songs. Purr-ayed they are. Smoothies.