Mixing Audio, 4th Edition

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003303077-1

It's not often a new form of art is conceived; where or when the art of mixing was born is not easy to answer. We can look at the instrumentation of orchestral pieces as a very primitive form of mixing—different instruments that played simultaneously could mask one another; composers understood this and took it into account. In the early days of recording, before multitrack recorders came about, a producer would place musicians in a room so that the final recording would make sense in terms of levels and depth. Equalizers, compressors, and reverbs hadn’t yet been invented; there was no such role as a mixing engineer either, but sonically combining various instruments in order to produce an appealing, ...