Mixing Secrets

CHAPTER 11

Equalizing for a Reason

Speaking in the broadest of terms, Chapters 9 and 10 are concerned with situations in which different time segments of a given track in your mix feel as if they demand different fader settings. It's these time-domain problems that create the kind of fader instability that makes you want to readjust the level setting the whole time, because a fader position that works one moment doesn't work the next. Dynamics processing provides the tools to balance all the audio events in an individual track's timeline relative to each other, which makes it possible to find a single, stable fader setting for that mixer channel.

However, dealing with time-domain issues is only half the story, because there will normally be ...