Music Production: Recording

THE MONITOR OR REFERENCE MIX

NB The term ‘rough mix’ is not used here, as it seems to exclude the possibility of ‘release quality’ monitor mixes.

During recording sessions, engineers are commonly expected to capture a number of different sound sources using a multitrack device, while creating a monitor mix onto a separate two-track machine or onto two tracks of the same multitrack recorder. The monitor or reference mix is the stereo balanced sum of all the contents of a given song and it is what the production team will take home to listen to between sessions and during the time that separates the recording and the mixing stages of a project. One may argue that the monitor mix is to the mixdown stage what the demo is to the recording stage, ...