Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio (Sound On Sound Presents...)

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The main meat of the book is contained in Part 3, where eight chapters cover the nitty‑gritty of compression, equalisation, side‑chains and the fundamental art of balancing. Drawing on the back-room strategies of more than 100 famous names, this entertaining guide leads you step-by-step through the entire mixing process. This book tells you in more specific detail how to do that well and how to use listening in mono as a check for phasing problems. The final section comprises five chapters dealing with mix sweetening techniques, including the application of reverbs and delays, stereo processing and other effects, bus compression, and the use of mix automation.

It's pretty awesome to stumble across a quarterly print 'zine that's "dedicated to increasing visibility for women working in live and recorded sound. Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio is a down-to-earth primer for small-studio enthusiasts who want chart-ready sonics in a hurry. The text also expands on Mike's own wealth of experience and knowledge with numerous relevant quotes and opinions from over 100 of the world's best-known engineers and producers.

User-friendly explanations introduce technical concepts on a strictly need-to-know basis, while chapter summaries and assignments are perfect for school and college use. On the way, you'll unravel the mysteries of every type of mix processing, from simple EQ and compression through to advanced spectral dynamics and 'fairy dust' effects.

My other issue with the title is that the implication is that his target audience is people with not as much experience, who might not know some of the info he is assuming we know. Regular Sound On Sound readers will already be familiar with Mike Senior's contributions to the ever‑popular Mix Rescue series, as well as his occasional (and usually lengthy! Recently, I felt like my mixing had hit a plateau, so I went looking for new ideas to consider at mix time.The emphasis is very much on mastering the correct approaches and techniques, rather than how to use any specific equipment or software, and everything is described in such as way as to make it easily transferable across any DAW platform or even to a traditional console-based mix environment. Great stuff, this book is a very complete guide to start mixing your songs on a amateur home studio. In the end, this may not have been exactly the right book for me, but I don't want to discount its value.

At this point the edition I read is a bit long in the tooth (10 years old) which means that some of the details of technologies are dated, and the author sometimes cracks little jokes that I don't understand - I think they're probably hilarious if you're British, but my American mind doesn't make it there.However, I can definitely see this as a book that remains on my shelf for reference and revision for a long time - beyond my student days. Each month, he does a "makeover" mix of a reader-submitted song, explaining his decisions and techniques in detail. Example, most books on recording will remind you to listen to your mixes from multiple sources (monitors, headphones, car, etc.

Certainly I think this would be an excellent book for someone who does want to get seriously into mixing. I have no such ambition; I simply want to make some half-way decent sounding recordings of my own vocals. Mike Senior is a professional engineer who has worked with Wet Wet Wet, The Charlatans, Reef, Therapy, and Nigel Kennedy.Part 1 of Mixing Secrets begins with a detailed discussion across four chapters on how to choose and use nearfield monitoring, including understanding and working around the limitations of budget equipment, optimising the listening environment, and 'self calibration' using commercial music reference material.