One of my favorite mixes, and how it came to be.

Move On - Vikki Hewitt

I've only been working on mixing for only a short period of time, but as a musician, and somebody who's a fan of the pop-rock genre, I really enjoy my mix of this song. The first time I heard it, I found the unmixed stems on Mixoff.org (A place for recording engineers/recording artists to upload their unmixed stems and have others take a shot at their mixes. Songs are usually recorded unmixed, and they sound sound really lod, and really dry, and that's not good. Mixing is where we take those tracks and use effects/compression/EQing/etc on a Digital Audio Workstation (In my case, I use Mixcraft 6.) to make them sound good enough to release them as a single, or on a CD, or on the Internet. Even for my own music, I have to do the same.), and thought to myself "Hmm...this sounds a little lifeless. Why not add some life to it?". And that's exactly what I did. And while I still had very little knowledge of mixing at the time, and while I'm still learning about it, I really think that I did this song justice.

In my head, I really wanted to give this song sort of a live feeling to it, sort of like an intimate concert that's going on right in front of you, and you can hear and feel everything. On nearly every track, I added reverb (In other words, I've added an echo to each track.) to the bass track and each drum mic. (How drums are recorded is very interesting, and probably one of my favorite things as a musician to do is to research on recording techniques, and how songs and instruments were recorded in the past. Each drum on the kit gets a microphone, and there's two overhead mics on the left and right side of the drum placed a few feet above the drums/cymbals, either pointing down, or parallel each other. I only put the reverb on the Kick and Snare tracks, and since the drum track had no Tom mic, (Well...it did, but it was a trigger mic that sounded terrible, and trigger mics are usually used so they can be replaced with a drum sample, which I find pointless, especially since you can use a tom mic, or even the overhead track!) I had to replace the tom mic with a virtual instrument version of a Tom, which I think was a good replacement.

The only thing I regret is not knowing proper knowledge of compression at the time, since it would've helped in making the piano/vocals tracks sound louder/quieter in some parts, without it sounding off in the recording, as I think this whole mix is 95%  natural, and in my opinion, my best mix to date.