Mix Smart: Pro Audio Tips For Your Multitrack Mix (Mastering Music) 1st Edition

Mix Smart offers a wealth of information for engineers, producers and musicians across a wide spectrum of audio expertise. For a musician just getting started with audio, it provides solid foundation of concepts through simple, no-nonsense descriptions and real world applications. For a seasoned professional, it provides compelling explanations of concepts that we've all experienced but may not understand completely or utilize efficiently. For engineers at all levels, the concept specific chapters, extensive appendices and index make it a great reference tool as we work in the field and try to make sense of other books, articles, and technical documents that we encounter.As many reviewers have already described, this book carefully emphasizes "strategies, not recipes", but doesn't hesitate to provide meaningful starting points and possible problem-solvers within discussion of each topic. The opening two chapters introduce ideas on a macro-level and walk the reader through a sample rock mix session. Most of the subsequent chapters focus on specific tools and effects employed in audio, and provide first a thorough study of the technology and possibilities within these tools, and then application specific suggestions for mixing. Each chapter carefully balances conceptual ideas with specific recommendations, all carefully organized to be a useful cover-to-cover read or as a reference volume to answer specific questions during a mix session. The culminating chapter includes sage advice for continued skill development, and encouragement to use the techniques and technologies for good, not evil.Although my first time through this book was as a cover-to-cover read, it has inspired me to take on daily mix "practice sessions" and has been an invaluable resource as I encounter challenges along the way. I'm listening to records more analytically, and gradually finding more success (and hearing more places to improve) in my own mixes. In an industry dominated by gear, I think the single best investment I've made for my studio was getting this book and digging into it thoroughly. For the price of a mediocre mic cable, I've learned how to use the gear and the ears that I already have more efficiently and effectively, and I'm getting results that go far beyond what any amount gear could ever do. I highly recommend it for engineers at all levels.

I love Alexander Case's writing style and sense of humor, which he sprinkles in throughout some very difficult topics...this book is definitely not for the faint of heart or for the novice looking for an easy read with easy solutions...Mr. Case makes it painfully clear at times that, in order to become a "quality" recording engineer, you must work and study for many years...as you read each chapter, it becomes more and more evident that Mr. Case loves the world of audio engineering...he writes in an eloquent manner about such topics as comb-filtering, algorithms and phase anomalies...I somehow became riveted by even the driest of subject matter!it's a great reference book, jam-packed with useful "real" information...NOT a book of tricks and magical formulas to make you an engineer overnight...and certainly NOT for the novice, as at least one reviewer suggested...it took me many years to get to the point where I could read AND comprehend what Mr. Case is saying in this wonderful and useful book...it's one of a very few books on mixing/engineering that I'll never sell...another being Alexander Case's book "Sound FX"...

This is a solid book, without a doubt. The author knows his stuff, and the chapters are easy to understand. All the good reviews for this book are correct, so I won't duplicate them here.However, I ordered Sound FX: Unlocking the Creative Potential of Recording Studio Effects by the same author a few days beforehand. When 'Sound FX' arrived, I spent that whole weekend reading it and eagerly anticipating the arrival of 'Mix Smart' for more yummy goodness. Then I received 'Mix Smart' and discovered that most of it is the same material, usually word-for-word, that I had just read in 'Sound FX'. The illustrations and graphs are the same. I even had both books in front of me and compared section-for-section and paragraph-for-paragraph.In a nutshell: to these eyes, it is a revision of 'Sound FX', not a new book. There are some worthwhile tweaks here and there, but not enough to warrant keeping both, so I'm returning 'Mix Smart'.I'm not crying foul play at all. The author even addresses the question of which to get on his website. I'm sure this is not the first time a 2nd Edition has featured a new title; maybe it was the publisher's idea.At first, I wasn't even going to mention the whole thing. But since the return will cost me $3.99 and a trip to the UPS store, I figured a disclaimer would be fair to save others the trouble.

Mix Smart is the perfect text for the aspiring mix engineer. As one might expect from anything written by Alex Case, this book finds the perfect intersection between the technical theory and the artistic endeavor that is mixing. Wonderfully organized into a series of chapters covering commonly used techniques, Mix Smart takes the reader through the entire mix process from planning to printing.Handfuls of charts, graphs and waveform diagrams within each chapter offer objective validation to the many traditions and tropes of mixing, and suggestions for how these techniques may be effective in your own mix. For the beginner, this research instills thoughtful decision making that can be brought to every mix in the future. For those who are unsure that they've heard such techniques used before, each chapter also comes with a listening list, highlighting exemplary or otherwise unique examples of each topic covered. Finally, for the engineers who have practiced these techniques for years, a scientific exposition of how they work may offer new creative alleys.