Is mixing and mastering important?

[Noire]

Not sure if this in Production help or General Chat

is it important and What happen if you don't?
do remix need mastering too?

Am still newbie at this kind of stuff and still learning about it. I don't take it seriously and only doing it for fun and time wasting, and any important thing to know while making a song?

[brandystarbrite]

Yep. It's very important.
If you don't mix and master your tracks, your music might sound:

1) Your music, and certain sounds and instruments in your track, might sound too loud and have tons of clipping. aka the (red zone) area.

2) Your music might be too soft, for listeners to hear.

3) Your music and synth sounds, might sound muddy, blurry, very low sounding and not clear.

4) Certain synth sounds and instruments, might get drowned out, by other louder sounds.

5) Certain sounds, might sound dull and weak. Especially when louder sounds are playing.

6) Certain frequencies in some synth sounds, might hurt the listeners ears.

7) Some synth sounds etc. might sound thin and bland and not full/wide. Making you track/sounds kinda thin and bland.

8 ) Your music might sound like noisy noise, to some listeners. And they might refuse to listen to it.

And a ton of other things, that will take too long to write.

Mixing and mastering is not that super hard. Well,....sort of.
And sometimes, it depends on the type of music project, you're working on.
When it comes to mixing and mastering, learn what you can learn now, as time passes faster
than we think.
If you have like a basic idea, of how to mix and master music tracks, that alone is good enough
to help you later on, with music tracks, that have lots of different sounds and instruments.

[slipstick]

Mixing and mastering are sort of different. Nobody has ever produced anything without actually mixing it. That just means taking all the individual instrument/vocal tracks and mixing them all into a decent sounding stereo version. E.g. making sure you can hear all the parts and the drums or bass aren't completely drowning out the vocals and the whole thing isn't distorting when it gets loud etc.

Mastering is another story and is more concerned with making sure all the tracks on an EP/LP sound right together or that your track works on different playback systems like super-loud mono club systems as well as on phones and laptops and decent stereos. These days most people do the mastering when they're mixing the track just by checking it on a few different systems (I try mine at least on laptop speakers and car stereo before I think I've finished a mix).

But if it's purely for your own entertainment then you can forget most of that and when the mix sounds o.k. to you, you've finished .

Steve

[st3aLth]

Yes of course it is important.

[st3aLth]

But it learning to do it right can transform in routine so don't mind about what wright mixing/mastering is

[musikbear]

Nobody has ever produced anything without actually mixing it.

Well, i kind of disagree to that, because a 'non-mix' is what you get if everything is send to Master!
So for those lmms users that do not assign each instrument to a specific FX-channel (bus), they are quite close to having an non-mixed track.
If they also have everything in default volume, no EQs, and no use of panning. then it is a non-mixed track, and it will sound very 'unfinished' indeed

So the most simple way to express this could be:
If you do not use the mixer and take benefit from what the mixer can do, then you pretty much has an non-mixed track

@

@

If you like to learn about mixing, i have made tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuT_Ok6o5Dc

[mrlmmsguy]

is it important and What happen if you don't?
do remix need mastering too?

The short answer is yes. Absolutely. Mixing ensures that your track sounds good and balanced, and thankfully, is a straightforward process. You essentially want to make sure that your various instruments are audible but complementary, and that specific frequencies are not crowded. The Spectrum Analyzer is your friend.
Mastering is a more esoteric process, which I made a tutorial on here here (be sure to read the majority of the thread). What mastering does, besides "Gluing" your mix together, is it makes your track louder and fuller. And yes, mastering is needed for remixes too, unless you're using mastered stems

[DJ FlyingPankakez]

Well...uh, you seem to have answers, i suggest the SPAN VST instead of the Spectrum Analyzer, you can find it here http://www.voxengo.com/product/span/

[slipstick]

Nobody has ever produced anything without actually mixing it.

Well, i kind of disagree to that, because a 'non-mix' is what you get if everything is send to Master!

Well I kind of disagree with that. If you ever adjust any of the volume or pan controls on your individual tracks or put any volume adjustment effects like compressors or limiters on them then what you're doing is mixing. You don't have to use the FX mixer for it to count as mixing. That's mainly for grouping tracks into what most DAWs would call FX busses.

Steve

[musikbear]

Nobody has ever produced anything without actually mixing it.

Well, i kind of disagree to that, because a 'non-mix' is what you get if everything is send to Master!

Well I kind of disagree with that.

Im sure we can agree that it is good practice always to use the FX-Mixer, and to use busses for all. There are so many good qualities in the FX-Mixer in lmms, that it would be a shame not to use it.
In fact -Because of the output architecture, only FX-Mixer can control the volume of VSTs based instruments, just to mention one :)