There’s something very satisfying about leaving as much as I can in the hardware domain as well, and sometimes stuff sounds great coming straight out of the rack so it just makes a lot more sense. This means that sometimes I do most of the mixing stage in the rack, record it as a simple stereo track, give it a quick go-over when I’m starting the mastering process, and call it mixed. I have dedicated EQ’s, compressors, delays, reverbs, and mixers that allow me to control frequencies, buss groups of sounds through different sound-shaping processes, and do a lot of what I’d normally do in my DAW right in my eurorack system. However, I also do a lot of mixing in the rack while I’m making a patch. I’m a producer at heart, and this is how I’m used to thinking. If I’m prepping a patch for a proper release, most often I’ll record it as a multitrack and do a full mix on it before I go to the mastering phase of the process. However, the two have started to blur in recent years, and especially in a modular context it doesn’t always make sense to completely separate the two. So where do we start? ARE YOU MIXING, MASTERING, OR BOTH?Īs I said earlier, traditionally, mixing is the act of taking a multitrack recording and making everything sound good together, and mastering is the act of prepping a full track for release.

However, the basic concepts are easy to comprehend, and especially if you just want your Instagram clip or YouTube video to have a bit more punch, it’s not very difficult (or expensive) to do. Mastering has always been treated as a dark art, full of mystery, and requiring skill unattainable by us mere mortals. A mastering engineer then takes the stereo rendering of that mix, and does some voodoo magic to it to make it ready for release (and by voodoo, I mean EQing and dynamics management, for the most part). A mixing engineer would take the stems of a track and shape them to fit together into a song. In a traditional music release, mastering is basically the final stage of mixing. The music is there, all your carefully crafted sounds are in that audio file, but it’s quiet and doesn’t have the impact of the recordings you’ve compared it to. You’ve made that awesome patch, you carefully perform and record it into your daw, and you’re all ready to share it with the world.

Slate virtual mix rack noise floor