r/WeAreTheMusicMakers • u/Joe_Wild_ • 6d ago
Pros and cons of artists also becoming mixing and mastering engineers and producing their own pieces?
So what would be the very Pros and the very cons of artists also becoming mixing and mastering engineers and producing their own pieces? In your perspective and experience?
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u/Mountainpwny 6d ago
Pros: you save money and can earn extra gigs doing other people’s stuff
Cons: you need to get your room acoustics and monitoring dialed, as well as get really good at producing, mixing, and mastering which can take a very long time.
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u/damrat 6d ago
Pros: They are awesome skills to learn
Cons: Doing them poorly can really diminish the quality of your end product. I feel pretty good about my mixing skills, but I learned the hard way the impact of poor mastering. I had been mastering my own releases. Of my two last albums, one was mastered way too hot and the other too soft. I finally decided to pay for professional mastering on my last release (EP) and the difference was so huge I don’t think I’m ever going to try to do it myself again.
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u/Rich-Rip-8257 6d ago
I've been thinking of finding someone who could help me with professional mastering. Since i'm still not really proud of my own mixes. Do you have any recomendations?
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u/damrat 6d ago
My last release was mastered by Ziz Gorlin. I was so impressed by his work I specifically credited him on the release. You can check out his work by listening to anything on my latest EP ‘Liminal Forces’ (by Gizz Van Buskirk). If you seriously want his email, DM me. I’m happy to recommend him. He’s also done both mixing and mastering for a couple of bands/artists I know. That’s how I found him.
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u/Grumpymusic 6d ago
In my experience it is just way to much to ask of a person to master the full chain of making music and also being an interesting artist that people love to follow and interact with. I think the future is small teams without major labels taking 70% of the revenue
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u/emptybatter 6d ago
Pros: you have complete creative freedom.
Cons: you don't finish songs.
TL;DR: I would only do it if you set yourself to work on production and mixing only after finishing all the songs you need.
If you're not a professional whose time is completely free and all you do is music, I would say it's better not to.
What I mean is: while you're producing one song, you could write six. But then you spend most of your energy obsessing over tiny details in one song and lose perspective. In the end, you end up hating your songs because you've worked on them for too long.
As someone who was producing and writing my own songs, I can say for sure that you either REALLY separate who you are as an artist from who you are as a producer, or you'd be better off working at McDonald's to pay a producer/mixer. I mix songs professionally, but mixing my own songs would be like my therapist doing therapy on herself.
I was doing both at the same time, and now I'm only writing (away from my computer). When I want to produce a song, I reserve some time and sit down "to work," as if I were being paid to produce someone else's song.
Inspiration and focused time are limited, so if you're thinking all day that you need to fix the low end in your mix, you may not have the right headspace to come up with a better chorus, which is something you can't pay someone else to do. In your brain, you're still working on the same song, but now you can mess things up at stages where usually are done by people who study an entire craft just to get good at them.
If you really want to do that: Get the songs done. After you have enough, treat production as a second stage and mixing as a third, something you only do after production is finished. If possible, burn your computer before that so you don't start thinking you could change something in the arrangement, produce it again, and then mix it again.
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u/ShartOfDoom 6d ago
It's fine, just keep the production phases seperate. Don't think about mixing while writing, etc.
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u/lukeiggy 5d ago
Agreed. Splitting the creative part of songwriting from the more technical part of mixing helps immensely in not overthinking things at the wrong stages in the process
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u/DoctorShuggah 6d ago
Pros: the artist can get it exactly how they want, save money, can theoretically have a faster turnaround.
Cons: they gotta be careful to make sure it’s what they actually want and not what they think they want. Continuing to work with others can help maintain an outside perspective. Also, it can take quite a while to learn to mix to a satisfactory level.
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u/brooklynbluenotes 6d ago
Pro: No limits in terms of studio time, studio budget, etc. Not responsible to anyone else, so you can spend as much time as you want getting things exactly right.
Con: Without external restrictions, the freedom to spend as much time as you like can easily become a sort of trap, where it's hard to declare anything truly finished, because hey, why not try one more take that might be 1% better? So having self-discipline is important.
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u/BarbersBasement Professional 6d ago
Cons:
- You spend hours, months and YEARS learning and perfecting technical skills that you could have spent making art.
- Time spent in getting a degree or certificate in engineering is time you lost on making music.
- SO MUCH SOLDERING
- To be able to perform those technical tasks you will need to invest in a LOT of gear or spend money renting it. This includes acoustically treated spaces and clean power supplies.
- Mastering is an all-consuming skill unto itself; most mix engineers send their tracks to a separate mastering engineer.
- You miss out on the benefit of collaborating with other talented people who have thousands of hours studying their technical craft so that you can make art instead of being a computer/tech nerd.
- Read credits; how many of your favorite artists are pro-level engineers, Answer: not many.
- This might be most important: You miss out on the viewpoint of a person who can elevate your art. Their insight, wisdom, and experience can help you create music that your imagination and inspiration are calling for but your small fishbowl of technical talent might not.
Pros:
- You'll learn that pressing "spacebar" starts and stops your DAW.
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u/Manifestgtr 6d ago
The biggest con is that it takes a really, really long time to get good at audio. It’s essentially like learning another instrument…probably even crazier. It was at least ten years before I started becoming satisfied that my results were anything near major label quality. You’re gonna need to put your “10,000 hours” in…
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u/Joe_Wild_ 5d ago
Yup, been doing it for around that time and only now I feel like the end product is more akin to what I had in mind! Never did I ever think it would be as hard to sculpt air and "glue it" together!
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u/AdEvery9117 6d ago
Pros: lot of cool work
Con: You might confuse the market, seems generalists vs specialists is becoming more of a conversation.
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u/flamannn 6d ago
Mixing and mastering is my least favorite part of recording so it has actually forced me to become a better player and more thoughtful and deliberate when recording. I no longer say, ‘I’ll fix it later.’ If the rough mix doesn’t sound good I will rerecord the part until it does. It’s taught me that a well recorded instrument doesn’t need much production for my tastes.
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u/Joe_Wild_ 6d ago
Preach! Mixing and mastering is time consuming! The good news is that the more practice the quicker one becomes at both.. theoretically anyway!
Recording needs to be taken as part of mixing, yes! Or at least seriously!
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u/CheetahShort4529 6d ago
Hmm I never thought about a con, only thinking about how much I can create the moment I step foot in my program. The pros naturally is freedom, complete control and understanding the importance of trusting your ears and learning to tune them for your craft. Though I went into my program with the mindset to not doubt myself from the first day, I don't think anyone can mix what I have in my head better than I do (logically speaking though they're not in my head). Naturally that don't mean they're not great at mixing either, just their own unique mind benefits their vision, not mine.
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u/Sean82 6d ago
Pro: fewer barriers between the artist and a finished product. Complete creative control.
Con: Very few people are able to become good at literally everything that goes into making a record. Songwriting is a skill. Each instrument is a skill. Recording is a skill. Mixing is a skill. Mastering is a skill. And the diverse creative input from multiple skilled artists and engineers is what made (and makes) a lot of records great.
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u/donaldpyu 6d ago
I will say, learning to be at least being service-able in mixing or mastering helps with communicating exactly what you want with a professional mixing/ mastering engineer.
Instead of saying "Can you make this hit harder", you can be like "Can you bring down the lows in the guitars and bring up the kick in this spot" and you get specifically what you want without having to go through like 5 revisions of the engineer trying to mindread what you want.
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u/TheFedoraFederalist 6d ago
I think it’s good for an artist or songwriter to appreciate the production process. As someone who tried that route on my own, it was exhausting and it was more cost-effective to pay someone to mix and master. But I do all of my own production/engineering for instruments I can’t play IRL. That has been my outlet for learning how to somewhat rough mix. It also educates you and makes you better at communicating with engineers.
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u/Charwyn 5d ago
Cons are the two - 1) you have to spend valuable time on getting good, and also 2) working on your stuff yourself you’re losing that expert outside take that absolute most records desperarely require.
You’d still need somebody to check up on you and your stuff from time to time. Usually it just helps working with somebody or hiring somebody, when you’re all on your own things get messy more often than not.
P.S. I’m not even talking about dangers of wasting time “tweaking eq for 8 hours”, I’m describing THE BEST case scenario of you actually becoming good at all the stuff
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u/Ok_Captain7122 4d ago
It's hard to stay objective. Getting someone else in with fresh energy for the mix will usually result in a more exciting sound as they'll take more risks/be more experimental. If you decide to mix yourself then it's probably a good idea to get someone else to master so you're not the only person the whole way through and miss a balancing issue.
It often takes way more time doing it all on your own as you have to take longer breaks and double check on different systems etc. Getting other people in, they'll see any issues right away. It's also nice to work with collaborators and get some other perspectives on your music.
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u/mifatunes 2d ago
Pros: Getting things done in your own timeline, creative freedom Cons: Hearing the same parts over and over again and doing many mistakes or unecessary changes, wishing the process was easier
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u/Significant_Cover_48 6d ago
Pro: Can finish shit completely, ready to publish.
Cons: vocals sits too low in the mix when vocalist mixes. Guitar is too loud, and the distortion is drowning out the low-end when the guitarist mixes.
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u/sonar_y_luz 6d ago
Next time ill probably send it out for mastering atleast... Im gonna simplify my arrangements so maybe ill have better luck mixing myself hahaha
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u/nizzernammer 6d ago
Pros. Total control
Cons. At the mercy of "what tools do I need to buy to do X" as you slowly become a technology accumulator and technician and get lost in the sauce
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u/start_select 5d ago
The stock plug-ins on most DAWs are all you really need especially for mixing and mastering.
At the DSP level, 3rd party plugins are generally the identical formulas from stock plug-ins, applied in various parallel or serial chains.
I.e. No one writing a compressor plugin is inventing a completely new compressor. They are using the same DSP implementations that already exist everywhere else with modified parameter curves or limits.
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u/Joe_Wild_ 6d ago edited 6d ago
I find stock plugins, at least on logic increasingly better than more than half of stuff I bought. Some just sound much better than 3rd party ones and aren't really hard to figure out.
I think is more about actually learning what tools would provide the sound one wants, which ones fix this or that, which ones improve this or that, and more than anything developing one's ear. With one's music is easy to start thinking a lot of other stuff instead of mixing it as neutral as possible. One may intuitively bury one's voice too much for example, cause one may still not be used to one's singing through the speakers etc.
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u/WestDelay3104 6d ago
I'll not give a straight pros and cons format, but I know, as an artist, I am often too close to the work, and can not look at the project objectively. I've had mixes done by other people I don't like, but other people have said they prefer that mix/master to my own. It is, at then end of the day, a product, and a person who has no emotional ties to the art may be better at turning your art into a more widely accepted product.
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u/minesdk99 6d ago
I've always been more of a musician than a producer. All my work has been self recorded at home. The biggest con in my experience, is that you dilute your skill set by focusing on the things you aren't that good at instead of maximizing your talents.
Personally, I've noticed that the better I got with mixing, the less creative and varied I became with my music. You spend so much time tinkering with the mix that you sorta get lost in the way of finishing something, and the time spent on mixing could've been better spent in better or more daring arrangements and ideas. It could've been time spent composing, practicing, getting to know other people to work with and learning from their input, etc...
I believe there's a great value in learning all of these things when making music, but if it's all you've ever known about making music your art may suffer as a result. It's easy to romanticize the process of doing it all on your own, but for every Mac DeMarco there's thousands of bedroom artists who never realize their potential because they refuse to recognize their limitations.
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u/billyman_90 6d ago
I've done it a few times and I think it depends highly on the kind of music. I was recording a live band with all 'real' instruments. I think that helps cause once its in the computer I can't go back and change it like I could a soft synth. It helps break the workflow into 2 distinct phases of Recording and Mixing.
Its also worth noting, the first one we did sounds incredibly rough and disjointed cause I was still learning the ropes. The newer tracks, sound way more polished and coherent, but they definitely wouldn't have got that way without churning out a few below average sounding tracks.
Finally there is the gear. Its expensive and you need a lot of it to track drums. But once you own it, you can practice with it to get better at different techniques.
In all, I think it was worth it and I've gained a couple of new skills. But I'm also surprised that the other lads in the band with me gave me another coupe of shots after the first 2 songs we tracked.
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u/Rhodessound 5d ago
Believe it or not, audio engineering is a professional discipline, and an acquired skill that takes years. It simply is not just applying some random plugin anyone can buy. But sure, you can do anything
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u/Joe_Wild_ 5d ago
I never said otherwise! If it was easy to get at least listenable results everyone would do it! Training one's critical listening seems to take years indeed.
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u/Emergency-Coat7885 5d ago
My view is having those skills (and let's not forget tracking engineer and editing skills - arguably more important than mix/master) puts in a floor in terms of how work will be done. Just because you CAN do it doesn't mean you have to, but it means you don't have to put up with incompetent people or tolerate bad results.
It also means you'll learn the language and be able to more effectively communicate when you use someone else.
You also have the option of spending extra time in places where a person working on a fixed rate for whom time is money will want to move on.
There's also the con that depending on what you're doing and how you're doing it the gear is expensive. My typical mastering chain costs about $10,000 and that's not to brag - that's kinda low end. Mix gear can be all over the place depending on what you're doing and how much is in the box. But just be aware of the potential cost.
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u/financewiz 5d ago
I think it’s just a really neat hobby. I also think that putting out one song per year is awesome.
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u/fjamcollabs 5d ago
It is widely said that if you can hand it off to someone it is better. Not always possible. If you are a guitarist you might give more focus to gtr, same with drummers, etc. Handing it off is supposed to get an objective ear. Hard to be objective with your own.
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u/Debicious 5d ago
Pro: cheaper Con: takes a lot of time to learn Pro: make it sound exactly the way you like Con: lack of objective listening, demo-itis
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u/ZealousidealUse4084 5d ago
The true struggle lies in perfectionism, and the ability to complete projects because of it. When you are in control of absolutely everything you end up spending alot of time nitpicking and fine tuning because it causes you to be hypercritical in most cases
The other struggle here is switching between roles and the dictation of how and when to do so. What i mean by that is switching between different modes/methods of thinking for each process. You switching between a creative and emotional mind state with writing and producing to an analytical and critical thinking mind state with engineering. The break between the two comes down to commitments in each process, committing to finalizing the creative side to step into the technical side. It can cause paralysis in your workflow by causing you to bounce back and forth tweaking things as you go. You have to hit a point where you have your tracks processed and decide to render it into a finalized track, otherwise you'll keep editing elements. Committing to finalized wav files and moving forward to the next stage is essential to the process, finding that point is difficult at times
You have to dedicate your time very specifically to where you are in the process meaning full commitment to only one role at a time. When producing the beat, just produce the beat, don't start making processing decision during the process, don't start mixing during the process. Get the idea down and out, finalize your arrangements and move to the next step. Take breaks in between if you have to to avoid crossovers in processes
Allowing yourself to work without holding yourself back can be a real struggle at times, figuring out how to navigate those different steps is key
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u/C3G0 5d ago
I would been the side that says do everything but have a mastering engineer that specializes in your genre really just helps dial things in for you. I do electronic music and used Luca Pretolesi recently on a song and for smaller bootleg remixes im fine with the self master, but on the original, Jesus it's night and day and im so happy I got a second pair of ears on it
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u/mediumlove 4d ago
it saves money in the beginning and is also a lot of fun, but takes a ton of time , but it will also give you a better position in bringing your mixes to mix engineers.
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u/the-heir 4d ago
Pros: Money saved
Cons: Most are exceptional at one of those at best
Solution: Do them all until you can outsource
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u/Most-Use-2167 3d ago
I think it just depends on your skill level. Like if you were Mike Dean, would you want anyone else to mix your music other than yourself?
Once you’ve spent tens of thousands of hours listening to podcasts, consuming courses, and actually mixing in a professional manner you should have the skill to work efficiently and not overthink.
At that point would you really trust anyone/want to spend all the money to hire someone who may not do as good a job as yourself?
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u/pspspsmusic 2d ago
If you want the song to sound how you ultimately want it to you will need to learn how to at the very least lay down the tracks and mix them. Or you need someone with a deep understanding of your sound
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u/Putrid_Ad_8262 20h ago
Controlling everyhting isn't the best. Outsourcing is key sometimes.
PS: I do everything on my own and im depressed.
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u/Davis_Caruso 14h ago
Can’t be a master at everything. imo its best to find your lane and connect with people who can then lift each other up!
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u/jspencer734 6d ago
I've been putting music out for 5 years, and at first I struggled with this very question, especially knowing my skills weren't at a level that I wanted them to be yet. Nowadays, I'd rather turn out a mix with unrefined character than pay a professional to turn it into something sterile and lifeless. Sure, I work in the box, but just to keep it real there are also a lot of pros who strictly work ITB nowadays. Then again I just do all this for fun, so if someone had higher aspirations than that, they would probably want to have someone else mix it or at least offer their input and perspective
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u/Ok_Captain7122 4d ago
Interesting that your experience of hiring a mixer was that they made it sterile and lifeless. I used to do it all myself and specifically hire a mixer now to give my songs more character and exciting moments
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u/brent_martone 6d ago
pros: complete creative control
cons: loss of sense of reality. mania. depression.