>>12239215Mixing is different for every genre, and most "rules" can be broken in some way or another since the end result is what matters - but generally if people are breaking them without a clear reason it's going to soud bad or amateurish. Things like making sure that everything inside a mix can be heard - if it was meant to be drowned out, the producer wouldn't have put it in there in the first place - consistency, so, say, your guitar doesn't drift randomly much louder or softer than your drums - and not muddying frequency ranges unnecessarily (if you have a bass guitar and drums going, you don't want them fighting each other just because they normally share the low end of the spectrum). There's also the problem of phase cancellation where sound waves clash and cancel each other out, making stuff sound wimpy, which is why most mixing is done on studio monitors instead of headphones. The point of mixing in the end is not just that it sounds good on your own sound system, but also just as good when played on iPod earbuds, on stage loudspeakers, or on 2000-dollar headphones.
