>>33571863People often talk about 'bad mixing' but I feel like people don't really know what it actually entails.
A mixer basically does these things:
Volume balance - you get several tracks and you balance them relative to each other. Vocals should not get drowned out, sometimes you want the horns to be louder and sometimes you want them to be softer, etc.
Compression - Sometimes in recording a live instrument or voice, you get cases where the musician/singer is too soft or too loud at certain points. Proper compression - not too much or too little, and of different types - has to be applied in many cases to, well, 'compress' these so it sounds like the singer or musician has more control than they actually have.
EQ - EQ helps to shape a sound or voice. You can get cases where a drum interferes with a bass guitar and they sound muddy because their frequencies conflict and cancel each other out - you can reduce that. Or if you wanted to drop Kiara's 'chicken voice' characteristic you might turn down the 5K to 8K range.
Panning - You position the tracks in space so that everything sounds good. Drums are usually centered, the singer might be a tiny bit to the left, etc.
Effects - Here reverb, delay, pitch correction, etc can be applied to each track as the mixer and client thinks appropriate.
There're rules of thumb but every mixer has their own style and every song is different.
This is one of Nene's mixer's costs by the way
http://jun-audio.com/price.htmlIf you're an amateur or a sort of indie mixer you charge 100 to 200, if you're a relatively no-name mixer for a major label it can be 2000 a song, if you're a big name like Chris Lord-Alge it can be more than 10K a song.
A good mixer can take as little as a few hours to a day to finish a song, so it can be pretty lucrative once you've "made it", but that's all reputation-based. If you pay more, there's more probability of your mix sounding good or like something else the same mixer did.
