Many musicians and engineers that have not worked on a tag job have nothing to compare their experiences to, so they are not always certain when a mix is completed. How long should a combination take anyway? When you first begin, you fly through mixes and believe you are finished after an hour or two, but then you start to discover that there is a great deal more to it than you ever imagined. As always, the only way which you can gauge what you are doing is by comparing yourself to an expert.
Let’s Suppose for a second that you decide that you are going to get somebody else mix your music, either as a record label is demanding it, or because you just think it is a fantastic idea to employ somebody with abilities better than yours you ought to be applauded if you believe this way. In The times of analog consoles, we used to figure a mix could take anywhere from a day to a day and a half per tune, especially if you used an A-list Raz Klinghoffer engineer. The first day was used to find the mixture pretty much 95% of the way, and the 2nd half-day were to out as a lot of the additional five percent as possible with a new set of ears.
While You could get lucky on the first mix that took a day and a half, it was not uncommon to keep on remixing from there until everybody was happy, which for a significant budget heritage act could take six or eight months on exactly the identical song. For instance, legendary engineer Bruce Sweden says that there were 91 combinations of Michael Jackson’s Billy Jean and they ended up picking number 2. And it required U2 six full weeks to locate the perfect combination for Still Have not found What Looking For. Do not let that amount of time alert you; there were more tunes mixed in the day and a half time period than there were in 6 months.
Of Course, the time it takes to get a mix depends on the tune, type of substance, how it was recorded, number of tracks and components, and the mixer. If the recording was a live concert with a power trio and vocalist, for example, and all of the songs sounded pretty much exactly the same, a whole album might only have a day to complete. On the other hand, an R&B tune with 100 tracks could take a couple of days just to get a deal on. And a song that had badly recorded tracks that needed plenty of fixing and editing to bring it up to snuff might take much longer than that. On the other hand, producer/engineer Kevin Shirley was known to combine entire albums in one day, like the best-selling Journey records he worked in the 80’s.