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For the independent musician, sounding great isn't a rarity only available to major label artists anymore - it is a necessity. Music sales may have went down, but that doesn't mean that recorded music is going away any time soon. Far from it. More music is being consumed on more devices by more fans than ever before in history! Musicians are making their music available on internet and satellite radio, online music streaming services such as Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, Deezer, and YouTube, selling on direct-to-fan sites such as CD Baby, Bandcamp, and ReverbNation, and still pushing sales through ‘traditional' online retailers such as iTunes and Amazon MP3. Let's face it, there is no excuse for an artist to release sub-par recordings. For many, audio engineers are still an enigma. To others, they are ‘evil' manipulators of music, creating false, auto-tuned, robots out of terrible artists. This, however, is far from the truth. Every record, no matter the genre, gets taken care of by a recording engineer, mixing engineer, and mastering engineer. The recording engineer uses many of microphones and technique to accurately capture and record the artist's performance as it happens in the recording studio. The mixing engineer takes all of the separate audio tracks and crafts the music to sound great and convey the song's emotion. He sets proper levels, panning, equalization, compression, and adds creative effects where possible to enhance the musician's vision. Finally, the mastering engineer uses special equipment and highly trained ears in an acoustically accurate room to subtly polish and prepare the music for final release and ensure the music plays back well on a variety of speakers. "While many audio techniques can enhance the final production, we engineers are not magicians and can't replace a poor performance or terrible recording," says Scott of Virtual Mix Engineer. Recorded music is more often used as promotional vessel for musicians. The big dough currently is in touring, publishing, film and TV placements, and merchandise. When a listener connects with an artist's music, they'll listen to their music, tweet, and share the music with their friends. The fans want to help the artist and buy tickets to their shows, purchase t-shirts, and follow and interact with the artist through social media. As the artist grows in popularity, their music may be chosen for sync placements in film and TV, which not only provides great exposure, it also pays quite well. To make it to this stage however, it all begins with a great song and convincing recording. The rise of DIY recording has led to more bands releasing music than ever before. With a powerful laptop, some mics, a digital audio workstation, and a little knowledge, anyone can record and release music. One area where many artists fall short is failing to recognize their weaknesses in audio engineering. An experienced mixer has the right equipment, but most importantly the knowledge to make a recording reach its full potential. Though it can be hard for an artist, letting go and trusting your mixer will take your recordings to the next level and help you stand out from the others. Fans are instantly attracted to a well-written and performed song that sounds like a hit. Spend the proper time in pre-production, ensuring your song and arrangement are as strong as possible. Then and only then, go to the best studio you can afford to record your basic tracks. Find a local or online mix engineer within your budget whose work and personality you connect with, and tweak the mix until you're happy. Finally, send the songs off to the mastering engineer for that final touch. Once your record is finished, you can get the music into multiple outlets and into the ears of your listeners and fans. Scott Horton is the ultimate example of the cutting-edge mixing engineer/producer/songwriter. He has collaborated with multitudes of recording artists world-wide in all musical genres ranging from Pop, Pop-Rock, Hip-Hop,RnB, Urban and more. His online mixing and mastering service, Virtual Mix Engineer, delivers musicians with superb sounding mixes which make impressions that count. Visit Scott at http://www.virtualmixengineer.com
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