Reviewing Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio (Book Review)
book review yeah i’m reviewing a book
i got a book um it’s called mixing
secrets for the small
studio by mike senior yeah so to give
you a bit of backstory
um i i’ve been like producing music for
maybe like i don’t know
i think it’s been like three years now
so not a huge amount of time
in the game but at least long enough to
kind of
hopefully know what it is that i’m doing
and have
some sort of style i would like to think
i have some sort of style
probably as a quick long story very
short would i recommend this book if you
want to learn how to mix better
yeah definitely i’m not going to say
that this book
taught me how to mix perfectly in fact i
don’t really think
there’s anything that will teach you how
to mix perfectly without you putting the
effort of failing
into it but what this book did do is it
gave me the ability to be more
consistent with my mixes
so whereas before i’d be like oh i’d
make a really good mix and then all of a
sudden the
maybe be trash or maybe be good and i
wouldn’t have an idea
at least because of the lessons that
i’ve learned from this book and also
from trial and error
and like working on projects i’ve kind
of at least gotten to a point where like
there’s at least a good base minimum
that’s quite good quality where my mix
is kind of hit
what’s great about this book is that
it’s actually kind of versatile
in terms of how you would use it now
normally when i use books like when i’ve
used books for learning how to knit
i usually end up finding books that
either fit into
the whole dictionary and reference
manual
sort of book where you kind of go in and
you use it as a way to learn
certain things or you have books that
are kind of like
project based books where you kind of go
from start to finish and you basically
kind of read through the book
so then that way by the end of the book
you’re very good
and that’s pretty much it and then the
book’s done its purpose
mixing secrets for the small studio kind
of
sits in between as a book that can do
both
you do kind of end up needing to read it
from like
front to back at least for certain
segments to be able to understand
all of the context and actually learn
the lesson but at the same time
if you have a really specific thing that
you kind of want to get good at
you can just kind of roll a decks
through it like a dictionary style book
and still find all of the information
that you need even with like some of the
earlier stuff that i learned
like for example making sure that i was
really smart at low cutting
and deciding what speakers i should get
and then also
like the way that i should place them
and how to actually use
speakers because surprisingly you’d kind
of think oh i just listened to speakers
it would tell me there but it actually
taught me what to do with the
information they were giving me
i really liked this book um what was i
talking about
oh yeah even with all of those other
bits and pieces in the book
um where it kind of tells you basic
things at the start and then goes into
things like reverb and delay and stuff
in the end
you can still just kind of pick and
choose if you kind of have a feeling
that you already know where your mixing
is but you just kind of want to improve
it
definitely and the gotcha is i don’t
really feel like i was able to get the
most out of this book until i got myself
some studio monitors
i did get myself some pretty good ones
that i allowed micro monitors which are
really small
um but actually really nice sounding
maybe i’ll do a review of them
later on um but yeah this book kind of
made a lot more sense when i took its
lessons and applied it to using
the i louds rather than just my
headphones
not to say that i didn’t get anything
out of it using headphones as my only
way of mixing
just that it kind of made a lot more
sense
what it was saying in the book once i
could apply it to
that way of mixing as opposed to using
just headphones
so in summary would i recommend this
book
yeah it’s presented by sound on sound
so you know that it’s at least not going
to be terrible
it kind of gets you into the mindset of
understanding
what someone who’s mixing goes through
it kind of puts you into that mixing
engineer’s seat it really kind of tries
to get you to think of mixing
as a very important and basically final
step of music production
almost as if mastering didn’t exist
which
at least in my opinion is pretty good it
at least
has gotten me to be able to get more
consistent mixes that
really by just throwing limiting onto
them to make sure that they hit
decent loudness sound good enough to be
able to put into soundcloud or even into
my youtube videos
without much need of putting them into
ozone or like reworking them in another
door to be able to master them so
yeah there you go i have got another
book review that i’m doing
i’m doing it on the ableton book um yeah
if you don’t know about the ableton book
make sure you’re subscribed and then
i’ll talk to you about that as well but
yeah
definitely and side note um i’m not
going to say i’m a
i’m a mixing or mastering or music
production
expert but if you genuinely want advice
on how i do certain bits and pieces of
my mixing
feel free to like put into the comments
or something like that
um and i’ll talk you through some of the
stuff that i do
basically yeah cool
[Applause]
you
