Mixing / Production

You've got four weeks left until your studio closes. How to make best use of that time? The Walkmen's answer was to recreate their favourite album, note for note, in all its drunken and shambolic glory.

When The Beatles' record company tempted their producer out of retirement for one last project, no-one had any idea how radical the resulting album would be.

John Legend's silky, R&B-tinged sound has revitalised soul music. Mix engineer Tony Maserati explains how he crafted that sound for Legend's hit 'Save Room'.

When you're aiming for an in-your-face rock epic, the last thing you want is a muddy mix! Krys Baxter's Afterglow gets the Mix Rescue treatment...

I'm looking to create a home studio so that I can make beats and improve my DJ and production skills. My current set up is...

Here are the links to the various MP3 files that accompany the March 2007 instalment of Mix Rescue.

Phil Tan, one of the leading mix engineers specialising in urban music, dissects his mixes for two worldwide hit singles from Rihanna: the apty-named 'SOS' and 'Unfaithful'.

This month we beef up drums and bass, polish guitars and vocals, and give choruses a lift, as the Belgian band Leaf get the Mix Rescue treatment.

Martin Rushent managed the rare double feat of working at the artistic cutting edge and having colossal success — until disaster struck.

This month we beef up drums and bass, polish guitars and vocals, and give choruses a lift, as the Belgian band Leaf get the Mix Rescue treatment.

Mix engineers have a huge role to play in modern record production; but what does it take to turn a collection of raw tracks into a chart-topping single? In a major new SOS series, specialist mixers will be showing us exactly how they use the tricks of their trade.

Rescuing and reinforcing a weak-sounding cello are amongst this month's remedies...

Mixing on 'cans' is often frowned upon, but if you know what you're doing, you can get good results with only occasional checks on your monitor speakers.

Rescuing and reinforcing a weak-sounding cello are amongst this month's remedies...

If you're after bigger-sounding tracks, read on, as we discover plug-ins that manipulate stereo information to play tricks with your mix...

Will Holland is one of the most prolific producers in the UK's alternative dance scene, and rather than sampling old records, he prefers to track down the musicians who made them.

Their combination of Southern soul and hip-hop gave Gnarls Barkley one of the biggest hits of the year, thanks in part to the mixing wizardry of Ben Allen.

No, it's not the Naked Chef, just Sound On Sound getting busy in the kitchen to salvage some old tape recordings... Note: there are no audio files accompanying this article

Is there a preferred method of using normalisation?

Tired of the same old vocal sound? Time to get creative with your plug-ins, FX pedals and anything else you have!

This month we help reader Simon Fitzpatrick to bind his synthesized, programmed, and acoustic sounds together into a cohesive mix.