Professional recording engineer and regular Mix Rescue author Mike Senior has just written his first book, Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio. The book is published by Focal Press — the same publisher that brought us Bob Katz’s highly regarded Mastering Audio and Eddy Brixen’s Audio Metering, which we reviewed last month — and was written with the aim of helping small‑studio owners achieve professional‑sounding results using affordable equipment.
In the book, Mike shares his own numerous tips, as well as tricks he’s learnt from some of the industry’s top engineers, including Michael Brauer, Chris and Tom Lord‑Alge, Tony Maserati, Andy Wallace and many more. At well over 300 pages, there’s plenty of information to digest, and it’s all been helpfully categorised and split into easily navigable chapters. The book covers topics such as monitoring, including speaker types and room acoustics; mix preparation, from fixing timing and tuning errors to modifying a song’s arrangement; effects and processing, including the use of reverb, delay, EQ and compression; and finishing a mix, as well as dealing with revision requests made by the client. At the end of each chapter is a section titled Cut To The Chase, which summarises all the points made therein.
As well as providing all this information, Mike has produced over 350 audio files to accompany the chapters in the book, provided in both MP3 and uncompressed WAV formats. He’s also sought out bands and producers kind enough to agree to make unmixed multitracks of their recordings available for budding mix engineers to practice mixing with. These are available to everyone, for free, at http://cambridge-mt.com/ms-ch15.htm#audio.
A copy of the book has been doing the rounds at SOS HQ, and everyone who’s seen it has been very impressed by the quality and range of information. Available now, Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio can be bought for around £20. For more information, check out the web site below.
