The Systematic Mixing Guide - Its Worth Your Money

As an audio professional, I'm no stranger to sifting through wordy and painfully dry specialized texts.  Sure, there's plenty of great information buried among the mess of diagrams and large blocks of text, but I've found that often times I spend just as much time looking for the right blurb as I do applying it to my work.  It's not a very efficient way of learning by any measure, and frankly I think that I speak for many an engineer when I say that there has GOT to be a better way for us to go about it.  Enter the Systematic Mixing Guide, a truly tell-all guide to mixing tracks from start to finish, written by Ermin Hamidovic.  

I stumbled across this text not too long after it's release, as Ermin is a very reputable member of several gear and audio-related forums.  I'm not normally one to pick up anything like this, but based purely on his reputation, decided it was worth the read.  The book is made up of 12 chapters, each detailing different parts of the mixing process.  Everything from working with live drums to proper vocal automation is covered comprehensively, including typical problem frequency ranges, starting points for compression (not to mention what types of compression tend to vibe well with a given source), and even advanced applications for parallel processing, reverb, and delay.  Let me make that clear, Ermin provides these details for EVERY part of your mix.  

A small disclaimer: this guide is technically rock and metal centric.  Keep in mind though that metal music and busy mixes tend to go hand in hand.  The prevalence of very noisy sources (high-gain guitars for instance) combined with quick tempos and complex rhythmic patterns leaves ZERO room for messy production, speaking both spectrally, spatially.  Basically, every single track has to be painfully clean and well-balanced in relation to it's neighbors, or the end result will be a muddy, jumbled mess.  We all want clean, balanced mixes, and frankly that's what mixing metal (and this book) is all about. That's why I strongly believe that the principles covered in The Systematic Mixing Guide can (and should) be applied to every genre.

One of my favorite chapters details Ermin's process for working with distorted guitars, which are one of the most difficult instruments to process and place well in a mix.  He explains with sound theory some great starting points for processing, as well some (compelling) arguments against relying on additive EQ and broadband compression.  Perhaps most importantly,  he also lets us in on a few very specific tricks to effectively control the low end of high gain guitar tracks.  It's the finer points of mixing, like the topics covered in this chapter, that audio professionals can glean the most from.  After all, it tends to be the "little things" that separate a good mix from a fantastic one.

In all of my 8 years working with audio, I've never gained so much from one piece of text.  The Systematic Mixing Guide has completely changed my perspective on mixing, and has been invaluable in my journey from a weekend hobbyist with an Mbox to the audio professional that I am today.  So, seeing as my time at AI is very quickly coming to an end, I feel obligated to take this opportunity to let you all in on this hidden gem.  Pick this book up, in physical or digital form HERE. It's an awful lot cheaper than a text book, and take it from me, once you've read it, you'll never look back.