I’ve been firmly planted in the mixing business for some twenty years now, not to mention the online mixing side of it. (definitely the future) I check around occasionally to see how the other businesses handle their marketing presence. I see there are some great engineers out there working within the online mix and mastering community and lots of not so good ones too. It’s hard to tell because most online mixing and mastering providers offer very little to no personal information about the mix engineer. After all, it’s a “person” and hopefully a proven professional that needs to openly disclose themselves to you. It should be unnerving to most that many online mix/mastering services say little about “who” will be handling your mixes. They may say “our engineers are great” but won’t list their engineers or their accomplishments or their credits on the site. Whoa, not cool.

Of course the mix professional has a huge responsibility to your music’s sonic success. They may say that they’ll use certain equipment or a big console at some expensive studio and even have a big photo of an SSL or a Neve looking like they’ll mix your song through it. All that means little to nothing if ya don’t have an honest experienced pro on it, and then don’t forget, you’re paying the studio rate too if you’re using the huge console in their advert photo. My friends, any audio tool can be used by anyone with two fingers. So BEWARE!… If you don’t have “fully” disclosed comprehensive information and a good dialogue with the mix engineer that’s mixing your music or if you have confusing information on the mixer’s professional expertise, move on. I’ve been at the other end of this check-it-out diligence from a recently acquired client of mine. He checked my experience by calling the Record Plant to check on my tenure there and interviewed me through a couple phone calls that I was more than happy to accommodate. That’s how ya do it my friends! Choose your engineer first, all the tools are a distant second.

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