What is mixing? (And how it is different to mastering)

If you are new to the world of music production, you will constantly hear two words grouped together: mixing and mastering.

They are the two final, crucial steps in turning a rough bedroom recording into a polished track ready for Spotify or the radio. However, because they both involve making music sound better, beginners often get them confused.

The easiest way to understand the difference is to use a baking analogy: mixing is combining your ingredients to bake the cake; mastering is putting the icing on top and packaging it up beautifully for the shop window.

What is mixing?

Mixing is the process of taking all the individual tracks you have recorded—such as the vocals, drums, guitars, and synthesizers—and blending them together into one cohesive song.

When you finish recording, you are usually left with a mess. The vocals might be too quiet, the guitars might be drowning out the bass, and everything might sound like it is fighting for your attention in the center of your speakers.

During the mixing stage, a mix engineer uses a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) to make everything sit perfectly together. They do this using four main tools:

• Volume (Faders): Balancing the levels so that the most important elements (usually the vocals) are clear, and nothing is accidentally overpowering the rest of the track.
• Panning: Placing sounds in the stereo field (left speaker, right speaker, or middle). For example, you might keep the vocals and bass dead centre, but pan the acoustic guitars out to the left and right to make the song sound wide and huge.
• EQ (Equalisation): Carving away frequencies that clash. If the bass guitar and the kick drum are fighting for the same deep, low frequencies, an engineer will use EQ to clean up the mud so both instruments can be heard clearly.
• Effects: Adding polish using tools like compression (to smooth out volume spikes) and reverb or delay (to give the instruments a sense of space, as if they were recorded in a cathedral or a small club).

The end result of a mix session is a single, high-quality audio file (usually a stereo WAV file) where the song sounds perfectly balanced.

What is mastering?

Once the mix is completely finished, that single stereo file is sent to a mastering engineer.

Mastering is the absolute final step in the audio post-production process. Because the song has already been blended into one single file, the mastering engineer cannot adjust the volume of just the guitar or fix a mistake in the vocal track. They are working with the song as a whole.

The goals of mastering are completely different to mixing:

• Making it loud enough: Standardizing the volume so that your song matches the commercial loudness levels of every other track on streaming platforms like Apple Music or Spotify.
• Tonal balance: Applying subtle, broad adjustments to the overall EQ so the track sounds good whether it is played on cheap smartphone speakers, laptop speakers, or a massive nightclub sound system.
• Consistency: If you are releasing an album or an EP, mastering ensures that all the songs have a similar volume and vibe, so the listener doesn’t have to keep turning their volume knob up and down between tracks.
• Technical prep: Adding the final data metadata, ordering the tracks, and creating the final files required for digital distribution or vinyl pressing.

Mixing vs. mastering: The key differences

To see how they contrast side-by-side, look at this quick comparison:

The bottom line: You cannot have a good master without a good mix. If a song is poorly mixed and the vocals are too quiet, mastering will only make the entire song louder—including the mistake. Mixing fixes the internal relationship between the instruments, while mastering prepares that combined sound for the outside world.