Customer Reviews

The Art of Mixing: A Visual Guide to Recording, Engineering, and Production

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I will agree with most of the reviews that this book's images helped in conveying stereo field information, however, I have two problems with this book:

1) The images are exremely redundant and take up half of the already slim 124 pages (where does the publisher get 144 from?)

2) The book's content does not justify the price.

Contrary to someone elses comment, I found the book to be exremely lacking in the area of compression. On the other hand, it did have some useful info on equalization settings.

For the pros and home-musicians alike, this book gives a surprisingly clear view of virtually all aspects of recording and mixing in the studio. For me, having read the book, I suddenly understood why my mixes were only so-so and certainly not good enough for record companies (especially the section on compression is great!). This book provides highly valuable insight, which means that you still have to practice a lot to really improve your skills, but that practicing becomes much more pleasurable having read this book.

When I recieved the book I began to glance through the pages. Four hours later, I finally put it down, complete with highlighting items I thought were important. That night, I mixed and mastered my latest composition and compared it to a previous mix I "thought" was good. Day and night.

This book has no pork...only the necessary items to raise your mixing abilities to a semi-pro level. And it does so in a wonderful graphical form unlike the countless "engineering" books I've poured through (and I've got an engineering degree). Make no mistake, you need to know the numbers, but the perspective Gibson provides is worth every penny!

First a bit of praise. Gibson does make a few good points and the visual diagrams used to illustrate mix density are very enlightening indeed. On the down side, the material covered is repetitive and somewhat basic. My biggest gripe is the price tag, the book is worth maybe half the price. Beginner to Intermediate level. For a more intermediate to experienced level book, I would recommend 'Sound Advice' by Wadhams.

...What I will say is that the advice given in this book is, in no way, worth the price if the book. The information is far too basic and is presented over and over again until the reader is completely turned-off by the whole concept. In short, we are asked to visually represent a mix in terms of volume, panning, and frequency. This is done with a basic X-Y-Z axis and a series of colored spheres representing the different instruments. That covers about 5 pages. Throughout the rest of the book , we are hit with what seems like hundreeds of these same graphs, each representing examples of different mixes. The problem is, they do not teach us anything other than "every mix is different". To me, that's just not enough.

In short, the basic theory is good, but it is more geared toward a magazine article than to an entire book. By making the concept into a book, we are presented with a lot of over-priced fluff which, in reality, detracts from the fact that the basic theory makes sense...

I'm about halfway through this book and I can already understand why my mixes so far have sounded crowded and muddy. The visual presentation of the material makes the concepts crystal clear right away.

I definitely bought this thinking it was like the first edition which I had bought several years ago and which got stolen. Now, I don't remember the first edition being ANYTHING like this. All this has is a bunch of examples of what "famous" musicians' mixes look like. It totally OVERDOES the colored spheres bit and there are large "Comment Boxes" with information that is neither useful NOR informative. Makes many references to 808 Boom, which is most like the Roland TR-808 drum machine, the boomy sustaining kick drum of which is used in a a lot of rap and hip hop music. I think the first edition was a more professional book aimed at SERIOUS mixing engineers, whereas the second edition only shows us what Christina Aguilera and other cheesy artists use as their mix. I am totally disappointed. The first edition, on the other hand, is very informative, uses the illustrations with the colored orbs positioning in the 3D sound field effectively, and I must say DID help me improve the quality of my mixes. The second edition just LACKS ALL OVER what the first edition had. What a terrible way to try to boost sales, i.e., delete all professional material and insert material that appears to teeny-boppers who know nothing about music. What a letdown!

I am a recording engineer in Atlanta and I have worked at a couple of up scale studios. The studios always had interns come in from AIM (Atlanta Institute of music) so they could get some experience in the real world. I bought this book off the shelf because of all the simple to understand graphix inside. For instance, using the different colored and varying size balloons to explain how to place the instruments in a 3-d field in the stereo relm was amazing.
I still have an intern from time to time and I make it required reading. The students always have a much more practicle understanding about the mix process. This is the best book I have found for this task.

gibson's book is kind of a one trick pony. you instantly get what he's going for and, to be fair, it's a neat idea to visualize music this way. but, if you're serious at all about mixing or even listening to music, you immediately realize that you knew all of this already. my advice would be read this in a bookstore for about 3 minutes and then get Bobby Owsinski's book Mixing Engineers Handbook for some truly useful info.

This answered many questions for me about mixing. How to eq guitars, drums, vocals, bass; how to use compression, etc. The visualizations are cool, and a quick way to identify with the way you might want to mix different song. The pictures show panning positions, volumes, etc. It is genious because the only other way to explain it is to sit right here by me and listen through my monitors at something I've recorded. It's still up to you to train your ear and try some things. If you don't have monitors, none of this will make sense to you, but is still a good reference with specific examples and settings. This is really everything you need if you have been recording and want to get better mixes than you have been. Whether you use Cakewalk, or multitrack and rack/stomp box effects you can learn how to do it the right way from this. It's saved me a bunch of money because I found that I have everything I need and don't need maximizers and other expensive equipment and plug ins that do simple things you could do if you knew how to use what you have.