Five song EP, tracked at home and the recordings are decent. My mixes are fine in the sense that nothing is broken, and they never sound finished. I have enough money for exactly one of: paying a mixer, paying a mastering engineer, or properly treating the room. Everything I read is written by someone who sells one of the three.
My expensive lesson: I paid to master an EP, then decided the vocals on two tracks needed redoing, re-recorded them, remixed, and had to pay again. Master last, and master when you are genuinely finished, not when you are tired of the songs.
Going to push back on mastering being the answer, because it is the thing people reach for when a mix feels unfinished. Mastering is not a finishing process for a mix that has problems, it is a final polish and a translation step for a mix that is already right. If your mixes never sound finished, sending them to mastering gets you the same unfinished mix, slightly louder and slightly brighter. Spend on the mix, or on your ability to hear the mix.
Agreed, with one caveat. If the problem is only that your mixes are quiet and dull compared to references, mastering does fix that specific thing. If the problem is that the vocal sits wrong and the low end is vague, it absolutely does not.
Pay for one song. Compare it honestly with your own version of the same song. Then decide about the other four.
Paid a mixer once, for one song, and treated it as tuition. Two things came back. First, the mix, which was obviously better in ways I could then hear in my own attempts. Second, and more useful, he sent notes about the recordings, specifically that my vocal comp had three different distances in it and that the acoustic was clipping on the transients before it ever reached him. I have fixed those at the source ever since.
If you do this, label the stems properly, print everything at the same start point, and send them dry unless the effect is part of the sound.
Ask for the session notes explicitly when you book. Most mixers will tell you what fought them if you ask, and almost nobody asks.
Treating it as tuition rather than a service reframes the price completely. One song it is.
Third option and the one I would pick in your shoes. Two bass traps in the corners changed my mixes more than any plugin or any single piece of advice, because I stopped guessing about the low end. The reason your mixes never feel finished may be that you cannot hear the bottom two octaves in that room and you are making decisions blind. Treatment is also the only one of your three options that keeps paying on every song forever.
@blistermaps · last mo.
Practical numbers from hiring out over a few years: mixing is quoted per song and varies wildly by who you ask, mastering is much cheaper per song and often has an EP rate that is better than five singles. Turnaround was one to two weeks for mixing, a couple of days for mastering. Get the revision policy in writing before you pay, because two included revisions versus unlimited within a window is the difference between a good experience and a tense one.
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