Reddit mentions of Zen and the Art of Mixing

So... your only technique in mixing is moving your faders?

I don't want to sound rude, but that's not enough to get your mix to sound good. It's only going to get you a starting balance.

I'm not going to write a book here, but I'd like to give you a short overview of what concepts an average mixing process comprises of (in a nutshell and NOT comprehensive,... there's enough information out there to learn about each topic).

• Editing: check phase if you're layering instruments/recording stuff with more than one mic, clean up your tracks,...
  
• Gain staging (that's - more or less - what you're describing)
  
• Equalizing tracks
  
• Compressing tracks
  
• Panning tracks
  
• Transient shaping
  
• Sweetening the mix (room tone reverb, delay, saturation, ...)
  
  Seriously, educate yourself on mixing and your sound will get an enormous boost. There's a ton of resources out there, including some of my favorites:
  
  
• Mixing secrets for the small studio
  
• Mixing audio - concepts practices & tools
  
• Zen & the art of mixing
  
• shameless plug, but I've started a video series on mixing as well, maybe you'll find it useful: Start To Mix
  
  With regards to mastering, I would really consider sending your mix to an external mastering engineer. You will get a much better result, not only because these people specialise in what they can do, but a second pair of ears is always a good idea.
  
  Hope you find this useful & best of luck!

I personally use Cubase, but it doesn't really matter which DAW you use, as all of them can do pretty much everything you want them to do. The punch you get out of your sound is based on what hardware and plug-ins you use, and more importantly, how well you are using them. DAW's just there to be a host for those things, and all the major ones handle the recording and mixing superbly. If you do a lot of MIDI stuff, then FL Studio might be the best choice, as it has the best Piano Roll input, making MIDI composition in it very simple.

Anyways, both the software and the hardware are gonna cost you quite a lot (unless you pirate). If you want good sound, there are no alternatives. For Symphonic Metal, some essential stuff is

1. If you'd prefer to obtain your MIDI from notation, then you will need a notation software. Finale and Sibelius are market leaders. Those aren't DAWs, though, so if you want some actual good sound, you'll need to export the midi files from those after composing, and load them up in the DAW, as controllers for VSTi-s. Do note that with this method you'll have to oftentimes make quite a bit of adjustments to the MIDI in the DAW as well (changing and automating the CC options, velocity settings, absolute note length, etc.). Good thing is, both Finale and Sibelius can load up VST instruments, so you can get a good approximation of how the music's gonna sound in the DAW before actually exporting the MIDIs.
   
   
2. Good amp head and effect sims. Seriously, this day and age, DI'd guitars can do at least the same, if not more, than the mic'd up ones. The good thing is, some of the best stuff is free. Really good examples are Le Pou plugins and free TSE audio stuff. As for the non-free stuff, Guitar Rig Pro, POD Farm and Amplitube are all pretty good.
   Now, a really important thing to remember here is, if you use those plugins, turn off the Cab Simulation parts. They're usually not bad, but they won't be able to match some of the Impulse Responses you can find on the web. Which brings us to,
   
   
3. IRs and a convolution loader. IRs are basically files that describe what a specific cab and microphone placement usually does to the audio signal, and convolution loader is a plug-in that will load IRs in your channel strip. There are tons of free Impulse Responses out there, but the best ones I've ever seen, Red Wirez BIGBox series, are totally worth the money. As for the loader, the best one I've seen, Le Pou's LeCab, is totally, 100% free. Though Red Wirez's MixIR is pretty good too, and you can load up BIGBox presets in it. Note that unlike the commercial amp sims, which most often advertise themselves as the complete guitar solutions and automatically load up cab sims (which you'll have to manually disable) whenever you load an amp preset, free ones almost never do. It is absolutely normal for an amp sim to sound like shit if no cab sim is loaded. Just load up some IRs through the convolution loader and see how it sounds then.
   
   
4. Some virtual drums. They make composing drum parts much easier. Right now, the best ones out there are available as expansions for Toontrack's EZDrummer and Superior Drummer. Superior Drummer can load up EZDrummer stuff, and is much more advanced, but is quite a bit more expensive (and larger). Anyway, the two best expansions for metal are Drumkit from Hell and Metal Machine. Metal!, Metalheads and the Metal Foundry expansions are all very good as well, but those two are the ones that have actually been used on the records, and sound pretty much perfect. Also note that Toontrack sells some really good MIDI drum line packs for those, and at a pretty cheap price. If you want to get started with drum programming in an easy way, you can try those.
   
   
5. Some orchestra samples. Those will cost you an arm and a leg, and then some. Some of the best stuff out there is by the EastWest/Quantum Leap group, famous for their EWQL Symphonic Orchestra sample library. Other good stuff is Vienna Symphonic Library and Garritan virtual instruments. Really, though, there's no cheap stuff in here. If you're going for a Lo-Fi feel, though, then there's actually quite a lot out there. Just google some VST keyboards and individual instruments. Many of them are actually free.
   
   
6. (Optional) Guitar VSTis. It takes some time and effort to learn how to get them to sound like actual guitars, but if a guitarist is not around and you need to do some jamming, they're irreplaceable. The best ones out there are Shreddage 2 and [Prominy V-Metal] (http://www.prominy.com/V_METAL.htm). Nothing else can really compare with those two (though EastWest's Ministry of Rock comes pretty close). For bass, some good stuff is NI's Scarbee Rickenbacker, Prominy SR5 Rock Bass, Orange Tree Samples Rick Bass and Shreddage Picked Bass (which you can buy together with Shreddage II as a bundle). All of those are DI'd samples, so as with a physical guitar, you'll need to hook them up to the amp, cab and effect sims.
   
   That's it for the software part. Those, together with the stuff that usually comes with the DAWs (some really simple mixing plug-ins, mid-grade instrument samples and synths), and some necessary hardware (another topic altogether), should be enough for composing and recording. If you're planning on mixing by yourself, well, that's a lot of additional work. You'll need to get some mixing equipment and/or plug-ins (many producers even do mixing completely inside the computer, with no external mixing equipment). So, shameless plug of /r/audioengineering, one of my favorite subreddits. You can learn a lot about mixing and mastering in there. If you're a complete beginner in mixing, I'll suggest 5 Minutes to a Better Mix series and this little, godly book.
   
   Anyways, have fun with the music.

the bob katz book is great. also check out mixerman's zen and the art of mixing

Mixing BootCamp.
http://bobbyowsinski.com/Audio_Mixing_Bootcamp.html

zen and the art of mixing
http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Mixing-Mixerman/dp/1423491505

also (zen and the art of producing)

http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Producing-Mixerman/dp/1458402886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368676901&sr=1-1&keywords=zen+and+the+art+of+producing


the daily adventures of mixerman
http://www.amazon.com/Daily-Adventures-Mixerman/dp/0879309458/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368676951&sr=1-1&keywords=the+adventures+of+mixerman

bobby owinsky (has many great books)

hal leonard recording method is great (series of books)

I'm a big fan of the following books

Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio

Zen and the Art of Mixing

Books I have read that helped me, loosely in the order I read them:

• Practical Recording Techniques By Bartlett and Bartlett. This is a more "general case" audio recording text, about sound and recording. It's less focused on the EDM trope of people doing everything on their computers, as it talks a lot about outboard processing, microphones, and such, but I think that sort of thing is actually quite helpful to know.
  
  
• Welsh's Synthesizer Cookbook by Fred Welsh. This is an overview of subtractive synthesis which goes into quite useful depth on what's going on and what you can do with it, with lots of diagrams and such. In particular he goes over using oscilloscope and sepectrum analyzer plugins to see what's actually going on with your waveform. The second half of the book is a "cookbook" full of "recipes" that are basically presets written down on paper. If you're quite comfortable with synthesis you don't need much of what it has to offer, but I thought it was great.
  
  
• The Mixing Engineer's Handbook by Bobby Owsinski. This is all about mixing. I feel like a lot of what this book offers tends to come up online as a lot of it sounded familiar when I read it, but it's still a solid text.
  
  
• The Daily Adventures of Mixerman by Mixerman. This book is pure fucking comedy - it's a series of diary entries by a supposedly respectable mixer in LA, mixing the worst band he's ever seen. It's generally understood to be fictional, but it's very entertaining and it actually goes into a lot of detail about why certain audio decisions are made, and because of this serves as a surprisingly good primer on how such a studio is run. But mostly, it's hilarious. You can read a few chapters here.
  
  
• Zen and the Art of Mixing, also by Mixerman. This one isn't fiction, or funny, but it's the same author brain-dumping all about mixing, going into the depth that I wished he did in The Daily Adventures. If you already understand the technical tools in mixing, this book is all about what goes through his head when he's mixing, and I found it to be just incredibly helpful. The author is very opinionated about some things, but he makes this very obvious.
  
  
• The Dance Music Manual By Rick Snoman. This one comes up every time someone asks for a good book on dance music. I have only skimmed it, but from what I've gathered it's all about electronic styles and is aimed squarely at the sort of person who reads this sub. I really need to read through it entirely so I can say this for sure, but a number of people have told me if you want to learn dance music and only read one book, this would be a pretty good one.