How Much You NEED To Charge For Mixing In 2024.
Vložit
- čas přidán 23. 07. 2024
- What should YOU be charging in 2024 as a pro mix engineer? OR - what should you expect to pay if you're looking to hire a mix engineer in 2024? Let's find out!
---------
🎙 ⭐️Level Up Your Mixing Skills With This FREE Mixing Workshop: bit.ly/StandoutMixes
🎧---Get A FREE One-On-One Coaching Call With The Self-Recording Band Academy & Level Up Your Recording Skills! Use This Link: theselfrecordingband.com/mof
---------
-- EQUIPMENT THAT I USE:
The Headphones I Use To Mix: geni.us/MyMixingHeadphones
Budget Version Of My Mixing Headphones (Honestly, I'd probably get these instead): geni.us/MoreAffordableMixingHP
The Headphones I Use For Recording: geni.us/BestTrackingHeadphones
The BEST Passive DI Box: geni.us/BestPassiveDIBox
The BEST Active DI Box: geni.us/BestActiveDI
My Go-To Podcasting Mic: geni.us/MyPodcastMic
My Audio Interface: geni.us/MyAudioInterface
My Video Microphone Of Choice: geni.us/Sennheiser416
The Computer/Laptop I Use For ALL My Music & Video Work: geni.us/myonlylaptop
The Camera I Use For These Videos: geni.us/MySonyA7c
The Camera Lens that I use most: geni.us/myCZcamsLens
Best Microphone Boom Arm: geni.us/bestboomarm
Links are affiliate that don't cost you anything extra, and may actually save you some money - but also support me!
--- Check Out The Self-Recording Band Podcast: link.chtbl.com/tsrb
--- Get The FREE Music Single Release Guide: www.subscribepage.com/ybs_rel...
---- Work With Me: form.jotform.com/203645979863069
Intro Video Music: Shapeshifter By Daeodon
00:00 - Intro
00:08 - Topic Overview
01:09 - Understanding Mixing Costs
01:47 - Mix Prep
02:51 - Paying For Studio Time
03:17 - Paying For Assistant Engineers or Editing
04:04 - Is Mastering Included?
04:46 - Pricing Tier #1 (Beginners Tier)
06:45 - Pricing Tier #2: The Professional Tier
11:48 - Pricing Tier #3: The Celebrity Tier
13:38 - The Networking Effect
14:36 - Why You MIGHT Want To Hire Tier 2 Instead Of Tier 3
15:38 - Hidden Costs?
16:21 - Bonus Tip!
18:27 - Story Time! I Messed This Up! - Jak na to + styl
I see people complaining they can't rise their rates because it would kill their client base. My dude: you want to kill most of your actual client base if you charge a beginners rate, you can't keep clients that can't pay what you need to progress. Now that you charge quite a lot more you are after better clients, your past client base served you well for learning and getting really good so now you have an amazing portfolio that can lift you up! Reposition yourself in the market is not easy, because you just have to be really amazing at what you do and this is not for everyone, if you're not you won't succeed, this is the reality that is hard to swallow. It's almost like the same thing as to accept you don't have a good voice to be a singer, you can have fun doing this, you can have the time of you life, but being a full time professional could be more than you are able or even want to sacrifice for.
So many artists need to hear this😅👏🏻👏🏻
I definitely hope it helps musicians/bands understand why quality mixing is priced the way it is! You own a recording studio, so you know exactly what I'm talking about eh 😂
Mixer from Regina SK doing this full time professionally for 4 years, I’m charging $400-$500/mix (400 if it’s 6+ songs in a project). If someone’s starting out & I think they are worth the energy, I will do $300/mix for a first project. When I first started doing this I was charging $150 and worked my way up over time. I’ve got my workflow efficient enough to finish a first mix pass in 3h average + let it rest overnight and do 15 min of gut instinct final adjustments the next day. Any additional time spent past that doesn’t tend to benefit the song in my experience, nor is it efficient to put your heart & soul into something that may get revised by the artist anyways. My revisions rarely have to go over 2, which takes about 30 minutes each. After seeing this video I will increase to $650 over time, that is definitely a fair rate if a person is mixing at a high level. Thank you!
How are you continuing to get more clients ?
Have the same questio? ++...and also how do u go about landing ur first mixing gig😅
This is a really great comment, thanks for sharing with everyone! To give my two cents to the folks asking how to get started getting mixing clients - I think the easiest way to get mixing gigs is by also producing and engineering bands. If you want to niche down into just mixing, it's usually a down-the-road thing after you've built a portfolio of great productions!
Most excellent video Malcom, My tip is to find something unique to offer as a mixer. The world is your oyster, have fun with it!
Thank you and great encouraging tip for folks!
very nice topic..this fits other areas..things take more time and effort than they look.
Hope you're feeling better. Great topic.
Fully recovered and back to mixing! Thanks!
It’s definitely hard to balance, I’ve seen it from both sides, when I played in bands and had a little bit of hype behind whatever project, I’ve found “celebrity” producers will give you a homie price in order to grab the credit. I’m a full time producer now, hitting that busy point again so about to up my prices again! Great video!
Good insight on the 'credit hunting' thing!
Good video, thank you
Cheers Lasse, I've heard some of your mixes and you do great work!!
@@malcomowenflood🙏🏻🙏🏻
Great Talk:))
Thank you!
Love this conversation and really dope channel. As an engineer with industry credits I can say that bumping up your prices will get you higher quality clients and work becomes a lot easier for the most part. Would love to see more videos like this and a bit more video editing but great channel bro keep it up 🙏🏻
Appreciate the comment and 100% agree with your experience. Higher rates tends to equal higher quality mixing clients which equals more professional clients in communication around mixing their music! I think there is of course the prerequisite of having the skill to pull off the level of mixing work you’re charging for of course though, and that may be where some people go wrong.
Glad you enjoyed the video and appreciate the feedback. Could I ask if it’s just how the video is cut up, or are you wishing there was more B-roll cut into it?
@@malcomowenflood agreed, knowing where you stand in terms of skills is really important and for a lot of engineers it is a scary thing to raise prices because of the fear of loosing clients but that’s a different conversation haha you should make that a video.
In regards to the editing, b roll is always nice and I would of loved to see maybe a list on the top left corner too keep up with the topics and some camera angles and movement, which you can do with that one camera shot by adding some zoom ins or dynamic zooms. Also want to add that you’re not doing anything wrong video is amazing it’s just me because I have adhd haha
Great video. Not enough people talk about rates. Glad you started by talking about the work that goes into it. Understanding how much time you spend on projects is the only way to figure out the rate that fits your business. I tracked my time for a months to find my average hourly per mix and it was eye opening. Immediately doubled my rate. 😂
Love this, that's a good exercise!
Great information! I've been engineering for 35 years in a home studio and managed a commercial studio for 14 of those years in the very dense market of Music City, USA. Granted, I'm thinking in terms of the full gamut of services, but it seems like rates around here are still pretty low because of the local competition. I know guys in other cities who are fetching much higher rates, because they are the only game in town. Also, the style of music that I work in (primarily bluegrass, traditional country, and Gospel) still involves musicians tracking together, with no pragramming. It's good to know that a specialized mix engineer can get those kind of rates. I sure enjoy your content, Malcom! Always practical and applicable.
Thanks for the kind comment sir, and for sharing your personal experience with rates too! I think the more open the studio and audio community is with rates the better it is for everyone!
Great video
Glad you enjoyed it!
Spot On Malcom ! Im still slugging away with my studio business as side hustle, however interestingly enough I raised my rates considerably this year and it really does remove the tire kickers so to speak. I was worried that it would make me lose all my clients but im staying booked 2-3 in advance !!
I think a lot of people actually share this positive experience with raising their rates for mixing work! Hope your post encourages some people to make the leap!
Thanks for talking about this, not the easiest subject. I'm in Canada as well, Quebec, and I've been doing this for a while, as an artist and also as an producer/ engineer. Charging by the song, we used to make albums so some songs we're quicker to mix, some took longer, but yeah, I would say that around 500$ CAD will still get you a professional mix here. In this industry, prices haven't gone up in about 30 years...
A fellow Canuck! Hello! Totally, part of the reason I wanted to make this video was because of how far behind studios and mix engineers are on raising their rates with inflation - I hope this encourages some people to make a step up!
Yeah, it’s tricky, and especially depending on where you live, and the economy, etc. my personal journey was trying to charge people for work when I wasn’t that experienced, and it set me back for a while. So I honed my craft, and then offered my services for free to some better bands. That worked out well, and from that I got bands to pay me a more fair rate for my skill at the time. Slowly, but surely my business is increasing, and I hope to go full-time in a few years. Feast or famine is definitely the right term for the industry. Great video and you made some great points!!
Building up a portfolio of solid work is super important, you’re right and it sounds like you took a good route to get there! Appreciate you sharing your experience!
@@malcomowenflood 🙌🏻😁
This is good stuff! I would love to get that sheet that you send to get properly exported tracks.. but I haven't found your email address in the description.
If you can, put it here (:
Thanks!
Hey there! First off, thanks for watching and glad you enjoyed the video! As for the mix prep sheet, it was advised that I don't put my contact information publicly on a video - but I can be reached via the about page of my CZcams channel, so please do get in touch and I'll try to help you out!
Where can I hear some of your mixes please?
I charge somewhere between $350 4 hour plus 2 changes mix to $550 for all day 5 changes with Master included, it works pretty well most of the times. Some things are negotiable like when there’s a pack of 5 songs. Usually about 12% discount sometimes even more
I live in the US. I’ve been mixing for more than 25 years. I went from $25 per hour to $30 per hour and lost all of my clients. I used to charge $200 per song for total package of mixing and mastering but found myself spending too much time dealing with very picky clients. I don’t mix for a living but I do feel a lot of your prices have to correspond to what people are willing to pay in the neighborhood you live in. Many local bands wind up trying to mix and master themselves because they don’t want to pay the prices even if you are cheap.
Yea I own a music studio and this is true, I found the most sucess with pricing is when I compare my prices to other studios around me and see what they are charging and see if our sound is better or worse, if it's better, then charge more than them, if worse then undercut as the budget friendly location. Also I find my clients come back no matter what I charge due to our close location to them and the relation u have to build with them.
Great perspectives guys! I will say that a $200 mixing client will never turn into a $600 mixing client, and so on. I spent years charging between $200-400 per mix and had to be okay with losing those clients when I made the jump up in price.
The other thing I would suggest is to try and reach outside of your local area for mixing if you think that is limiting your rates. The internet makes mixing anyone from anywhere possible and should be taken advantage of! You never know where your sound is going to resonate so it's worth exploring!
Then they don’t appreciate the investment into their art. Once I built up legit studio and all the time learning I don’t care I found the quality of clients like that aren’t very good 9/10 times anyway
To be fair, I had the opposite problem. I lowered prices a bit in order to bring in more clients. In the end, all it did was lower the he perceived value and we actually lost a significant amount of income. It was hard to bring it back up to baseline.
Ofc, there are other variable that could have had an effect on our clientele, but this was our best deduction on what happened over the course of 2 years
Lower paying clients are nearly always the most picky and terrible clients. The higher the rate the clients expect that you are the expert. The lower the rate, the clients think they are the expert and expect you to validate their faux expertise.
Im about to graduate from audio engineering...and I was wondering about mixing as a career...do you have any advice on how to land the first paid gig on mixing and how to keep them coming? Thankyou so much in advance for your reply
Congrats on graduating audio school! That's awesome! Mixing can be a really fun and rewarding career, so if you love it and think you're good at it, go for it! My advice is that getting to a consistent professional level of mixing quality takes a lot of time and experience, so I'd personally work towards mixing as a career while doing engineering and production. If I could go back, I'd have not insisted on mixing so much of my work earlier on in my career. Instead, I would have encouraged the bands I was producing to hire a professional mixer with a proven track record in the sound we were aiming for and then also mixed the song myself just for the experience. This is hugely beneficial for so many reasons: you get to compare your mix against a pro, you still get practice mixing, and you don't destroy what could have been a great sounding song by messing up the mix while still inexperienced (and having great sounding tracks that you produced or engineered is what is going to get you hired on your next gig)!
It's one of those "you need experience to get the job, but you need the job to get the experience" things, so you just gotta buck up and put in the work on your own, probably for free and consider it an investment in yourself. And then you'll eventually get to the point where you like your mix more then the one they got hired out, and you can say "hey, check out my version - if you like it, I can mix the rest of the album".
Hope this helps and sends you down a good path!
great video and interesting topic. What strikes me, especially in the comments, is that pricing often seems to be based on the location of the studio. But don't we now live in a digital world where there are virtually no city or country borders anymore? So shouldn't you look at your customers and the price more globally? Of course it's nice if you as a band or musician can come over and have a direct contact, more personal. But at least in my case most jobs are done online these days. But that may also have something to do with the genre. I am a mix and mastering engineer in the field of electronic music.
1000%! I know a fellow mixer who has different rates for his local vs international work. I’ve done the same on occasion too!
I think it is important to keep a pulse on your local market for most though, as that is presumably where the majority of your work would come from due to your connection to that music scene.
Thanks for the great comment!
I came across this video today and the timing is excellent, because I'm gearing up to record an album and have contemplated having it professionally mixed. I'm the singer/guitar player in the band and know enough to achieve a decent result, but admittedly have invested more in guitar-related gear than mixing infrastructure. In short, I'd like to have a better result than I can reasonably facilitate myself.
The drums will be tracked at a studio, but all the instruments will be tracked direct at home. With hiring a professional mixer in mind, is it important or beneficial to utilize Pro Tools for tracking? My plan was to use Logic Pro, but if there is a significant benefit to using Pro Tools instead, I can do that.
Thanks!
Hey there! Glad you enjoyed the video and thanks for the comment! It doesn't matter which DAW you record in at all! If you like Logic Pro, use that! I mix in Pro Tools and get tracks from people using all sorts of daw and it doesn't make any difference at all to me! I highly recommend you try hiring a professional mixer who works in the style you're going for! Try just one song to start and go from there!
Thank you for the helpful information@@malcomowenflood 🙂 Regarding style/genre, you said that you specialize in rock. Would that include heavy hard rock?
Absolutely. I'm actually a metalhead at heart, but usually don't end up mixing a ton of stuff that qualifies as metal. I tend to prefer very modern sounding records, so thats my usual aesthetic!
Awesome 🤘🏼 I front a Metallica tribute and I love my metal (always have), but the original material is different. Driving and aggressive, but open and melodic as well. I’ll definitely check out your work. Could be a good fit 👍🏻
For sure! Reach out, I’d love to hear a tune! Might be able to suggest someone even if I’m not the right fit!
You’re right about the mix time but you’re being nice, 3days includes prep by my estimation as a solo engineer, a team changes that to a day IMO.
DIY bedroom tracks are my expertise, I’ve worked at a major studio and had ruff mixes done by time they were done chatting with each other in the live room.
Good info here for people learning, you’re rare in the CZcams community. First time to your channel, great work.
Thank you, and ya it can definitely take longer than it seems to prep a mix! I guess it does depend on what you include in that "prep". Generally, for me, things like vocal tuning or slip editing are already completed before they reach me for mixing - but for some that's part of their process and adds a TON of time to the 'prep' process.
@@malcomowenflood you live in a good world then. Me it’s raw vocals with many takes, off beat, flat loops, closet or noisy takes lol, but I love it. I went from top Grammy nominees to the “gutter”. I took my soul with me and understood who needs to be sacrificed.
what software checks if its mono or stereo...and why doesnt your daw automatically tell you?
Stereomonizer is the software I use - and any DAW will tell you, but Stereomonoizer will automatically convert them to their proper format for you. Example being, if I get sent a mono kick drum that's been printed as a stereo file, I can't drag it onto my Mono kick track in my session template, but if it gets converted to a proper mono file in Stereomonoizer, I then can. If you're interested in seeing more on that I did actually make a video about Stereomonoizer as well!
@@malcomowenflood that is pretty practical. I have never had to mix live drums. ..but ironically I'm about to start soon
It's a wildly different beast, but I love mixing live drums! Highly recommend using gates on your close mics if you want to retain a similar workflow to what you're used to with programmed drums, and double check the phase relationships across the kit. Very common to need to do some correction there if it's not coming from a great and experienced audio engineer.
Well, first of all, there needs to be clients to even consider pricing. I have a studio. I've narrowed down to rock and metal (mostly metal), and I had my first client in September 2023. They were super satisfied with the mix and master, but since then... nobody has reached out. I had Google ads running for months. Traffic seemed to be great. Conversion rate was also pretty good, and still... out of 1000 people who clicked on my website, I did not receive any quotes. I try to be objective here, but it happened to me that a band paid 2500€ for a studio, and the result was just weak. I know that music and sound are a subjective matter, but if you had the choice between paying 2500€ for a studio and getting a below-average sound, why the heck would you do that when you could pay 1000€ and get a great-sounding song? That brings me to my point... you mentioned in the video that it's not guaranteed that a higher price means a better result.
I think bands would pay a professional studio just for the sake of being in the studio and seeing all the analog stuff (which was not even used during mixing), rather than paying someone with a home studio, even though the result from the home studio could be much better. And this brings me to my question now: how do you get clients? I assume most of the clients come from word of mouth, but how did you look for them before that?
Hey there! The vast majority of my clients are indeed word of mouth and previous portfolio. As your body of work in a music scene increases (usually we start with our own local music scenes) that snowball of word of mouth work snowballs into more and more. If your'e doing a great job, it should happen both from the quality of the work promoting you (bands asking who mixed it for example, or looking online for the credits), but also the bands you worked with themselves should be actively recommending you if they loved the experience!
But to move past that local scene (which eventually does start to saturate) I've continued by creating connections online with things like this CZcams channel and with my podcast The Self-Recording Band Podcast.
I personally don't think ads will be an effective route for most mix engineers (I'm sure some make it work though) to get clients because it doesn't build enough trust and ultimately music is a very trust based art form, so if they don't know or trust you (either from a personal connection, social proof, or a referral) they aren't likely to make the leap to starting a conversation with you about potentially working together.
Highly recommend The 6 Figure Creative Podcast if this is a topic you're interested in.
To answer your last question, I cold called bands until they'd work with me haha! BUT I had recorded some tracks of my own band that I was proud of to use as a portfolio.
Hope this helps!
I think this depends hardly on where u live and also what kind of genre you mixing. I live in Switzerland and here u can go nr 1 on the album charts and still need a job., means artists dont want to pay a lot because they dont het paid good. I do mixing for 10+ years and charge between 200 and 300 per song. If i would charge more i would loose my job because there are other professional mixing engineers that charge the same price as i do. So most prducers/engineers do producing/recording/mix & mastering so they can get the most out of it.
I hope this video helps you make a decent living as a mix engineer, or (if you’re on the musician side of things), I hope it equips you with the knowledge you need to get the type of quality mixing and mastering you imagine for your song! 🎧
PS - if you're looking to contact me for my mixing file prep sheet - find my contact info on the about page of my channel!
this prices are for just one song to mix
Correct, these prices are based off mixing a single song! To give some context on mixing more songs (say mixing an EP or an album), most mixers I know, myself included, would offer a reduced per song rate depending on how many songs there are to mix.
I know 6lack & one of summer walkers engineers i can charge whatever or just not do it on this flat earth