Audio mixing
A mix has the same depth as a story, and roughly the same number of decisions. Almost none of them are audible on their own.
The short version
Is this for you? For the video that sounds assembled rather than mixed, where the music buries the sentence and the voice drifts between scenes. A mix has a depth axis, and most video mixes never use it. Not if your audio is a single clean voice with nothing under it; a mix earns its depth where music, effects and speech share the same space, and a bare voiceover barely needs one.
What leaves your plate. The voice held as the one fixed point, music that lifts without racing the lesson, and the few calls that belong to your brand rather than to us brought back to you instead of decided quietly.
What starts working. Nobody compliments the mix; they tell you the production is professional and watch further in than before.
The smallest way in. A free audit: three fields, and a written reading back, usually within about three working days. It commits you to nothing.
What to read next. The five levels to see where this fits, or the casework to see it done.
Where a mix stops being a level check
The voice is the one thing that never moves
In anything with a voiceover, the voice is fixed and stable and everything else arranges itself around it. Effects sit in the stereo field and travel with what the picture is doing, left when the animation goes left. It is the difference between a video that sounds mixed and a video that sounds assembled.
Music that lifts a lesson without racing it
An explainer still has to excite somebody, and music is how. Music is also the fastest way to bury the sentence a viewer came for. A few decibels of sidechain compression usually settles it, so the track breathes underneath the speaking. Denser videos do not settle that easily, and those get editorial decisions made by hand on top of the automation.
Automation where it belongs, judgement where it does not
Automation is neither the enemy nor the answer. We automate what is genuinely repetitive and take the rest by hand, and where a call belongs to the brand rather than to us we bring it to you instead of deciding it quietly. What the mix is focused on is a decision somebody made on purpose, not a default the software reached for.
The room is a choice somebody makes
Near-binaural placement where a space deserves to be felt, mid-side work where the room should be wide and the voice should not, a solo that cuts through without being louder than anything else. A mix has a depth axis and most video mixes never use it.
What is happening under the fader
The order it happens in
Multi-track assembly across the microphone sources. Phase correlation checked before anything else. Frequency build-up managed where sources overlap instead of notched away afterwards. EQ chosen per voice and per room. Saturation where a thin source needs weight it never had. Sidechain compression between music and speech. Mid-side processing for width. Then level automation across the whole timeline, moving with the piece.
The same rule as everywhere else
Fix it in the recording, perfect it in the mix. A mix cannot invent separation that was never captured, and it cannot un-hear a room that swallowed a voice. What it can do, when the recording gave it something to work with, is make every one of those decisions disappear.
Audio is the invisible king of a video. Nobody notices it, and you notice it in your retention.
The picture gets the compliments; the sound gets the second half of the video watched.
What changes for you
Nobody will compliment the mix. They will tell you the production is professional, and they will watch further into the video than they did before. You will not hear a word about your audio until it is perfect, and then you will hear it described as something else entirely.
Related: Noise removal · Mastering for platform · Phase alignment · Multi-microphone setups
Audio problems hide in plain sight because viewers feel them without naming them. The audit listens through recent videos and puts in writing what the sound is costing and what would fix it first.
Request your free audit.
Three fields, and a written reading back: a fit snapshot, two or three prioritised opportunities, and a recommended next step.
A person reads the channel and writes the audit by hand: a considered read typically takes three working days. That is the usual shape, not a promised turnaround. We use these details only to reply to you: no lists, no lurking.
What you will get
A fit snapshot: where your channel stands, and whether we are a match.
Two to three opportunities: specific, prioritised, yours to keep.
A recommended next step, even if that step is not us.
The audit is free and commits you to nothing: nobody follows up with a call you did not ask for.
The casework shows all of this done.
The case studies are the same work with the numbers, the sources and the dates attached.
See the casework →