ABOUT THE BOOK

In Mixing with Impact – Learning to Make Musical Choices, Wessel Oltheten discusses the creative and technical concepts behind making a mix. Whether you’re a dance producer in your home studio,a live mixer in a club, or an engineer in a big studio, the mindset is largely the same. The same goes for the questions you run into: where do you start? How do you deal with a context in which all the different parts affect each other? How do you avoid getting lost in technique? How do you direct your audience’s attention? Why doesn’t your mix sound as good as someone else’s? How do you maintain your objectivity when you hear the same song a hundred times? How do your speakers affect your perception? What’s the difference between one compressor and another? Following a clear structure, this book covers these and many other questions, bringing you closer and closer to answering the most important question of all: 
how do you tell a story with sound?

LOOK INSIDE

“Ultimately, mixing is an intensely instinctual endeavor that can’t really be taught in a book. But in Mixing with Impact, Wessel Oltheten lays out and explores an impressive number of the things that go into making this very complicated process make sense. Balancing the technical and the creative sides, the book thoughtfully examines the experience of mixing in straightforward and current language that could be helpful to beginners and experienced engineers alike.”

Peter Katis

(Grammy Award winning mix engineer and producer – The National, Interpol, Kurt Vile, Japandroids, Jonsi, Stars, Frightened Rabbit, The Swell Season, The Head & The Heart)

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ABOUT WESSEL

Wessel Oltheten (1983) has been recording and mixing music since his teens, which has led to a successful studio business with a very diverse clientele, ranging from big-selling pop acts like the late Michael Jackson, Don Diablo and David Garrett to the Dutch Traveling Opera Company and lots of independent artists, like Black Oak, DeWolff, Navarone, Pocket Knife Army, Tim Knol, Tangarine, Marble Sounds, I Am Oak and Robin Borneman. He has specialized in mixing and mastering, but still does the occasional recording on the road for concerts and music films.

Apart from being an engineer, Wessel is a lecturer in Audio Engineering at the Utrecht University of the Arts. He has written many articles on audio engineering and music production, some of which have evolved into the book Mixing with Impact.

For more information on Wessel’s studio and to listen to some of his mixes, visit www.wesseloltheten.nl

REVIEWS

DESIGNING SOUND IMAGES VIDEO COURSE

Sign up here to get free access to a video course (4 parts, 80 minutes) on how to come up with a plan for a sound stage to be, and how to derive recording and mixing decisions from that plan.

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WORKBOOK

Now available in Dutch (an English version is planned for in the near future) is a workbook accompanying Mixing With Impact. The workbook provides a clear structure for learning by doing—the only way to master a creative activity like mixing. The exercises help the reader to build a frame of reference, to learn to mix systematically, and to learn to base mixing decisions on an artistic concept. For schools, the workbookcontains enough exercises to build a two-year curriculum. It provides teachers and students with objective criteria for assessing mixes and giving feedback, without resorting to taste or other opinions.

Get the workbook here.

LIVE IN THE STUDIO

27 Tapes is an initiative that aims to bring the exciting realness of live music to an online audience. The resulting videos consist of one continuous take, which is supplemented with a minimal amount of overdubbing in only a few cases. Wessel mixed all episodes in this playlist. 

MIXING IN PROGRESS

In the Mixing in Progress series Wessel shows you how he implements some of the concepts from Mixing with Impact in real life studio situations. A short explanation of a concept is illustrated with sound examples in each episode. More in-depth information can be found in the online course, the articles, and of course in the book. 

ARTICLES

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