Mixing a song for radio play can be a bit of a tedious task as it can involve a lot of fine tuning. The major problem that most have (including myself) is that I tend to mix with fairly decent headphones or speakers which give a crisp sound that is close to the original recording. However the problem with doing this is that when you are listening to the radio, you don’t tend to be listening with this sort of equipment, it tends to either be terrible car speakers or cheap headphones, sometimes you even listen to the song in mono. The main goal that I have set myself is to make sure the songs sound good through my cheap £3 earphones and a cheap £5 mono speaker, that way I know it will likely sound good no matter what you play it on.
The main goal in mixing for radio is that you want the vocals to be audible, you don’t want listeners to have to really listen hard to the singing. As radio is more or less a passive experience nowadays if you are listening in a car, you want the instruments and vocals to pop and really shine through so that you garner some interest from the listener and pull them into the song and perhaps they start, really listening to the song. This goes doubly for the first 5-10 seconds of the song, you want this part to grab the attention of the listener right away.
Another thing that has to be considered is the length of the song, if you take a quick look on Spotify you can see that the majority of radio edits of songs land somewhere between 2-4 minutes in length as radio only has so many slots in a day and anything more than 4 minutes can just become tedious to the listener. Pretty much every song that we have recorded with the band is around 5 minutes in length, to shorten this I think I will likely get rid of either a chorus or long, drawn out intros and bridges so that it is radio ready.
I will remember to apply some of these techniques during the mixing/mastering process of the songs that the band want to be played on the radio.
This is the second of three radio posts, the third and final post will focus on my efforts to get the band played on the radio and the ways that I went about doing it.
Sources:
http://www.bmi.com/news/entry/Mixing_Your_Music_for_Radio_Broadcast