The Art Of Micro Mixing The Alien Tribe Way

Lia uses micro mixing to fully integrate all of Alien Tribe’s sounds and vocals into one unified whole. In fact, all her songs are mixed using this innovative approach. In traditional music mixing, each track consisting of different instruments and vocals is mixed together by adjusting the volume and equalization on each entire track. That’s not good enough for Lia!

Her micro mixing approach mixes each second and fraction of a second of each track against all the other tracks for that same time period. So she might increase a synth sound for a few seconds in the mix then lower it then raise a vocal for a few seconds. Imagine with from 40 to 60 tracks comprising each song that all those sounds and vocals are adjusted against each other every second of the song. Once this is done, Lia cannot use the master volume controls to adjust the tracks because that would upset the micro mix.

Micro mixing creates the ultimate fine tuning of how every sound and vocal integrates with all the others at every moment of the song. To do this, it takes about two hours to micro mix one minute of music. In a typical five minute song, it would take over ten hours to do one micro mix pass. And usually, Lia does several mixing passes before she is finally satisfied with the song.