Someone on Reddit asked a familiar question: “How do I get into the business of mixing/mastering? How did you guys start?”
They’d been mixing for a few months, had some released songs to show, and wanted to know where to promote themselves. Instagram? LinkedIn? Reddit?
The replies described friends, local bands, internships, assisting, touring, and years spent developing the craft. The original poster later clarified that they were looking for a starting point, not trying to launch a professional business right away.
I added my perspective as someone who coaches freelance mix engineers. What stood out to me was how long these paths took, and how often the opportunities came through relationships.
But there’s more to unpack. A story about how someone got started can be encouraging without giving you enough information to decide what to do next.
“Get good, meet people, and let it grow” leaves some important questions unanswered.
1. How good do you need to be before working with someone?
Several replies encouraged the poster to keep developing their skills. That’s reasonable. A few months of practice gives you limited experience with the range of problems different projects can present.
But time alone can’t tell you whether you can handle a particular project. Neither can your confidence in your own mixes.
The useful question is whether you can deliver what this person needs, with the material they have, within expectations you both understand.
Can you finish? Can you respond to feedback? Can you recognize when a problem is outside your ability? Can you explain what you can realistically contribute?
Start with projects whose demands you can meet. Be honest about your experience. Ask for feedback on both the result and the process. Build your judgment through complete projects with real people.
2. Who should you actually be meeting?
“Network” is hard to act on when it means everyone in music.
An artist with unfinished demos, a producer with several releases in progress, and another mix engineer may all become valuable relationships. But they have different needs, and you have different reasons to know each of them.
Start close to the music you understand and enjoy. Who’s making it? What are they working toward? Where does your contribution fit?
If you already know musicians, begin by getting curious about their projects. If you don’t, participate in a community you’d want to belong to even before anyone hires you.
The platform question gets easier once you know which people you want to build relationships with and why they might need your help.
3. What makes someone trust you with a song?
A portfolio helps someone hear your work. It can’t answer every question involved in hiring you.
Will you understand what they want? Will they feel comfortable giving notes? Will you communicate if something changes? Will they know what happens after they send the files?
A referral can reduce some of that uncertainty because someone they trust has already worked with you. When that introduction is missing, you need other ways to make the experience understandable.
Show relevant work. Explain your role accurately. Describe the process simply. Ask useful questions before promising an outcome.
Being good to work with includes reliability, clarity, and the ability to handle disagreement. It also includes boundaries. Agreeing to everything can create expectations you can’t sustain.
4. When do you start charging?
The thread includes advice about working for free to build a portfolio. That can be useful, but it needs a purpose and an endpoint.
A practice project might help you learn how to handle revisions, complete an unfamiliar genre, or build a relationship with an artist whose music you care about. Decide what you’re trying to learn before agreeing to it.
Even if no money changes hands, agree on the scope, timing, and whether you can share the work. Free work still creates expectations.
When you begin charging, consider the whole job: preparation, communication, mixing, revisions, and delivery. Track the time involved. A price that seems reasonable for the mixing session may look very different once you include everything required to complete the project.
You can learn these basic business habits while your technical skills are still developing.
5. What turns one project into another?
Some of the stories in the thread describe work spreading through friends and friends of friends. It’s easy to read that and assume referrals will take care of themselves.
Look more closely at what you can influence.
Did the person get what they expected? Was the process manageable? Do they know you’d like to work together again? Have you stayed interested in what they’re making?
At the end of a project, ask how the experience was. Resolve loose ends. With permission, collect a testimonial or portfolio example. Stay in touch when you have a real reason to do so.
A happy client may have nothing else to release for a year. That makes it useful to maintain several relationships instead of treating one successful project as a dependable stream of work.
6. How do you know whether you’re making progress?
One commenter described a roughly eight-year path into freelance mixing. Others described their own long routes through learning and related work.
Those accounts offer perspective. They don’t establish an eight-year requirement or promise that time will produce a business.
Pay attention to what your experience is teaching you. Are you finishing more consistently? Are revisions becoming easier to understand? Are people returning? Where did each inquiry come from? Which projects fit you, and which repeatedly become difficult?
Even a simple record of projects, time spent, feedback, and client sources gives you something more useful than comparing your timeline with a stranger’s.
Where I’d start
If you’re a few months into mixing, choose one manageable project with a real person. Agree on what you’re doing, finish it, ask for honest feedback, and write down what you learned. Use that experience to choose the next project.
If you already have clients, review your recent work. Find out where people came from, why they chose you, what the projects required, and whether they returned. That will help you decide whether the next improvement belongs in your craft, your offer, your relationships, or your client experience.
This is the work I focus on through The Business of Mixing: helping freelance mix engineers understand how the different parts of their business affect one another, then decide what to improve next.
You don’t have to solve your entire career before helping someone finish a song. You can start small and build deliberately from what the work teaches you.
Not sure whether your next improvement belongs in your craft, your offer, or your relationships? The Business Reality Check grades twelve systems in your business and shows you where the real bottleneck is sitting.
If you’d rather work through it with someone, the Mentorship Intensive is sixty minutes on your specific situation, mapping out what to do next.
