Fix The Mix: learn audio engineering by playing

Learning to mix starts with learning to hear

You can memorise what every control on a compressor does and still not know when to use it. You can read about EQ for months and still not locate the frequency dirtying a guitar. All the technical knowledge in mixing rests on a prior skill that isn't acquired by reading: telling what's actually happening in the sound.

Fix The Mix trains that skill with short exercises and immediate feedback, which is the condition for the ear to learn anything. Each exercise poses a real mixing problem — a boosted band, a badly set compressor, an element misplaced in the stereo field — asks you for an answer and tells you straight away whether you got it right. That loop is what turns listening into recognising.

What's inside

The ear training section organises the skills into a phased routine, and each one has its exercise: the EQ Surgeon for identifying frequencies, the Gain Rider for dynamics in motion, and Stereo Space for position and width. If you'd rather start by knowing where you're weak, the mix skills test points at it in eight questions, no sign-up.

Alongside the exercises there are working tools that run in the browser with nothing to install: a chromatic tuner, an online piano, a BPM and key finder and a mix analyser that compares your frequency balance against genre references.

The theory, written to be applied

Training your ear without knowing what to listen for is slow, so every exercise has an article behind it explaining what to listen for. 18 guides, no preset recipes: what each decision does to the sound and how to know whether you got it right. The most recent, "Tuning: why the tuner says it's fine and the mix still sounds out of tune", was published on 8 September 2026.

See the full guides section

Who writes this

Fix The Mix is made by Mónica Andrade, an artist, producer and audio engineer who graduated from Berklee College of Music and releases her own music as Monár. She writes the guides herself: they aren't summaries of other people's articles — they come out of actually mixing and producing, which is why they take a side when there's a side to take instead of listing every possible option.

If you spot a mistake in a guide or want to suggest a topic, write to hello@artekfutura.com. Every email gets read, and the guides get corrected.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to know about mixing to start?

No. The usual starting point is not being able to tell a low from a mid, which is exactly why training begins with wide bands. If you already mix, you can skip that phase and go straight to the precision exercises.

What can I use without paying or signing up?

The four tools — tuner, piano, BPM and key finder, mix analyser — the complete guides and the mix skills test ask for neither an account nor payment. Part of the training is open and part is unlocked by the Pro subscription; each screen says which before you start.

How much time does it take?

Ten minutes a day returns more than one long session a week. Hearing fatigues quickly, and short frequent sessions are what consolidate timbre memory.