Stop. Think. Mix

So what is mixing and why do we even need to do it?  Sounds simple enough, right?  Well, not as simple as you might think.  Mixing audio properly takes a lot of time and a hell of a lot of failures before you can really get it right.  Most people go into a studio, sit down at a console with their session in front of them and proceed to turn knobs and move faders at random.  Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with this exploratory technique, after all how are you ever going to know what a compressor does to the sound of something or what notching out a certain frequency will sound like without actually hearing it, but this technique takes way too much time, and sometimes time is money.  So, how could we go into a mixing session with a logical plan in mind?  This is where an understanding of acoustics, and more importantly, psychoacoustics can help us.  Acoustics is the scientific study of sound and psychoacoustics is the study of how we, as people, perceive that sound.  So knowing how, in a broad sense, people will hear your mix gives you that extra edge over some other mixing engineers.