Discuss here mixing and mastering

But see above.

granted. this shit takes years to learn - someone could point you in the right direction on m/board like this, but you've got to get your hands dirty, put the hours in, read the experts (see link above) and make lots of mistakes (in the comfort of your own home) to get beyond the theory and BS and into an intuitive state with it. no one can really explain it to you.

i'm not gonna overrule the resident guitar tech (i need favours dammit) but as pointers:

1. frequency
2. dynamics
3. use your ears

*ziiiiip!!*

The best advice regarding passing on something to be mastered is that the less you do to the mix, the better. Don't be tempted to start applying compression/expansion/whatever, just send the raw 2-track, even if it sounds shitty to your ears.

The idea is that mixing = assembling the structure of the sound and mastering = turning crappy but assembled sound into good and assembled sound.

That is so true. People get so wacked out doing crazy EQ, compressor and limiter settings and trying to tweak every sound into nothing. All of the plug ins craze have only made this kind of problem worse, as people think they have to use something because they have so many options.

If it doesn't sound good when it is live in the room, it probably won't sound that good in a mix and no amount of trickery can really fix it is as easily as just improving the original sound.

1) EQ comes before levels. If you go through trying to even out the peaks of a track that's not properly EQ'd it'll take forever and sound like crap anyway. If you go through everything and take out the harsh-sounding frequencies and make sure there's a place for each track, balance is cake.

2) Compression is not always necessary.

3) My engineer's band mixed their radio-pop record with a radio-pop pro, and it sounded pretty interesting. Apparently after the EQ'ing was done and they were in front of the humungo mixing board, the dude bumped the snare way up but otherwise the levels of all the instrumental tracks were FLAT. The only thing they spent a lot of time doing volume automation and stuff for was the vocals. The end effect is that some of the layers and little instrumental stuff gets lost, but it does create this thick pop sheen that coats the vocals.

keep posting away on this subject! i appreciate the advice.

The tracks are on our Myspace here.

n.a., are you the person in fake fictions? the band i'm in is looking at different mastering people and i noticed that the fake fictions used carl saff. were you satisfied w/ the results? any beefs?

http://saffmastering.com/main.html

Carl Saff - mastering, chicago

nice, much thanks steve

we ended up going w/ SAE mastering in phoenix. it was way too expensive but the before/after difference was amazing. if anyone is interested, i can post a song

nice choice

i'm interested. how was the $$$?

the original quote was for about $800, but then we asked him to go back over the whole thing and bring the vocals out a little more and tone down some of the harshness in the high end. which to be fair to him, was totally on us - we had some nasty trebley tones in our mix we sent him. it took him about an hour or so to churn out the 2nd try, so our total came to about $900. it was pretty remarkable how well he was able to bring out the vocals, considering that we mixed them a bit low in the first place. anyway, we're all pretty stoked on the end result.
i'll post before and after mixes when i get a chance

anyone have experience with including a video on a cd? i'm guessing it would need to be added at the mastering stage? i have no idea how this affects the possible length of the album, and i'm a little concerned that it can cause problems ripping and/or the cd.

We're released 2 commercial CDs with video on them. Length is as you'd guess. If the video is 10 megs, that's room for one less song or whatever. I forget how much space songs take. The real issue is choosing a size and a compression codec that's suitable. In the mastering stage, you can define exactly where the window will open up and what will be shown. You can create some kind of flash application or internal website to frame the video, or just make it a quicktime clip (or WMV?) with a nice title page. The first clip we included was of Glenn Branca playing guitar on the Ascension CD. It's all over youtube now.

'spread' - anyone got any tips. I'm starting to get into the nitty gritty of equalising my tracks in order to retain a place for them in the mix. Should I get deep into panning and stuff or should I concentrate on the audibility of separate instruments with levels/dynamics/EQ? It's all really heavily layered pop stuff often with various drum kits (actually have one with a 707, 808 and a 909 lol I'm making this hard for myself) and I want to at least attempt for a large/wide clean sound.

proper producer 'man this mix is shitty, it's going to take me so long to fix it'
me 'nah nah, you're missing the point. It's RAW, it has HEART, I'm breaking industry held traditions to forge my own sound'
(I can't keep this lie up)

panning is essential for giving things space, esp if the mix is busy. eq can only do so much if the arrangement isn't already giving space to everything imo

i'm quite into hard LCR panning occasionally putting one or two things in between..

do you have an example we can hear?

I'm doing most of my mixing on headphones (sadly) so I find it really hit and miss with hard panning. I think I have a problem with overcompression too and am in the process of going through everything removing as much as I can (this track is pre decompression drive) and trying to dense it up in mastering rather than worrying about it right now.

here's an example of a track that I'd like to give more space to.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/6i7sek

ignore the adhd synth in the chorus, that's gone now i just can't be bothered to bounce it with the replacement.

problem with overcompression too

i know the feeling, i used to compress & eq everything out of sheer habit, these days i barely do much of either and the results are vastly better

haha, god you'll hate that track. There's so much it's painful.

i don't think the mix is bad at all - it does feel like it could be a bit wider, i wouldn't be scared to hard pan particular instruments, leave the C for drums/bass/vocals and pan or hard pan everything else. no need for synth and guitar to be sitting in the same area for example..

sounds like something that would fit right in on the moshi moshi singles club!

http://www.sendspace.com/file/1kyitu
actually this a better example with a more specific need. I'd really love those disco string stabs to really pierce the mix but they always end up sounding a bit weak.

But yeah the wideness is something to be addressed at the mastering stage correct? For some reason I have this strange voice in my mind telling me that if I concentrate on making a track wider in the mix it'll render it less punchy dunno why.

Maybe I'll have a go at some hard panning and post my results. Thanks so much for the advice. Don't really have a go person I can use, thank god for ilxor.

Hah, think I've tried approaching moshi moshi in previous guises.

the wideness is something to be addressed at the mastering stage correct?

most of the 'width' is going to come out of having more unique elements in L vs R, but yeah some additional widening can be done in mastering with the purpose-built tools.

shouldn't necessarily take away from the punchiness if you've got the drums and bass up the guts.

bypassed all this hassle and got a really cool producer in a fancy studio doing some work with me. One of the london miloco ones. Very cool. Although when I go in I know i'm going to be fazed by all the gear and end up going 'yeah, do that' a lot.

limiters are just killing my mixes. I tend to have to send out a lot of bounces with minor things tweaked and the requisite is that it's limited (otherwise the person on the receiving end will inevitably say 'can you make it a bit louder'). The norm is to smash the shit out of a mix on the L2 but I'm increasingly finding it to be shit. Prefer the Oxford but for certain mixes it just doesn't seem to work

but what limiters do people use?

i really dislike both L2 and oxford. i think limiting technology has come a long way since those.

i've used a bunch of limiters, until recently my preference was PSP xenon but i've switched over to fabfilter pro-l which i think is awesome. things can get a lot louder without getting crumbly.

I'll have to check out the fabfilter. Is it au? I'd go with the Massey if I used protools more often. Wonder if hardware limiters are a good investment? I get the impression they're overly musical/colouring for my needs.

yeah FF do AU. i am a huge fan of fabfilter stuff, i haven't used their EQ or compressor but have everything else.

hardware limiters seem a bit pointless to me - they're digital by definition so i don't see how they could be better than a plugin. you'd be better off with a hardware compressor then come back itb for the limiting..

whoa, aams.

sounds 10x better than my sad diy mastering attempts.

oh dear

don't get me wrong, i know how important a good mastering engineer is and would never use it for a 'real' release. but i hate + am terrible at mastering my own tracks, so this will be a big help for sending out demos or throwing up a freebie on soundcloud.

maybe i should try this thing out

it's certainly not perfect, like the kick on this track i just tried is distorting/clipping out periodically, but def better than i expected.

ok i'm over it, did 6 tracks without a problem but now it errors out every time i try to use it on anything.

why did it take me so long to embrace the joys of M/S processing

https://www.landr.com/en

purports to instantly master your tracks for cheap
i'm trying it out as a test with one track
but it can't possibly be good, right?

i don't really have the ears to assess how "good" a job they do. it's louder for sure.

show us the before & after graphs & spectrograms?

Deeply skeptical

mixing is the part that frustrates me the most about making music. i just want whatever goodass ideas i have to sound better. ive gotten a lot better about using stereo space, and making instruments sound distinct from one another, but theres still a lot of mush. i'll listen to professional stuff and be like WHAT AM I DOING WRONG and then i remember i have a full-time job and a family and slither away.

I don't know much about mastering but I imagine there isn't much that online service does thats much better than turning on a mastering plug-in to whatever preset seems suitable.

I'll probably take these down in a day or two but
here's the unmastered version: https://soundcloud.com/scarequotes-1/shredded-sun-say-my-name
here's the mastered by LANDR version: https://soundcloud.com/scarequotes-1/landr-shredded-sun-say-my-name
that's the free lo-res MP3 of the master, I'm not ready to pay for it yet, and you can really hear it in the loud parts of the song - has that very obnoxious lo-res watery sound. I'm guessing paying for the hi-res MP3s or WAVs would get rid of that

you can pick how aggressive you want the dynamics to be too - this is the most aggressive (ie most squashed) mode - probably the loud parts would sound better with a more dynamic mode

Ugggh, I hate mastering. I'm trying to get better with Ozone (Elements), but my attempts always sound both not as loud and more squashed than everything I compare them to.

Yes, it's always better to pay a mastering engineer and I have no problem doing so for 'real' releases, but I'd also like to put out some more informal releases on Bandcamp. And I'd rather not pay even $100 for mastering an EP that is likely going to make $100 or less.

That said, here's a cool panel on mixing & mastering with a bunch of cool people: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/785681589

So what do we think of the mastering service on Soundcloud? I've not actually paid to use it but you can hear a wee sample of what your tracks would sound like post-mastering and to my untrained ear they do sound better.

Haven't tested it but I've only seen people clowning on it, it's probably better than nothing though.

So I've made some improvements by 1) adding more things to the mastering chain than just ozone, which probably isn't necessary but I guess this is 'serial compression'? and mostly 2) downloading this Youlean mastering meter plugin, which I may have found through that above panel: https://youlean.co/youlean-loudness-meter/

It's great to have an objective measure of loudness, to A/B against reference tracks. What I also learned from this (and the panel) was that I can ignore the whole 'master for Spotify' and their -14 LUFs thing. Most of my reference tracks are louder than that, and it's ok to go loud and know that streaming services will just pull it down a few db (and apparently there's a way to turn that off when listening??).

My main concern is making dubs that will sound good in a DJ mix anyway, and mastering for Bandcamp downloads.

I've become a full-on mix nerd in the process of mixing this (algorithmic) guitar & (live) drums record I'm working on. I'm talking getting into different EQs and compressors, watching youtube tutorials, endless revisions and car tests, etc. I feel like this is the first 'real' mixing I've done, both in terms of taking full responsibility for it and in not doing as part of the production/arrangement (although some problems I'm definitely solving with arrangement changes too).

Learning so much as I go along, it's making me feel bad about all my previous mixdowns. It's nice when you come across a tip or trick that you arrived at intuitively. For example, I was worried that I was doing too much surgical notch EQ by sweeping around and dipping resonant frequencies, and was thinning out the guitars too much. So I added analog-style EQs after the subtractive ones to gently boost frequency ranges back in and warm things up again.

Mostly what I'm learning is that every track is its own problem to solve and there are no formulas, not even on the same record. But it's also good to have a bag full of tricks to try and solve problems.

Luckily I'm not doing the final master, I still don't feel very skilled when it comes to limiting and gain at the master stage, especially for music that's a little more dynamic.

Btw FabFilter's youtube channel has some really fab tutorials.

In the final stages of obsessive mixing for another record and once again learning lots of good lessons, which are sometimes contradictory! Like, after working on recent tracks where I've been very detailed about EQ and transient shaping etc, I've gone back to the earlier tracks that I mixed months ago. Sometimes I'll look at an instrument and realize "oh, I literally didn't EQ this except for rolling off the low end, no wonder that cymbal sounds harsh." But other times I'll have genius mixer brain and clear up some low mids so that the kick drum can cut through, and later (in the car) realize that the rhythmic noise track that hums around 100-200 hz was literally holding the track together, and all the atmosphere and vibe is now gone.

Also watched a youtube video with a good exercise to demonstrate mixer brain where you listen to classic tracks, like 'Billie Jean', and try note all the weird choices that you would probably change if you had your hands on the controls (like perhaps turning down the shaker simply because it's the loudest thing in the mix).

What do you mean by algorithmic guitar?

I'm a big advocate for taking a lot of time to mix, listening in different rooms and spaces, listening to a lot of reference recordings. If you sit in the mixing suite with the song for too long your ears get tired and you end up making everything complacent. I just listened to some Barry White yesterday on my studio monitors (for a string reference) and was blown away at the crispness of everything. My god! Listen to this!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YS7sWCG_ZE

Nobody would mix rhythm guitar, like that right-channel muted-wah part, in 2024. It's a shame, it sounds so good.

Nice to hear too that even in the 70s the French horn section was the weakest link, plus ça change etc.

Oh yeah, my partner sampled his acoustic guitar and made a MAX/MSP instrument with a bunch of different types of pattern generators, and recorded improvisations in real time with it. It's still a bit of a mystery to me tbh. Then I would edit these and record drums and other stuff (although some of the drums were my samples that went into his system first).

Thankfully I'm still happy with how that record came out, I really didn't want to let it down on the mixing end - https://thetrilogytapes.bandcamp.com/album/gurum-triads

xp

Agreed I've found that there's no substitute for listening on a bunch of systems. One revelation is that my little Anker bluetooth speaker has been one of the best references, it's revealed some things that I didn't catch in the car or on other speakers/headphones. There's no depth at all and it can make classic records sound like demos, so if a track sounds like music on it and the bass is legible, then I know I've cracked it.

I do need to listen to more reference tracks. I've been doing it when checking mixes on other systems, like to compare the general frequency spread and bass levels and what not. But I never take the step of actually pulling reference tracks into my DAW and listening on my mixing headphones. Actually just watched another youtube vid that rightfully called me out for being too afraid to compare, lol.

fgti that track sounds amazing. Ugh, like so much from that era the instrumentation is so perfect for mixing, a place for everything and everything in its place. Especially dead drums and a huge, clean electric bass. You really think it wouldn't be mixed like that today though (maybe not in terms of recording quality, but approach)? If you have two rhythm guitar tracks it seems pretty natural to pan them L/R. A lot of the James Brown stuff is like that, with one strummed part and one picked line?

Thanks Jordan, that sounds like a cool approach... and turns out it's already in my bandcamp wishlist, looking forward to giving it a listen...

Oh dang, thank you!