Discuss here mixing and mastering

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!

Speaking of 'Billie Jean', I read last night that the drums are actually 3db louder in the intro, and then Bruce Swedien does a slow fade down to tuck them in by the time the vocals come in. It's so obvious now but I never thought about it (or assumed it was due to mastering compression), it's so simple and brilliant. You get hit with "wow these drums bang" at a level that wouldn't be sustainable over the whole song.

I read ages ago that Quincy/the engineer on that album would use fresh tape for the drum beds, immediately bounce them to work tape, build the song on the work tape, and then only use the original drum bed tape when it was mix time, "so frequent replay doesn't deteriorate the transients on the drums", iirc

Regardless of the truthiness of the story, this isn't a lesson to me about "good usage of tape", more that it brought transients and their importance to my attention, I suppose

Totallyyyy. I also read someone theorizing that Thriller was engineered to overemphasize transients because they would be rounded out on cassette (and probably vinyl too), and that they're overly spiky today on digital. Interesting theory, but I don't really buy it (especially in today's world of super punchy transients).

Transients have a big Goldilocks factor for me lately, trying to find that perfect middle ground. I've mostly been guilty of ignoring them in the past (especially in search of super compressed and saturated tones), so now I'm trying to pay attention to them without overcorrecting hopefully. Or maybe I wasn't ignoring them, I just didn't know what I was doing and would solve problems by adding more layers with samples etc. The parallel processing thing has been helpful in certain instances, when it's hard to get it dialed in just right through compression though. Awhile back I heard someone say that they realized that one thing all their favorite records had in common was how the transients come across and that's haunted me ever since.

can someone here give this noob a working definition of "transients"? I do know my audio tech and sound physics fwiw

this revive reminds me of a recent interview I saw with James McNew of Yo La Tengo, talking about how they recorded the new album on their own, but sent it off for mastering "because that is something that can only be done by wizards"

Basically it's the attack at the beginning of a sound, like the stick striking a drumhead or a pick hitting a string. As opposed to the sustained tone that comes after. So sometimes you want to tame that with compression for a more even sound, but you also need them eg for drums that should 'hit' viscerally and not stroke your ears like a feather.

got it, thanks - the only other thing I knew was "that's what Rush fucked up on that album that people hated"

Haha, oh really?

https://gearspace.com/board/mastering-forum/736700-cant-stand-new-rush-album.html

Vapor Trails, I think