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Tricks to make a mix loud and well defined

2

Comments

  • db909db909
    edited May 2017

    heres an exercise in restraint: when elements seem to be clashing and just don't gel, instead of reaching for the eq or compressor, reach for the mute button. Sometimes all those layers of sexy counter melodies just add up to incomprehensible noise. You can comprehend it, but that's only because you created them.

    The other day I opened an old Gadget project that had about 9 tracks going at once for a particular section. Carved it down to 5 and rebalanced things. Way better. The song still sucks, but it sucks so much less than before.

  • AudioGusAudioGus

    @db909 said:
    heres an exercise in restraint: when elements seem to be clashing and just don't gel, instead of reaching for the eq or compressor, reach for the mute button. Sometimes all those layers of sexy counter melodies just add up to incomprehensible noise. You can comprehend it, but that's only because you created them.

    The other day I opened an old Gadget project that had about 9 tracks going at once for a particular section. Carved it down to 5 and rebalanced things. Way better

    Hehe, yah sometimes I will load an old project that I thought was relaxing and flowing only to ask myself 'what the hell is going on here?' Like two songs playing at once.

  • DefRobotDefRobot

    More good comments :)
    I've written stuff where I think I've cleverly put parts together that fit with each other, but it just detracts from the original good idea.
    Try to detach yourself and concentrate on what the listener is going to hear is what I'm getting from all this. Give them a focus.

  • db909db909

    It's really weird how mixing can become so cerebral and often meditative when you get into it. You start to notice all these little things that are hard to put into words but I will try now. I find that every fine adjustment you make to anything, basically any knob or fader you move, has a sweet spot for the most part and if you hit it, the whole image of the mix will expand ever so slightly, like more space is being added one drop at a time. So I try to listen for that, though it's not easy sometimes. Or maybe it's all in my head, either way.

  • wigglelightswigglelights

    Great comments, nice to see some full timers comments - quite helpful....
    I think i left out one on my list, should have included Engineering to the arranging, mixing and mastering. As mentioned, garbage in, garbage out"...
    Not that there aren't accomplished musicians well versed in the technical ins and outs of recording and mastering, but it really is an art in itself.

    And I like the "restraint" thread - as the blues boys say "less is more". I think that applies to what's played, as well as mixing; EQ, compression, limiting should all be used as a light touch -

  • TelefunkyTelefunky
    edited May 2017

    @brice said:
    In my experience with Pro-L on the mix bus you need to have proper gainstaging across your mix before you even get to it. Giving it enough headroom will mitigate any distortion issues.

    >
    Pro-L is supposed to balance out peaks to achieve a higher perceived loudness, which would be pointless without any headroom.
    Those apps (or VSTs) are quite rare afaik, the one I use is a custom plugin for my DAW (Saw-Studio Levelizer), the other one Anwida's L1-V. Here's a comparison of all three.
    http://www.sawstudiouser.com/forums/showthread.php?17682-The-levelizer-is-still-brilliant
    Such plugins aren't restricted to mastering in any way. In fact it's a very convenient method as a 2nd step to prepare a track after manually cleaning the raw recording.
    No need to push things at that stage, just give it some impact and still have it breathing.
    I almost never needed compression for loudness since I switched to that method.

  • eustressoreustressor
    edited May 2017

    I've spent the last two years deliberately delaying releasing any albums because I am training myself, with a group of songs that will become my first album, for two years on mixing and, to the debatable extent it can truly be done, self-mastering. If I could afford it, I would surely send my songs to a pro like @Tarekith, and maybe someday I'll be able to afford that splurge.

    It helps if you happen to be pretty good at objective thinking. Even if you don't think you are, I think it's a trait that can be learned over time. Regardless, when it comes to mastering, you cannot have any prejudices toward/against any single element or group of elements. It's the song and making its mix sound as professional as possible.

    Some useful tools I've found are:

    • Doing yourself a favor and start with an immaculate recording session. Mixing/mastering is much easier, in my estimation - great performances will virtually mix themselves
    • Record as much as possible/sensible in mono - it took me a long time to realize my 4 guitar tracks and 6 vocal tracks did not need to be stereo, and were just mucking things up and draining unnecessary CPU
    • Subscribing to Recording Revolution.com's YouTube channel - funny, today's episode is about mastering
    • Reading everything Mr. @Tarekith has provided on the subject, lots of PDFs and an interview (or two?)
    • Talking shop with another pro mastering fellow named Adam on the Facebook iPad Musician's Group
    • A monitoring setup that gives me full range/mainly mids/cheap computer speakers (w/ and without eq) and mono on any or all, at the touch of a few buttons
    • Learning to gainstage properly and preserve headroom. Try to work in 24 bit until your final mastering mixdown.
    • Faders were meant to be moved. I mean, just look at them - and record your movements.
    • Finding the manufacturer's frequency response chart for my portable headphones (Samson S950) and creating an eq preset that is last on my output chain, countering any boosts/drops to create an almost precisely flat, uncolored sound for headphone mix/master (bypassed before mixdown, of course)
    • Having the right tools. Even most Cubasis fans will admit Auria Pro is closer to a desktop daw, in no small part thanks to a wide range of available plugins that are top notch. I find FabFilter's Pro-L limiter to be awesome.
    • Listen to the music you are mastering a lot. A LOT. On as many different speaker systems you have at your disposal. Until your entire family is ready to puke if they hear that song one more time in the car.
    • Have a reference track (or two) in a similar genre handy, so you can A/B the differences.
    • RE: Loudness – Remember all that headroom you are preserving? That's so you can push out a master where the volume peaks reach six decibels gain reduction using Pro-L in Auria, and yet there are plenty of passages in the song where the volume doesn't even near the -0.5db threshold. Loud AND dynamic.
    • Oh, and you can ride (and record/automate your movements) the fader of Pro-L just like a volume slider out in the main mix. Keeping one eye on your max gain reduction, do not be in the least bit afraid to do this. It's how songs breathe and get air.

    I'm getting there. Might even put that first album out this year :smile:

  • BluepunkBluepunk

    So glad you asked this question. What an education and tons to try out. Thank you everyone for sharing your knowledge and experience. This information is gold to the L plater that I am. :)

  • OscarSouthOscarSouth

    @brice said:

    @OscarSouth said:
    Everyone has their own approach but I try and work with a minimal amount of editing. Once you edit one or two things heavily then you end up going down an escalating spiral of editing everything more and more to make it fit together.

    I think of it like this:

    Light editing / finishing touches - you're basically tweaking the filter settings on a beautiful image, or superimposing a castle over that wonderful photo of an empty rural landscape. Maybe you need to make some mild adjustments or general tweaks to bring out the best in what's there.

    Heavy editing / audio surgery - You're basically putting that same picture together out of jigsaw pieces, only you've also got to perfectly shape each piece so that it fits into it's place with surgical precision. One wrong shaped piece and the rest of the picture won't fit together properly.

    Both methods can produce fantastic results in the right hands. It's also worth noting that the light touch approach leans more heavily on the preproduction and tracking stages, to minimise necessary work when editing, mixing and mastering.u

    Here's an example of a track myself and a colleague did in the minimal editing style:
    https://specresmen.bandcamp.com/track/the-beggar-on-the-cold-ground

    I performed every instrument bar the fiddle and vocal. It basically only required a bit of mix adjustment and some light EQing and boosting. My colleague did all the production work on this track - I'm more of a session musician/performance specialist, while he leans more towards record production.

    That's a great track! Well performed and mixed.

    Cheers! Thanks for your insight too. I got a lot out of it, especially the comments on stereo field.

  • eustressoreustressor

    PS - If, like me, you are a big fan of high frequency detail (crispy hats, searing lead guitar, every nuance of vocal enunciations, etc) the De-Esser is YOUR NEW VERY BEST MASTERING FRIEND to avoid harsh/brittle/amateur high end frequency abuse while preserving detail. I learned this by deconstructing the demo version of Lürssen's signal chain :wink:

  • BluepunkBluepunk

    @eustressor said:
    PS - If, like me, you are a big fan of high frequency detail (crispy hats, searing lead guitar, every nuance of vocal enunciations, etc) the De-Esser is YOUR NEW VERY BEST MASTERING FRIEND to avoid harsh/brittle/amateur high end frequency abuse while preserving detail. I learned this by deconstructing the demo version of Lürssen's signal chain :wink:

    It has been added to my meagre chain as of NOW. Thank you millions. :)

  • stemshadestemshade

    @Tarekith said:
    As mentioned, a lot of it is just sound selection and arranging. Beginners tend to add a lot of sounds and clutter to a mix that makes it harder for everything to be heard, as well as more difficult to master to louder volumes. EQ can be a great tool to give each sound it's own space, but I always urge restraint here too. You don't need to totally isolate every sound by completely cutting out other freqs, often that just leads to a thin sounding mix. Usually just reducing problematic frequencies a few dB does the trick. Here's a few more indepth guides I've written that might give you some more ideas:

    http://innerportalstudio.com/articles/Mixdowns.pdf
    http://innerportalstudio.com/articles/Mastering.pdf

    I'm a professional mastering engineer as well, so if you have loudness/mastering questions, feel free to fire away as I deal with this every single day.

    Good luck!

    Thanks for adding this, will read.

  • TarekithTarekith

    @eustressor said:
    It helps if you happen to be pretty good at objective thinking. Even if you don't think you are, I think it's a trait that can be learned over time. Regardless, when it comes to mastering, you cannot have any prejudices toward/against any single element or group of elements. It's the song and making its mix sound as professional as possible.

    Good point on the objective thinking. When you're mixing and writing your own songs, you know them so well that YOU can easily hear every single element you add to the song. That's why sometimes people end up just cluttering things up without realizing it. I get people sending me songs with 4 lead synth lines happening at once sometimes. To me it's pure chaos but they can easily hear every little detail since it's fresh in their mind what went into making them all.

    The ability to step back and look at it with fresh ears (is that a thing?) is one of the best skills any musician can learn, and also one of the hardest I think. People HATE, HATE, HATE to do it (and I get why), but I often tell my clients to PLEASE wait 2-3 days when you're done with the mixdown before you send it for mastering. Don't listen to the track at all. It's amazing how just a couple days away puts soooo many things into fresh perspective. Of course when you're having fun and the vibe is flowing, stepping back is never easy though.

    Pro-L is a great limiter IMO, until DMG Audio released Limitless it was hands down my go to limiter for mastering. Ignore the names of the 4 different limiting algorithms and you get a lot of flexibility in how it deals with transient details at higher amounts of gain reduction. Those names are misleading IMO. I never really thought of it as adding distortion at all to be honest, unless you're pushing it harder than just about any other limiter would distort anyway. I'm really curious to see what Fabfilter does with Limitless2.

    Side note: I've never once in 26 years of making music or mastering it used a de-esser :s Please don't tell anyone. :)

  • JRSIVJRSIV

    @AudioGus said:

    @JRSIV said:

    Louder is always​ better-

    ?

    Obviously a typo @AudioGus, louder is NOT always better!

    What I said right after is in service to that ideal. I'd rather have a mix with dynamics, where it's punchy rather than a sheen of raw volume. The listener can just turn the volume up. Unfortunately there was this conditioning that when you put in a CD it had to roar to compete with everything else. Now that streaming and files on flash storage have supplanted CD's it's changing a bit.

  • bricebrice

    @Telefunky said:

    @brice said:
    In my experience with Pro-L on the mix bus you need to have proper gainstaging across your mix before you even get to it. Giving it enough headroom will mitigate any distortion issues.

    >
    Pro-L is supposed to balance out peaks to achieve a higher perceived loudness, which would be pointless without any headroom.
    Those apps (or VSTs) are quite rare afaik, the one I use is a custom plugin for my DAW (Saw-Studio Levelizer), the other one Anwida's L1-V. Here's a comparison of all three.
    http://www.sawstudiouser.com/forums/showthread.php?17682-The-levelizer-is-still-brilliant
    Such plugins aren't restricted to mastering in any way. In fact it's a very convenient method as a 2nd step to prepare a track after manually cleaning the raw recording.
    No need to push things at that stage, just give it some impact and still have it breathing.
    I almost never needed compression for loudness since I switched to that method.

    That's what I was saying in my comment....or, were you agreeing with me, or..wait.... B) I think we're in agreeance here. If not then we should be. Headroom is important.....-18dbfs for life!!!

  • 1P181P18

    Turn it up to 11.

    Joke never gets old. :)

  • TelefunkyTelefunky
    edited May 2017

    @Tarekith said: I never really thought of it as adding distortion at all to be honest, unless you're pushing it harder than just about any other limiter would distort anyway...

    you can squeeze a hell of loudness out of Levelizer and even more out of L1-V without any grain in sound, if (!) the source contains a good amount of peaks.
    Which is typical for a well balanced mix and raw acoustic recordings.
    Those plugins definitely use different algorithms nit found in 'any other limiter', but the news is certainly spreading as your mention of DMG Limitless suggests.
    Not shure if that's a VST or app, but I'll check it out.

  • u0421793u0421793

    @1P18 said:
    Turn it up to 11.

    Joke never gets old. :)

    Except – if you look closely, those knobs start at zero. Then they go up to eleven. That's twelve discrete integers. If you look at a normal knob that goes 0 to 10, that's eleven discrete integers, so, normal knobs actually go up to eleven.

  • OscarSouthOscarSouth

    @u0421793 said:

    @1P18 said:
    Turn it up to 11.

    Joke never gets old. :)

    Except – if you look closely, those knobs start at zero. Then they go up to eleven. That's twelve discrete integers. If you look at a normal knob that goes 0 to 10, that's eleven discrete integers, so, normal knobs actually go up to eleven.

    Best post yet, across any existing message board.

  • 1P181P18

    @u0421793 said:

    @1P18 said:
    Turn it up to 11.

    Joke never gets old. :)

    Except – if you look closely, those knobs start at zero. Then they go up to eleven. That's twelve discrete integers. If you look at a normal knob that goes 0 to 10, that's eleven discrete integers, so, normal knobs actually go up to eleven.

    ...
    ...
    ...
    ...These go to 11.

  • Blipsford_BaubieBlipsford_Baubie

    Maybe somebody could answer a couple questions i have about K-System metering. Let's say I opt to work with K-12. Is -12dbFS supposed to be the anchor point for the RMS on my final mix? Or individual tracks? I'm guessing it's the mix since a mix is what's full spectrum and pink noise (which is also full spectrum) is what is being used to calibrated at -12db (or the chosen anchor point).

  • TarekithTarekith

    Probably best to read about it from the K man himself:

    https://www.digido.com/portfolio-item/level-practices-part-2/

  • pichipichi

    @Tarekith said:
    Probably best to read about it from the K man himself:

    https://www.digido.com/portfolio-item/level-practices-part-2/

    It's sad reading this article 17 years after it appeared to think things have only gotten worse since in terms of loudness. It's pretty hard to find listenable (not brickwalled) music in the 21st Century in popular genres. And sadly a whole generation has grown up not knowing better and thinking that is the way music should sound. :#

  • richardyotrichardyot

    @pichi said:

    @Tarekith said:
    Probably best to read about it from the K man himself:

    https://www.digido.com/portfolio-item/level-practices-part-2/

    It's sad reading this article 17 years after it appeared to think things have only gotten worse since in terms of loudness. It's pretty hard to find listenable (not brickwalled) music in the 21st Century in popular genres. And sadly a whole generation has grown up not knowing better and thinking that is the way music should sound. :#

    I've been using the K system for the last few months, but I have to mix/master to K12 because K14 just sounds too quiet compared to any kind of current music. In theory K14 should be better for most music, and K12 only used for broadcast but I think we've become so accustomed to really heavily limited music that K14 just sounds really quiet by comparison. Obviously the listener can increase the volume, but K14 seems to lack punch to my ears compared to modern masters.

    On the other hand using K12 has been a really helpful guideline/system for me because I was definitely pushing things way too hard before, and using the K12 meter inside of Pro L gives me a really useful visual guideline for my levels.

  • supadomsupadom

    In most cases the final sound of the track depends on the well balanced mix. Without a decent mix you will struggle to get good mastering esulta irrespectable of the tools you use. I think many people (including myself not so long ago) think that mastering will just magically fix mixing mistakes. They might but at a price.

  • db909db909

    ironically my mixes have improved by mixing at a such a low level that I can barely hear anything.

  • TelefunkyTelefunky
    edited May 2017

    this album (Roisin Murphy, Overpowered) is 10 years old and my personal benchmark for a well defined mix with impact, but just slightly crosses the border of being 'unpleasent to listen to'
    (though a Moloko fan, I couldn't make up my mind to buy it and picked up a live version on iTunes instead.

  • RUST( i )KRUST( i )K

    @supadom said:
    In most cases the final sound of the track depends on the well balanced mix. Without a decent mix you will struggle to get good mastering esulta irrespectable of the tools you use. I think many people (including myself not so long ago) think that mastering will just magically fix mixing mistakes. They might but at a price.

    For me I limit pan positions for supporting tracks to 100L, 50L, C, 50R and 100R and focus on the balance and spectral content respectively. As you said.

    Its the old "I bought a $3000k guitar to play like a star"........LULZ

  • TarekithTarekith

    The K-System for me is more of a mixing/writing guideline than a mastering one, it's way too quiet for that in terms of modern loudness.

    That said, there's hope! As streaming music has gotten more and more popular, the big stations (Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, etc) are all now using a guideline of roughly -14 to -16 LUFS. So brickwalling the crap out of your songs is now actually making them sound potentially worse. More info so I don't have to retype it all:

    http://subaqueousmusic.com/we-won-the-loudness-wars/

    http://innerportalstudio.com/loudness-wars-part-2/

    I have a big article on this I just wrote for another blog this week, once it gets posted I'll link it here as it explains it a bit more simply.

  • DefRobotDefRobot

    @Tarekith I completely understand why mastering is a specialised craft and I can see why you would be in demand. I'm slowly getting my head around all the facets of this process!
    Unfortunately all my current finances have gone on an iPad Pro and multiple apps, so I'm out of budget. I use Cubasis into Final Touch for mastering (I know Auria is a better option for mastering, but I only have the old version. Payday maybe?)
    Anyway, after all the great advice, I'm now making my mixes as 'ready to go' as possible so that I only have to do minimal mastering.
    My one question is, what format should I be mastering to?
    It's only staying in the digital domain at the mo - SoundCloud and maybe YouTube, so no CD or anything yet.
    The best sounding masters I can make are .wav files.
    Is this ok for what I want, or should I be aiming for Mp3, MP4A or some other such file?
    Sorry for the long winded question, any suggestions for a final file format are much appreciated!

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