Quote:
Originally Posted by Riccardo  First separate the two process:
one is mixing, the other is mastering.
Track at moderately adequate levels, mix at moderately adequate levels and chances are your plug ins will not turn your music into mush and your d/a converters will sound smoother.
Get the mix to sound the way you want. |
this is so important i had to reiterate what Riccardo said.
Get the mix sounding the way you want. All the internal balances of the instruments and vocals should be where they need to be and if not, adjust your mix to get them that way. If the track isn't hitting hard enough, if the vocals don't come through, if lead instruments aren't standing out when they should, adjust your internal mix balances to make it that way.
DO -NOT- attempt to fix your mix balances with limiting or massive compression across the entire mix to make it loud or cover up a bad mix at this point in the production flow. You have much more discretion and greater ability to fix fundamental problems in a mix while the track is still in discrete elements that are individually adjustable. That is far better than trying to make things work for a poor mix that is just composite stereo.
I've seen these sorts of mixes squashed come into mastering and sometimes I've just handed the track back to the client and said remix it, this is a trainwreck.
Headroom ? leave some for processing, peak levels around 3db below 0ppm isn't a bad place to end up. Levels are easily taken up during mastering if you are concerned about having a loud track. speaking of loud tracks, there are loud tracks that sound like dog doo and tracks with lower average levels that pump and hit harder because the dynamic range is being utilized for impact.
a sine wave can be terribly loud, but it has no punch. you can do the same thing to your music, make it loud but limp with no punch. when that loud, limp track gets played at the same playback volume against other tracks with greater dynamic range and good internal balances , guess which sounds better?