No one yet -- mastering doesnt fix weird crunchy distortion in the top end of vocals, drums, on open vowels. Andrew Ahmad (worked with kanye and frank ocean, some other great bands i love the sound of) masters my mixes when im ready to send them off. They dont come back with a smoother top end.

This is not an issue of mastering. This is an issue in my plugin chain / masterbus processing / recording / converters / somewhere in that signal flow. I just wanted to see if anyone has had a similar experience and could help point out an obvious mistake i am committing while ruling out digital clipping both on the way in and bad gain staging.

Are you using too many plugins?

but cranking up your unmastered mixed to the same level as to be competitive with mixes that are mastered could cause weird crunchy distortions and so on. Mastered records have limiters across them.

I am not saying it is. I am saying that turning up your mixes to the same maximum volume that you are able to turn up professionally mastered recordings is not a fair comparison. And your unmastered mix is getting the short end of the stick.

Its not that I would expect a good mastering engineer to "fix" weird crunchy distortions. But I bet a good mastering job will help prevent weird crunchy distortions from happening at extreme volume levels.

Not to "60"! I have turned up the volume, but I really cannot remember ever putting my volume on anything to as loud as it could go. Unless it was a toy. Like a transistor radio or something. Turning the dial all the way to the right?

My question is, are you hearing these same distortions at normal, "human" levels?

well .. no. I'm not. I don't hear this fizziness at quieter levels, which makes me thing it's an issue with my car speakers themselves, not in my mix process no?

The thing is, pro records don't react the same to louder levels in my car.


Even my mastered mixes, they tend to crap out and become too .. unnatural .. at very loud levels. It may be too many saturation plugins. I'm not heavy handed with eq / compression at all, im very methodical when it comes to compressing naturally and over different stages and so on ..

To anyone who cares im currently mixing another project, i will try to keep it as clean as possible and i wont just throw around saturators for the sake of it -- i will report back once im done to see where i arrive incase some other poor soul is over-using saturation and it is the cause for this annoying dirty top end.

is there such a thing?

my masterbus tends to have a compressor (ssl glue), an eq, another eq for boosting (sie-q), decapitator, waves abby roads, a limiter that is barely doing anything between 0 and -1 db gain reduction ---- this is all pre-master

is this considered "alot"?
precisely why im posting here, i am following my ears which is the best advice nayone could give, and everything sounds good and dandy on my monitors, but they dont translate well to my car and i find myself having to go back and forth too many times

Yes there is such a thing and having 6 effects may be way way too much. Everything and anything can have too much.

Only use what is needed. Is all that needed to get your sound? or is it interfering with you getting your sound?

You have six plugs on your masterbus. But it ISN'T a masterbus, it is your mix buss. You might be in the ballpark for what is normal in your genre, you probably know more about that than I.
What specifically are you doing in waves abbey roads?

When everything sounds “good and dandy” on your monitors, but isn’t good and dandy in the outside world, in my experience that is a huge clue that you seem to want to ignore. If you hear obvious problems when your mix leaves home, but you didn’t hear those problems at home, what exactly does that tell you? If the problem was you, meaning your ears and your perception, you wouldn’t be able to hear the problems when you listen out of your studio.
I am not believing that your room is your friend.

Oh, sure.

i couldn't agree more .. but this is an issue that i am already working on week by week. It is already treated, i have scoured the internet looking for how to build bass traps (including here on gearslutz where people have cracked the formula, professional acoustician giving their advice)

i have set up bass traps in my room to mitigate the bad nodes and modes, treated first reflection points, but there is still more to be done i won't lie. dimensions themselves of the room are ok. rectangular. i am longways

but room treatment will not make me hear "crunchiness of top end" more clearly ... its probably because my monitors are more hi end than the car stereo and so can perhaps distort less? im not sure. But it doesnt feel like my room .. because on earpods and headphones, they problem is much much less than in my car again. But the issue isnt my car speakers since pro tracks dont behave the same way.

Hahahah yes.

No i dont mean "is there such a thing as too much" -- of course over processing is a thing -- i meant is there such a thing as TOO MANY PLUGINS


while it seems to be common on the tongues of youtube tutorialists "keep things simple", more pros seem to suggest if it sounds good it sounds good. doesnt matter what you do to it.


Tony maserati seems to absolutely demolish his vocal tracks with plugins. its because every plugin is doing very little, and that is the case with me.


So i may have 5 plugins on my mixbus (thanks for the correction poster), but decapitator is only mixed in 10 percent on 1 drive ... eq is notching at 250, -1db ... ssl is doing 2 db of gain reduction MAX with super natural attack and release settings .. you get my jist


so i do think now that it is a problem with my mixbus, but not the amount of plugins, just what they are ... im not going to use saturation on mixbus anymore, it seems to behave differently than on individual / transient tracks (kicks, snares, bass) ... it colors the entire song in this harsh light. Unpleasant


Thank you guys

You didn’t answer... what are you doing with Abbey Road?

That's because he received a stellar sounding raw vocal track from his client.

a distinction without a difference. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that we can quantify your distortion in some kind of "units". If two plugins cranked up are each creating a distortion level of let's say "25 units" that would add up to 50 of these "units". If ten plugins are "tastefully" set at "only 5" each that still adds up to "50 units".

Are you suggesting that there are plugins that exist that are totally non-destructive of the sound? Everything you run your audio through will contribute wanted and unwanted stuff. Software, hardware, wire.

Just a guess, but maybe his "very little" is less than your "very little". It could be as simple as that.

or that!

But didn't you start this thread because it doesn't sound good?

the only way you can tell for sure is by experimenting. But I still think putting your car stereo on "60" or whatever is the maximum is not really testing anything except the limits of your car stereo ...

...and perhaps your human eardrums.