How do You™ Get By?

[xander]

I think I could cut a couple measures in the middle and prolly add more headroom by turning things down a bit - I mixed this a while ago when I was letting channels limiters and compressors handle the gain rather than using channel volume.* A new mix would be good practice to see if I've improved my technique.

* For many years, I never knew what to do with compressors/limiters or how to tweak dynamics other than raising/lowering the volume of particular channel or master. Then I went nuts with dropping compressors all over the place and letting them do everything. I think I've finally got a handle on sensibly balancing things...

...although I could be wrong about that last bit. I've been having some issues with weird pumping in high-frequency sounds when I use compression on mixes with lots of super-deep bass. I don't usually notice it in the real-time playback, but I catch it later in the mixdown.

Ahh well, what I do, for what it's worth, is use minimal comp in the mix on vocals, leads & a wee bit on mid-range percs & bass. I leave at least a -5db headroom on the mix going to the master and then, when at mastering, bring my L2 up slow until it pleases me AKG240DFs (spectrum-wise), then ballance to the Genelecs. In this way, I don't need any multi-band comp (which I hate on mastering). So, in other words, maybe my masters will be a db or so down from full loudness, but it lets all the bits breathe a bit better instead of them sounding brickwalled, etc. This also eliminates most of the high-freq pumping worry (which I personally despise).

Ch33rs,
AJ

[You™]

Hey, that's interesting to know. I tend to do everything (mixing and mastering) one song at a time. I'm not usually a brick-wall kind of guy; for material like this, I usually use a 5-band compressor on the master with thresholds that vary from -13 to -17 dB depending on the overall tone of the material. I adjust the makeup gain on each band until the master peaks around -3 to -0.5 dB and then sometimes I take the final print and normalize it to 0 dB if it's just going to be an MP3.

I'm still learning as I go along. I'd love to try mastering with some fancy tools in a real studio to see how different it would sound. Actually I'd like to watch how someone else does it. I know my equipment tends to color the mix - but that's usually OK because it's part of my "sound" at this point. But I get lost listening to how pro mixes sound - there's so much space and definition in-between instruments.

[xander]

Sounds like you have a handle on it -- Your songs always sound good so stick with what you're doing I reckon!