November 28, 2009 Mix Tips that I tell my clients
There’s three parts in the sound production process when you’re making a CD: recording, mixing and mastering. Although these three stages may overlap somewhat, they are three distinct parts, each with their own guidelines, concerns and tools. Here’s some simple guidelines I tell my clients to ensure good results in Mastering:
1. Don’t push the level in mixing, that’s my job in mastering. Just focus on making the mix sound great. Compression on the individual tracks is fine but minimal compression on the mix buss! It can’t be undone leaves me no room for mastering.
2. Definitely no limiting or mastering plugins on your Mix Buss! It’s only likely to degrade the sound and if the level is pushed too much, I will just ask you to remix it.
3. Leave 3-6 db of headroom. In other words the level does not even need to touch ‘0’dbfs on peak digital meters. This leaves the headroom that’s needed for mastering. Pushing the level will only augment ugly distortion Mastering.
4. Don’t Normalize your tracks, as this only degrades the quality of audio.
5. Try and record at the highest level bit rate (24 bit if possible) as this gives more headroom. So 44.1 24 bit or 96k 24 bit etc. It’s not critical if you haven’t done this, it just helps. Also, don’t change sample rates , this also should be left for the mastering stage.
6. NO DITHERING ! This is left to the mastering engineer.
7. Clean up your tracks - it’s a lot harder for me to get rid of the guitar player sighing, or a singer clearing his throat after it’s mixed. Solo all live audio tracks and take a listen to what’s there-you might even get a chuckle!
8. Send songs as Audio Data files (.WAV or .AIFF). NOT MP3 files! Just compare file sizes between the different file formats and you will see that mp3 are only 1/10th the amount of data. What do you think is missing?
9. When mixing, keep in mind that reverb levels will probably be enhanced a little with mastering, so often times holding back a little with the reverb during mixing, yields nicer results.
Reader Comments (2)
Great stuff! I have similar instructions posted on the preparation page of my web site. I'm a little pushier though - I insist on NO compression on the mix bus, since the attack/release characteristics of the compressor can't be undone after the fact.
The only point I disagree with is #6. Unless the client provides files at the same bit depth their DAW operates at internally (usually 32-bit floating or higher), dither should be applied. Ableton Live handles this gracefully by greying out the dither options when 32-bit is selected. If there are no dither options within the preferences or audio export menus of the DAW, the client should insert a dither plug-in on the master bus and set it for 24 bits with no noise shaping.
Brian Hazard
Resonance Mastering
www.resonancemastering.com
Excellent tips. I think most mix engineers would tell you that going beyond about 4 or 5 dB gain reduction tends to sound like crap on the mix buss for the vast majority of songs - at that point it's a band-aid leftover from roughs. You hear it used a LOT on demo mixes to give the band a ball park idea of how the mix would sound more "together," perhaps even after mastering, because there's not enough time to tweak. Doesn't mean it sounds good and should be left on...