Alright, so I've got a track pretty much all finished and its time to mix and master this track. That being said I have a few questions/thoughts about this whole process. To start with, I've taken a look at Terekiths articles (if you are watching Terekith, feel free to chime in here) found here http://tarekith.com/assets/mixdowns.html and the subsequent mastering article. Now a few questions arise for me:
1. In regards to mixing, i have pretty much been doing this as i've gone along and it seems this is acceptable, as he states...ok, good. I pretty much don't move on until I have the levels and general "sound" sounding pretty much exactly the way I want them to. Obviously there is tweaking as new tracks get added and I've done this, as well as an overall tweaking now that the track is done.A lot of people will not even approach the mixdown as a separate process, they shape it while they write, and when that phase is done, the song is done and they send it out for mastering. Certainly nothing wrong with this, many a good a tune has been written this way.
Track sounds great to me and is seems to be on average between -2db and at the very peak coming out of the main build up -0.5db, but there is a lot of talk about reducing the overall volume to like -6db. Now why would one need to do this if the track isn't clipping to begin with? I have volume automations in there so it seems to me like a huge pain in the ass to go over each track and reduce each to match the goal master db if it isn't actually necessary to do, no?
2. Which leads me to mastering, Terekith states a few goals of the mastering process:
Given that I'm doing this myself and this isn't going on a cd or anything (yet• Making all the songs on a CD sound cohesive.
• Preparing the song so that it is not too quiet, and more importantly these days, not too loud.
• The final quality control for projects going to a replication house.
• An experienced, fresh set of ears to help achieve the overall balance of frequencies in a song.
• And more recently, a chance to interact with an experienced audio engineer and get feedback on the sonic qualities of your productions as they get close to completion.
In general however, I think what most people want to achieve when it comes to mastering their own songs is two-fold: Get the overall level of the song right (how loud or quiet it is), and achieve a good balance of frequencies in the song (making sure it's not too bright or too bass-heavy for instance)....yeah clearly not heh) the first 5 points don't really apply. The last however is confusing, as to me, this seems to be exactly what I've been doing all along and what mixing is for. I must be missing something here. Or am i....
So basically it boils down to volume at this point? If my track somehow manages to be in line with the rest of the music in itunes I'm good to go? Even that seems unnecessary as I constantly change the volumes of songs I get off beatport to mix with. When I'm doing a dj mix, each track and the master is capped at -3db to avoid clipping and even then I like to keep it around -1.5 to -1db below that just to keep it in the green. And it's very easy to do: this track is a bit quiet and needs +1 db, while this one is too loud and needs to come down -1db. So why is volume a big concern to begin with? Seems odd to me having to lower all your tracks just to raise them again in the end if they were never clipping to begin with."Yeah yeah", I hear you muttering, "but how do I master my songs in the first place?"
To put it bluntly, you don't.
What?
Let me say this again, in case you skipped over it. If you are writing and releasing your own songs, there is no reason to “master” them per se.
Everything you need to do to make a song sound polished and balanced can be done in the mixdown, and this is where you should focus 100% of all your attention. There's only one exception, and that's getting the overall volume of the song more inline with today's standards, and I'll come back to this later.
My biggest concern is sound quality on different speakers. I'm listening to this mainly on my Sony MDR-7506 headphones and i gotta say it sounds pretty sick...but so does everything coming through those. Sounds good on my computer speakers too, but how will this sound if someone were to play this on a big club system for example? Its a long shot i know, but its the principle of the matter. A big system could reveal the production quality is actually terrible. How would I ever know that without actually testing it on club speakers?
Like i said i must be missing something here, any help would be great. (Sorry, long post, thanks for making it this far)
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