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Mixing to Mastering?


psychedelicfever

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Hello,

 

Sorry if this is long..

 

I am attempting to mix and master my disco/pop/rock track. I know that music/art is subjective as its mainly about tinkering and experimenting but I am looking for ballpark or general examples as I am stuck.

 

 

Correct me if wrong:

 

Mixing is: ... make all faders zero, add gain stage to hit every track between -18db & -8 db, then add whatever effects or plugins desired?

 

Mastering is: ... use LUFS, RMS or another loudness meter to make sure your levels are where you want them to be depending on preference and/or genre, and that on every device or streaming platform the volumes are near the same?

 

 

Questions:

1. Is -8db the standard for stereo output? If not, what is a nice ballpark?

2.If -8db is the standard: I get ear fatigue at -8db, Can I turn down master volume and continue mixing?

 

(-23db gives no ear fatigue, but when played on a cell phone the volume is too low.)

 

 

Using the meters:

 

3. Do I use a VU meter to make sure the dial is hitting close to 0 on every single track? (Or only the instruments I want to? Ex: louder vocals on pop, louder drums on edm, etc.)

 

 

4. Is the VU meter only to check individual tracks or is it also placed on stereo output?

 

4b. If placed on stereo output, should it be hitting near 0?

 

 

5. Is LUFS only for mastering?

 

 

6. Do I use an LUFS meter for every single track (on stereo output) or individual tracks too?

 

 

7. Do I need to use RMS in addition to VU and LUFS?

 

 

8. Which meter do you recommend first if they all need to be used?

 

 

9. Which loudness meter plugin do you recommend? ( I downloaded YouLean, but don't know if logic multimeter has everything needed.)

 

 

 

 

Thank you so much for your time, I feel like I've hit a roadblock. Thank you for answering any if not just one question.

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Mixing is: ... make all faders zero, add gain stage to hit every track between -18db & -8 db, then add whatever effects or plugins desired?

 

That's not what mixing is. All these rules about levels that are floating around lead more to misunderstandings than being helpful.

 

Mixing is about balance, about making sure every instrument has its place in the stereo field and that it sounds as you want it.

You move faders, use compression, eq and effects to achieve all this.

 

Then you just make sure that your mix is not hitting red constantly on the stereo out.

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Never forget that mixing is, first and foremost, a creative process. Given the same song's multitrack session, no two mixing engineers will produce the same mix.

 

Also keep in mind that like in art, mixing is not necessarily about making everything sound "good" (whatever that may mean). It's about telling a story, creating an emotion. Here's a good example of that:

 

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Just for fun…

A few time ago, in the last 5 minutes of a lesson, before closing, one of my student asked me… “may I ask you a last question? Can you explain me how to mix a song?”

In 5 minutes?

Well, I’m still learning… mix, in my opinion, is 99% art, 1% technique….

Mastering is the opposite!

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If I’m allowed I recommend the soundgym.co mixing and mastering course. It’s free - the course just links you to a load of YouTube videos but does it in a structured way, rather than randomly searching and getting 50 different opinions from 50 different musicians and sound engineers about what mixing is.

 

Plus you get some of the soundgym practice lessons free and a fantastic community of people trying to improve their music.

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When you "mix" different instruments together, notice how they look on an EQ display or on a frequency histogram: each one emits a fairly wide range of frequencies from high to low, but there is one much-narrower band of frequencies where most of its "distinctive sound" occurs. Mixers often use EQ to "slot" the various instruments into different frequency areas so that they don't step on one another. They choose a selection of instruments (or, patches) so that all of the frequencies from low to high are well-represented so that the sound isn't "thin." (Unfortunately, to my ears lots of modern-day music is very thin.) They also distribute the sounds from left to right – just as you observe in the physical arrangement of players in a symphony orchestra. They might use different levels of reverb to suggest front-to-back depth or the size of the performance space. "A place for everything, and everything in its place."

 

With digital recording, you also have to be aware that the recording consists of "a very large file of numbers," and there is a maximum numeric value which by definition cannot be exceeded. "A 16-bit number cannot exceed the value 65,535," and so on. Unlike an analog recording, which will reward you with distortion that you may or may not like when the magnetic field breaks down as the tape passes by, a digital recording "gets a burr haircut." It turns into a square wave: anything above the maximum number is, "simply, gone." It is literally data loss. Your DAW expresses this idea to you in "familiar, analog terms," but the situation and its cause is entirely numeric.

 

"Mastering," versus "mixing," is particularly concerned with distribution. For instance, is this going to be burned onto a 16-bit "CD" with no compression? Or is it going to be listened-to on an MP3 player – having been compressed like hell – through "earbuds?" Another digital-player format, perhaps? The PA-system of a great big grocery or department store? How about a vinyl disk, and if so is it going to be on an "inner" or an "outer" track? Satellite radio? Analog broadcast radio? In order to sound good on these different delivery platforms, a single song might be "mastered" in several different ways. It is rather like "pre-flighting" in the world of printing presses, where the choice of ink becomes important. Back in the days when The Beatles were recording in London's finest studios, they kept a set of "cheap AM radio speakers" in the listening room, along with a filter that imitated what AM would do to sound, because they knew that a lot of their audience would be listening that way.

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