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mastering tips please


DrPhibes

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awesome awesome advice everyone, I am improving my mixing and mastering game, but also admittedly making many horrendous versions of tracks while experimenting.

Here is a few more questions to discuss if you like;

First off, I recently watched a masterclass with Break (absolute beast if you do not know him) and he very briefly says something like, " so im gonna apply some compression here on the sub and get an overall gain of about 2 dB in the final output". question: how does compression relate to overall output? and how do you know what settings are a good start?

and Second; is it considered a bad practice to export a final project into a finished (single mastered) track from MIDI, so in other words, must you export everything into audio, then use that as your final piece?

again yall, huge big ups for all the amazing input and advice! this thread has been extremely helpful  

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oh yeah one more question

after hours upon hours of edits and watching and researching the subject of mastering I have come to a conclusion. I wish to know if this seems (although maybe simplified) accurate. 

 A notable difference between a mixdown and mastering is; in the mixdown you are dealing with all the given recorded tracks you have (ie, drums, bass, midrange fx and junk, percussion, etc) whereas when mastering you are more likely dealing with the final outputted master track which includes all the elements of a song in a single audio waveform.

also, if this statement is true, what is the ideal peak and rms output to have a final mixdown before heading into a mastering stage?

thanks very much

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eprom has an awesome article on the old archives of gltichhopforum regarding this topic. i'm too lazy to go dig it up now, but i'll give you the jist of it.

shoot for transients peaking no louder than -6 db on a mixdown. get everything sitting the way you want it. then export all the stuff as wavs in groups. this way you won't be tempted to keep going back and micro-editing stuff, and you save the cpu from having to rereder and process all those sounds from plugins

harmonic exciters (basically mild saturators applied to certain bandwidths) can make sounds shine where they need to to stand out in a master without having to pump the gain.

waves, iszotpe, whatever you're using, will work best with a quieter mixdown because they can apply cleaner gain and compression to give you a much more solid master than just pumping levels in a daw.

and fun little weird thing with final gain.. koan sound's masters usually come out around -6 db anyways. they just properly emphasize the right freqs in their mixdowns to make the percieved loudness stand out more than the actual loudness of their track due to just flat out gorgeous mixdowns.

 

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