gain structure and mixing aka THE MONEYSHOT THREAD

[Leax]

Hi there !
I won't be very original, but this thread taught me a lot about good mixing techniques and workflow, I just finished the 28 pages and I would like to thank all the guys who delivered such useful information, and the first of all, macc !

I may have a question or two one of these days, I'll probably come back there ! Cheers !

[paradigm_x]

Basically our ears are sluts, they'll spread their cochlea for any old big sound that comes along.

[wobbafet]

This thread is gold. I was redirected here from my questions on production, and I can't wait to take this info home (i'm at uni right now) and plug it into my tunes.
Big thanks everyone!

[Trenchfoot]

I dont know if anyone has posted this, but i found this pretty useful.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Dubstep-Mixin ... id=3115417

Theres 7 parts.

[-[2]DAY_-]

I dont know if anyone has posted this, but i found this pretty useful.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Dubstep-Mixin ... id=3115417

Theres 7 parts.

nice one, more tips never hurt

[Ongelegen]

I dont know if anyone has posted this, but i found this pretty useful.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Dubstep-Mixin ... id=3115417

Theres 7 parts.

Top bass: 44khz - 20khz

lol wut?

[therook]

This thread changed my life. All my kudos and love to everyone who chipped in!

[Sirius]

after gain structure.... this thread is pretty much complete.

We need 2 more threads.
1 about EQ and another about spatial acoustics!!

the 3 most important things when mixing down!

fuck I read soooo many pages of this thread, I'm glad I didn't come across anything new,
shows all my learning is paying off!!

!!chea

[Debaser1]

Must say after a lot of reading and experimenting, my current mixes are sounding ace thanks to this thread (macc in particular).

My question is: Is there a right and wrong way to use a limiter? I produce everything in reason and export to logic for further mastering (if needed) usually. Now in Logic there's an adaptive limiter and a standard limiter (not to mention things like silly maximisers in Reason, but that's another cookie). I generally turn the input scale down a lot and the gain up a lot, but is that right. Sometimes I get a tad of distortion (FAIL). I'm really rubbish with mastering tunes. I think I'm fine with mixing, but overall track management after mixing is my downfall. So yeah, limiters/expansion of dynamics/size is my question. How do you use a limiter well???

Much appreciated

[DJ Crackle]

Must say after a lot of reading and experimenting, my current mixes are sounding ace thanks to this thread (macc in particular).

My question is: Is there a right and wrong way to use a limiter? I produce everything in reason and export to logic for further mastering (if needed) usually. Now in Logic there's an adaptive limiter and a standard limiter (not to mention things like silly maximisers in Reason, but that's another cookie). I generally turn the input scale down a lot and the gain up a lot, but is that right. Sometimes I get a tad of distortion (FAIL). I'm really rubbish with mastering tunes. I think I'm fine with mixing, but overall track management after mixing is my downfall. So yeah, limiters/expansion of dynamics/size is my question. How do you use a limiter well???

Much appreciated

don't ever use limiters myself, but did a quick google search and this post makes sense to me

Limiting has a different goal than compressing. When limiting, the device should only come on occasionally, in order to "limit" how loud the "occasional" peaks are. So, yes, faster attack times are necessary to catch and "limit" the peaks. Then, because you've knocked a few decibels off the loudest peaks, you can turn up the entire track. Limiting should be transparent. If you can hear it, it's bad. If you are familiar with the four parts of a wave (attack, decay, sustain, and release), the perfect limiting action will be fast enough to bring down the attack on each overly spikey transient without knocking down the level of the decay, sustain, or release (because that would diminish the fullness and body of the sound). Limiting is quieting down the occasional spikes. Only. As invisibly as possible.

taken from here
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/so-much- ... miter.html

[travis_baker]

thanks for all the help so far but one quick dumb question. ok when i put a spectrum analyser on my master channel it registers my peaks way lower than what i set them at, and when i try bring them up to were there supposed to be on the spectrum display there in clipping teritory. so if i put a kick in the drum rack set my drums to roughly -10db it'll show it peaking at say 80Hz at around -15db. i know its a silly question but a response would be much appreciated.

[staticcast]

thanks for all the help so far but one quick dumb question. ok when i put a spectrum analyser on my master channel it registers my peaks way lower than what i set them at, and when i try bring them up to were there supposed to be on the spectrum display there in clipping teritory. so if i put a kick in the drum rack set my drums to roughly -10db it'll show it peaking at say 80Hz at around -15db. i know its a silly question but a response would be much appreciated.

Don't use a spectrum analyser to monitor the level of a channel. Unless you're dealing with a sine wave (actually, even if you're dealing with a sine wave, for reasons not worth going into), your spectrum reading will never be as high as the peaks on your channel meter. Very loosely speaking, your channel meter is displaying some indication of the sum of the spectrum across all frequencies.

[travis_baker]

thanks for all the help so far but one quick dumb question. ok when i put a spectrum analyser on my master channel it registers my peaks way lower than what i set them at, and when i try bring them up to were there supposed to be on the spectrum display there in clipping teritory. so if i put a kick in the drum rack set my drums to roughly -10db it'll show it peaking at say 80Hz at around -15db. i know its a silly question but a response would be much appreciated.

Don't use a spectrum analyser to monitor the level of a channel. Unless you're dealing with a sine wave (actually, even if you're dealing with a sine wave, for reasons not worth going into), your spectrum reading will never be as high as the peaks on your channel meter. Very loosely speaking, your channel meter is displaying some indication of the sum of the spectrum across all frequencies.

Ahk so it comes down to your ears to make the finer adjustments? or is there another way around it.

[amphibian]

No, otherwise mastering engineers wouldn't have a job.

[travis_baker]

No, otherwise mastering engineers wouldn't have a job.

how can i train my ears..? i bet theres a massive thread on this.

[macc]

Listen to lots of music, do lots of practice (listening/engineering), improve your monitoring situation, repeat all of the above for 20+ years. It's not an overnight thing. And a computer won't do it for you. Music is made by people

As for why the analyser shows the levels the way it does; SImply put, the total energy shown on your channel's peak meter (as discussed in this thread) is divided between the various constituent frequencies of whatever sound you're looking at.

As Static_Cast said - don't use an analyser to measure peak levels, that's what a peak meter is for

[travis_baker]

Listen to lots of music, do lots of practice (listening/engineering), improve your monitoring situation, repeat all of the above for 20+ years. It's not an overnight thing. And a computer won't do it for you. Music is made by people

As for why the analyser shows the levels the way it does; SImply put, the total energy shown on your channel's peak meter (as discussed in this thread) is divided between the various constituent frequencies of whatever sound you're looking at.

As Static_Cast said - don't use an analyser to measure peak levels, that's what a peak meter is for

thanks macc it would be more like 100 years if wasnt for you and a few others on this thread... just discovered it like a week ago.

[muteqx]

I've been reading this thread on and off for a month or two now, and as others have said, it's an absolute goldmine of knowledge! Many thanks to all the contributors for sharing your thoughts and considerable wisdom!

Now, I wonder if I could request a bit of help on this one from macc or anybody else who feels like chipping in:

I'm currently mixing the tracks for my album, which coincidentally is going a lot, lot smoother thanks to this thread. When I compare my tracks to other commercially released tracks at matched subjective levels, the commercially released tracks tend to have heavier bass and perhaps a bit less on the top than my tracks do.

Now, to my ears, some of them actually sound less good than the tracks I'm mixing myself - sort of muddier, with excessively pumped up bass which doesn't add clarity, and just sounds a bit too rumbly. I actually prefer the sonic characteristics of my own mixes to many of these tracks, when it really comes down to it - the bass still sounds nice and weighty to me, and you can really hear everything else that's going on.

But, here's the kicker: I've only been noticing how excessively pumped and muddy these tracks sound since listening to them in my studio on my monitors (which btw are nothing special, just Tannoy Reveal mk1 and a rather basic sub unit) at considerably higher volumes than I normally listen to them at, and because I've been digging into the reference material I've been collecting using various tools, analysers etc. Not so long ago, I thought all of them sounded fantastic!!

I picked the reference tracks I'm using because they are tracks I know well, and which I thought the production was pretty decent on, based mostly on listening to them on the hi-fi in my lounge. That hi-fi is nothing special either, but it has pretty decent big speakers and has always sounded "average" but clear and big enough to me - so I figured stuff which sounds good on that hi-fi and which I know well is probably a good choice for me to use as reference material in the studio.

I'm not just using dubstep tracks, but a range of music from similar-ish genres as well as dubstep, to give my ears the broadest palette of "decent sounding" tracks to compare against. I have tried hard to pick tracks I know inside-out.

So, I guess my question is:

Do I just keep mixing stuff as it sounds great to me - trying to get every element of the track sitting nice and clearly in the mix? Pros: It sounds fine as far as I can tell, and I'm achieving a lot of consistency between my different tracks now I'm mixing them iteratively as a collection. Con: I'm not sure if I just like things a bit more toppy, or perhaps it my monitor setup or both, and actually I need to be giving it a bit more bass.

Or, do I try to match my reference tracks a bit better in terms of overall EQ curve and sound, even though actually that would sound a bit less good to my ears?

You may say "that's a decision the mastering engineer will make" and I guess I'd agree with you, but since the budget for this album is pretty low in general (I'm not doing it to make money, so any I do make is a bonus really), I'm almost certainly unable to pay a dedicated mastering engineer the £400 or thereabouts that it would cost to do it.

I do have the next best thing lined up, which is that a friend of mine who is an experienced producer (including music for mainstream TV) has offered to take a listen to the mixes and master them for me as best he can in his (very nice) home studio. The room he has is good, but it's not comprehensively acoustically treated like a mastering studio would undoubtedly be. He's a very experienced producer and engineer, and he has some really decent mastering outboard gear (and the knowhow to use it), but I don't think he has particularly much experience of dubstep, although he does write other electronic genres pretty regularly. I expect he'll get it sounding sweet, but I'd like to help him in the right direction as much as I possibly can.

So, my aim with these mixes is to get them so close to what I'm aiming for eventually that there's almost nothing for a mastering engineer to do, other than apply final limiting. Certainly, he may well do more than that, but essentially, if I can hear anything at all which needs fixing, I am going back to my mix and fixing it there, and not leaving it to the mastering engineer.

My mixes are sounding pretty sweet to me (even after time away from them) - shall I keep it that way, or shall I try to more closely copy the sound (by which I mean overall EQ balance, mostly) of the commercially released tracks?

(Damn, sorry it's taken me so many words to ask that! Thanks in advance for any advice offered!)

[macc]

Wotcher boss

If all the reference tracks you have seem to have a common problem - rumbly/less tops/bit fuller/muddier etc - and yours sound crispy, clear and all that sort of thing, then it's almost certainly down to deficiencies in your monitoring. Not monitors, but the room, the speakers, their placement, your placement, treatment, blah blah. It's all part of a single system.

If your tracks sound clearer/brighter and with a bit less bass than all your refs, then inevitably once they are taken to another place and played in context against x other tunes, they'll sound thin. Without wanting to sound like a massive arsehole, that's why we call them reference tracks, innit. You use them as a reference for what sounds good. That's why you chose them

Nobody *ever* mixes their song so they think it sounds crap. Everyone mixes it so they think it sounds great, or as best they can get it... except it turns out their room was lying to them. This is the crux of room acoustics. That's why you get someone else to have a look at it - preferably someone with an monitoring environment that avoids all those problems, rather than just trading them for a different set of problems (though objectivity is always good). Point being, if you were to hear those ref tracks in a perfect room, they'd quite likely sound like your tracks sound to you now. Then when you played your own, they'd sound bright.

With time, lots and lots of listening and so on, your perception will change. Your ears will start to hear those ref tunes as sounding good, and your own stuff as bright. This is 'knowing your system'. In the meantime, you can only do what you feel is best for your music, what sounds best to you. Then you just have to have faith that your man knows what he is doing, and put your trust in his judgement.

Good luck!

[muteqx]

Thanks very much macc!

It's funny, only a few hours after posting that, I had some thoughts in a similar direction myself, and realised that I've probably got the subwoofer turned up a bit too loud. So I turned the sub down so that the reference tracks sounded less muddy, and as you predicted, my tracks now sound a bit bright, and the reference material sounds pretty rounded again.

So anyway, this is the "knowing my system" part of it, and I think I just took a step closer to that. Shouldn't be a massive amount of work to go back and sort the current mixes out - I think overall, I'll probably end up just turning down other stuff relative to the bass, and maybe rolling a little off the mids and tops.

One more question about the low end while I have your attention, if you don't mind:

Kicks!!! I've rolled off most (not all) of the high-energy, low-frequency content of my kicks, so as to leave enough space for the bass. Would I be right in thinking that generally, you don't want to completely remove all low frequencies from your kick, just rein them in somewhat so that the bass has enough space to get through? I have a feeling I may have EQed them all a bit too much, so I now have punchy but not particularly hefty kick sounds.

I'd probably like a bit more low frequency content and meat in those kicks, but have become a bit scared of allowing it through, for fear that it will mess with the bass too much. Is it OK to have some low frequency kick content getting through as long as it doesn't get in the way of the bass and make things sound muddy down there?

I've been writing electronic music for 18 years - more than half my life! Seems mad to still be asking these kind of questions, but I've never got as far as finishing an album before (and I may still kick the bucket before I finish this one LOL!), so much of this finishing off process is still new to me. Yesterday I ordered the Bob Katz "Mastering Audio" book and await it's arrival eagerly - time I plugged a few of these gaps in my knowledge.

Might you write a book one day Mr. Macc? Maybe there isn't much you can say which hasn't already been said before by someone else, but I like your way of explaining things because it's nice and clear - and often entertaining to read too. So, if you ever do write a book about your take on audio, I'd buy it and read it inside out! Here's hoping!