hi guys mastering advice plzz

[JamesBass123]

ok so i made a dubstepish song and i want to get it mastered profesionaly but they need a wav with headroom but i cant find the albeton file to do that but i have a wav , i was wondering if i could open the wav turn it down then render it ouut and send that? it doesnt clip

thanks

[ascent]

just turn everything down on the mixer
also don't bother wasting money on mastering until the mix is perfect

[macc]

ok so i made a dubstepish song and i want to get it mastered profesionaly but they need a wav with headroom but i cant find the albeton file to do that but i have a wav , i was wondering if i could open the wav turn it down then render it ouut and send that? it doesnt clip

thanks

If it doesn't clip then there's no need to turn it down

[jaimelee]

Make the song cap at like -6db when you render it out as a wav.

Also I agree with Ascent, make sure your mix down is bang on or else it won't matter.

[Dreadfunk]

Don't waste your money. Get it sounding good, gain structured properly, etc. If you want some volume for playing it out, or for itunes or whatever, then slap a good limiter (or a mastering suite like Ozone) on it. If it's gained properly it shouldn't take much to get it up to snuff (volume wise) with a few plugins.

[safeandsound]

When you export the file there should be an option for 24 bit and .wav or .aiff, either format is good
for a mastering engineer.

Clipping can be identified in a number of ways:

1)Red lights appearing on your master bus metering.

2)Zooming into your peaks in the resultant .wav/.aiff file and seeing if they looked squared off or flat topped.
If they are it's probably clipped, as a comprmise to adjusting your mix just pull your master down by the required amount of dB
to top clipping from occurring.

Some mastering engineer will happily offer mix feedback if it's not quite primetime for mastering.
Free previews are not uncommon either.

cheers

SafeandSound Mastering
online mastering

[jaws]

taking the wav file and just gaining it down wont help the mastering engineer (they're going to just have to turn it back up again, and the relative headroom will be the same).

You want to send him the best possible mix you can do without any sort of limiting or eq on the master bus (I will add a bit of master bus compression on my mixes because sometimes I mix with a master bus compressor on, but I'm using an alan smart C2 which is a high quality hardware bus compressor, and in the end I will send a version with no compression at all so they have more flexibility). You can send them a version with your eq and limiter if you think it sounds good as a reference, but sending them a mix already squashed and eq'd makes their job harder.

[Littlefoot]

ok so i made a dubstepish song and i want to get it mastered profesionaly but they need a wav with headroom but i cant find the albeton file to do that but i have a wav , i was wondering if i could open the wav turn it down then render it ouut and send that? it doesnt clip

thanks

If you can't find the Ableton file that is a shame indeed, what I would suggest in this case (as this happens sometimes to my clients) is that you do as Barry mentions above and send it to an ME, explaining what you said in the OP and seeing if they feel it's workable..