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so you've finished a tune, the mixdown is done, theres no red and you are happy

but you want to play it in a club to test it, if you play the bounced mp3 straight from the software its going to sound weaker than the mastered tunes surrounding it

so, to give it that little extra boost - what are you doing to it?

compressor? limiter? how much?

I use an akai 4 way comp, but by no means am I scientific with it

what I'd like to do if and when I can afford it...

is to get a stereo vacuum comp and an alesis masterlink deck

I'll play my tunes in a club before I get them mastered
just have to turn the gain up a bit usually

i would love to get my tunes mastered proper, but until then, i just slap on a multiband compressor, and a soft clipper

I usually load the tune up into a sound editor like Sound Fordge and apply some of the Wavs plug ins. If you don't know what you are doing you can really screw up a mix. If this is the case I would suggest using only a limiter. Some others may be able to give you a little better advice but what I do is try to get my bassline to about -6 to -5 db. I might try applying 3db of limiting first and see where I am at. You might have to go back and apply more. If you know what you are doing it can get a little more involved but if you did you wouldn't be asking innit.

If I'm happy 98...100% with the mix, I use only limiter. Since I dont know nothing about mastering, I think I don't need to do anything else. Maybe a little EQ too. Before I used multiband compressors, but now I realize I'm not able to use them, they just screw up my tune.

alvin18 wrote:If I'm happy 98...100% with the mix, I use only limiter. Since I dont know nothing about mastering, I think I don't need to do anything else. Maybe a little EQ too. Before I used multiband compressors, but now I realize I'm not able to use them, they just screw up my tune.

Man speaks sense!

I mixdown to -3db then put Waves L2 on the master to boost the volume.

Subtractive EQ on a transparent EQ
Compression, generally very soft and with slow release
Additive EQ on a nice classy "valve" sounding EQ
Limiting, the most transparent.. just catching the transients that might clip

I mix into a compressor anyway... with a high ratio but not much gain reduction... note that there's a huge difference between mixing into a compressor and putting slight compression on afterwards...

I actually leave the compression on when i take the tune to the cutting house, it's only very slight so it's not a problem for them.

For rough mastering i then use multiband compression, a linear phase EQ and finally a limiter... sometimes the EQ goes before the mutilband, sometimes after... you have to experiment and there are no rules as such...

If in doubt then using L2 or similar is fine though.

if I need a tune to be louder and to stand up against others in a set I will use a valve style master limiter. ''Classic Master Limiter'' is a good one and its free..doesnt effect the sound too much if you only have the output up a little but it gives that little extra volume.

if i do anything, it's usually just a vintagewarmer on the 2buss acting to increase gain and maybe saturate. quite often it's nothing; just turn it up @ the mixer and boost the highs a bit.

i'm really new to this but i'm diggin on psp vintagewarmer on the master right now

i generally use Logic's adaptive limiter on the master. sometimes a multipressor before it, although like our friend up there ^^^^ i am a bit ambivalent about it and have trouble getting a good result so increasingly i don't bother.

in times gone past, i used to overnormalise things in Audition, compress them very lightly and then overnormalise them again. i still do sometimes. gets a better result than anything i've managed out of logic!

nothing if sending to master
otherwise a bit of vintage warmer or l2 for immediate cd play dubbage

FSTZ wrote:
is to get a stereo vacuum comp and an alesis masterlink deck

yeah the Masterlink is a bloody great 2-track! the converters are very nice.

personally, if im sending a track for mastering i'll usually leave the master bus alone, sorting out level and frequency balance in the mix... but for playing recently finished tunes and test mixes out that i havent had properly mastered I will do a quick "ghetto" master: gentle subtractive EQ and a small high-end lift around 14-16kHz, multiband compression followed by a fairly harsh limit with either Waves L2 (the hardware rack version) or Logic's Adaptive Limiter to get it nice and loud

I do all of the stuff at mixing stage. My master gets a 20Hz high pass and 18kHz low pass, then sometimes I just add a graphical EQ and go through all the bands and boost/reduce tiny bits to taste. Finally there's the limiter, which is there from the start, just in case, it usually just shaves a bit off the top of my snare hits.