Song Mastering & Mixing - Tips For Appropriate Mastering & Mixing
I compose songs myself and made some experiences with recording and mastering some stuff over the last few years
. And I think I have some advices and tips for those of you who want to create their own powerful mixes, but are only short on experience or don't have any at all with the proper use of mastering plug-ins.
So, let's assume you have got all your recordings done properly and the basic track settings are okay and somewhat meet your requirements -- by that I mean that you're contented with your recordings and that you already set up all the effects and sounds on the single tracks.
Compression & Gain On Regular Tracks
I have to add here that I am working with "Logic Studio" as my studio software, so if you're using the "Express" version or any other software, some of the plug-ins that I'm going to mention here might possibly not be familiar to you.
The first thing you would want to do is to put both a compressor and the gain plug-in on every single track, except for the buses, auxiliaries, and output(s) -- I'll come to talk about how to treat these later on. It probably might seem a bit excessive to you to provide every single track with a compressor, but I can tell you from my own experience that especially rock-songs tend to sound 'weak' if their tracks are left uncompressed. This oftentimes entails that in certain passages of your song some tracks or instruments are unfortunately sort of 'drowned' by other tracks of which the volume level is currently higher.
You could say that your song might sound kind of blurred or fuzzy which turns out to be especially annoying since this makes it very difficult to emphasize certain elements. No track actually sticks out, instead they seem to work against each other so that when you put up the volume level of a particular track this one drowns anything else.
So make sure to compress all your regular tracks. Now, be also careful not to overdo your compression. The compressor is supposed to smooth out the track's peaks in order to bring these into line with the lower amplitudes. By not overdoing the compression I mean that you should adjust your compressor to the particular track or instrument and to the way your instrument is played.
To tracks with softly picked guitars I prefer to apply soft compression, that is a long attack time (about 26.0 ms), a long release time (about 880.0 ms), a soft knee, a relatively low ratio, and probably most importantly, don't put the compressor threshold too low, more in first third under 0.0 dB, for otherwise your recorded material starts to sound 'hard' and too 'pushy'.
Let's say you're instead working on a hard rock song and have your guitars playing a combination of power-chords and scale based riffs provided with punchy overdrive-sounds. In this case you would rather want to eliminate volume fluctuations and hence your tracks to be more present. So your compressors should of course be set up a bit diversely.
I'd recommend to use a short attack, so your sound becomes punchy as the compressor attacks fast -- but don't set the attack to zero, for otherwise artifacts may occur. The setting of the release time is at your discretion -- the less you give, the more 'pushy' the track becomes. High ratio, a hard knee, and a low compressor threshold guarantee that your track gets compressed as much as possible -- the lower your threshold is, the more of the lower amplitudes are raised.
But I want to point out that especially low thresholds can lead to flatness and thus can have the exact contrary effect of what you want to achieve by using compression. Bringing all amplitudes roughly into line with each other can also result in an unexciting sounding track, for a recording with absolutely no emphasis might probably not be what you imagined as well, so just try things out in order to find 'the golden mean' -- a mixture of both, emphasis and clarity is mostly the best way, and sometimes even emphasis is what makes the clarity.
Make sure always to put your compressor at the end of a channel-strip-setting and after the compressor the gain plug-in. The gain is simply a fader with a wider volume range than that of your track, and some additional features like a mono switch and a left-to-right switch. It's an astonishingly useful tool since you can leave your track fader set to zero and use the gain instead. It might be very helpful to leave all your track faders at zero dB if you want to put down the volume of some instruments equally, but not of the entire group. Thus you can easily supervise if your instruments are still in the right ratio to each other.
You may laugh, but sometimes when your faders are set to different volume positions and you put down their faders simultaneously, the volumes do not necessarily decrease proportionally for the dB scale is plotted logarithmically. And if you put them back to their old position simultaneously again, not all faders exactly reach their original position -- unfortunately.
Compression & Limitation On Auxiliaries, Busses & Outputs
Normally you would put your delays and reverbs on auxiliary tracks (also known as 'aux') which the original signals are routed to in order to provide them with delay or reverb. You would also use bus tracks in order to divide all your tracks into groups, thus you can easily control each of these instrument groups through one fader.
Of course you can also apply some compression to the bus tracks if you will, but in my experience it's not really beneficial for a positive outcome -- at most you more likely will have to grapple with unwanted artifacts and so-called 'overcompression' through which the song actually starts sounding kind of 'unfortunate' to put it like that.
Whether or not I'd definitely advise you against applying compression to auxiliary tracks. It really serves no particular purpose doing that, in fact your signals being routed to your auxiliaries are already compressed, and so the compression is provided with the auxiliary's effect, too. Naturally, you can try that out as well, but I tell you, it'll sound awful!
Let's come to my favorite part regarding to mastering: compressing and limiting the output. For this one I use a compressor and after that I put an 'Adaptive Limiter'. Earlier I used to apply 'multipression' which works pretty much like normal compression except for the fact that you're able to set up the range of four frequency bands and then compress those individually. But I prefer equalizing the particular elements first and then applying a regular compression, for otherwise you'd eventually push frequencies of elements as well that you normally wouldn't want to hear in the foreground because the Multipressor applies to the entire song, once it's plugged into the output.
The Adaptive Limiter is quite magical. It's basically a limiter, but the special thing about it is that, in contrast to a normal one, you can adapt the input scale to the volume of your incoming signal which means that you're able to easily avoid overloads and thus artifacts. Furthermore, you can adjust the output volume so your output signal stays under zero dB, too -- I recommend to set the output scale to -0.1 dB. The Adaptive Limiter also equipped with an adjustable lookahead, a gain control, and some more. The gain control is very important as well. You'd definitely want to use that one as it gives your song more power and makes it so to speak more 'juicy'.
But you should be careful using this either, for too much gain can also cause artifacts even though there is no actual overload in the output. It's an unpleasant side effect that occurs when the limiter has to force down the very peaks of your signal like hell as they're piling up while the signal is boosted by the additionally applied gain.
By the way, I suggest to use an Adaptive Limiter solely and without a pre-connected compressor if you're working on 'soft' songs, such as ballads, orchestral music, and instrumentals. I can tell from my own experience that it is detrimental to this kind of music -- music that doesn't require as it were 'extra force' to sound punchy or more powerful -- for it possibly destroys or at least disturbs that quiet effect and delicate kind of vibrancy that makes up these pieces.
(c) Linus Schachten 2010 (Hamburg, Germany). All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
My brother and I recorded the brilliant "White Room" by Cream and also shot a video. The aspects I explained to you above, I took into consideration, too, with mastering this song -- except I actually applied my reverb to the output, for we wanted the song to sound more like we were really recording this in that very room.
by: Linus Schachten
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