Smoothing fade out?

YanKleber

YanKleber

Retired
I have had a hard time with fade outs in the very end.

Normally I make my fades by cutting it in two slopes. The first one is shorter and steeper and the second is longer and very smooth. For instances in a 30 seconds fade out, I would cut 8 dB in the first 5-6 seconds and then would go to infinite dB for the rest of the time.

Overall the fade out sounds good and linear (pleasant for the ears) BUT in the very end (last 0.5 to 1 second) it's not too hard to notice that it will disappear suddenly. Maybe it is an excess of preciosity of mine but I am sure that I have heard fades on commercial tracks that seem to continuously fade to the eternity in micro micro micro dB. OK, I am not willing to compare my awful mixes with those ones, it is just that maybe I am lacking a simple tip that may do the trick and I wouldn't like to pass this...

Any idea?

Thanks!
 
30 second fade out? really? Below a certain level, your monitors may just not be seeing enough voltage to make audible sound.
I usually start the fade out slow, then end it more quickly. You can set fadeout to a curve, as well, in Reaper.
 
30 seconds is a pretty long fade out.

Do you use the fade tool in Reaper? On the right hand side of your waveform in the track window, hover the mouse over the end of the wave item. The mouse cursor changes, and you can grab the wav to adjust its length. If you hover over the top right hand corner of the wave item, the cursor changes to the fade tool. Click and drag left to set the fadeout length. Right-click to choose from several different fade tapers. There are linear, logarithmic, and a few others to choose from. See if any of those tapers suit your needs. I never use the linear one, but all of my fades are only several seconds long at most.
 
Tadpui, this is a very handy information. Although I already knew that tool and have used it to cut individual tracks I never would imagine to use it to fade the whole tune just because there is not any wave form in the master track (unless if it is a mixed down stereo tune).

Then it made me think that I may be looking through a wrong perspective: should the fade out to be worked only at mastering and never at mixing step? If yes, then at mixing time should I apply a simple straight fade out (just to indicate that there is a fade there) or do not apply any fade at all?

Thanks!
 
That's pretty much what I do. I just mix the project, then render it to a 24-bit WAV file. I load the mixdown into a new project, apply my "mastering" plugins to it, adjust the start and end points, and apply any fade-in or fade-out there. Then I render it to an MP3 from there. Sometimes I get lazy and render it directly to MP3 from my original project, but I lose the ability to do the fades easily.
 
One thing you might consider is to fade the individual active tracks rather than the master track. Trim everything to the same length first, then multi-select and start with the same fade on everything. What I often find is that, as the volume is reduced, certain elements poke through that didn't when everything was at full volume.. for example the drums might sound disproportionately loud after gain on everything is reduced by a certain amount. Then, you'd go from there addressing things one-by-one as they poke out of the mix.. fade those things earlier, or change the shape. In the most natural sounding fades, the elements should reduce at slightly different rates/times. It's not as convoluted as it sounds. :)
 
Tadpui, since I read your previous post I imagined that I was doing the thing the wrong way. Basically I think that due to my inexperience and ignorance in the mixing subject I was trying to do mix and master at the same time. This morning I revisited a couple tunes that I had called as 'finished' and figured out that when I mixed them a few months ago I had applied some filters such as equalizer and compressor on master tracks (that is something to be done at mastering step). Nonetheless they weren't sounding bad at all I suspect that it could leave me without too much room to work in the whole album mastering. Then I removed the master plugins, compensated a few levels and surprisingly it didn't change too much and now it looks more correct for me as a mix. :)

Fat_fleet, you have a point. I was listening to one of my tunes that fades out along a sung part and noticed that at certain point the voice seems to be louder than it should in comparison to the other instruments (although it was sounding well balanced before the fade).

I think that in mostly of cases the mix-down fade will work well and that some times a separate fade will be necessary.

Excellent inputs, mates! Thank you very much!

:listeningmusic:

PS: By the way, to fade the tunes at mix time I was using the volume trim in the master tracks... :p
 
Yeah, 30 seconds is an extremely long fadeout!
If my song has an actual 'final end' then the fade out length will depend on any 'lingering' notes - the long sustain of a guitar or bass note, for example, and could stretch to 4 or 5 seconds. In the mix I will fade individual tracks linearly, using volume auto for notes that continue past that (an organ part that was held extra long, for example).
If the song has an atual full-sound fadeout going on, I will do an initial slow linear fade of a few dB for a few seconds, then a quicker final fade. I tried the various Reaper logarithmic fades and didn't like them any better than linear fades.
 
I fade out each track to make sure there are no unwanted noises at the end of any.

I leave a whole-of-song fade out to the mastering stage.
 
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