RecordingMaster
A Sarcastic Statement
Hi there,
I just finished doing a first mix down of a song that my band recorded in my studio. I've been working on it and have done all the mixing to a point where all of the effects, pans, eq's, compression and volume levels are all satisfactory. I sent to the band and they're all happy to proceed with mastering. When I look as the master bus with a frequency spectrum analyser it looks something similar to this:
. Sorry I don't have a screen shot since I'm not at home. But what it is is a little more build up of the low end and the high end being light.
When I listen to the mix in the studio or anywhere else, everything is translating well and nothing sounds bad, frequency wise. Each element sounds good on it's own and in the mix and the whole mix sounds pretty balanced. Of course, mastering will help give it that final polish, but the highs, mid and lows sound good to my ears. It's not too dull or overly bright imo.
So my question is, what should I do to fix that issue I see on the graph? Even though it sounds decent, I feel that it should be pretty even all the way across. I plan on doing quick and dirty mastering on my own for each individual song, until they're all done, then we'll get them professionally mastered some day. Some of you will maybe say use a multi-band compressor and some eq to adjust the overall mix. Some will say to go into the mix and adjust the levels there. So in this case, it'd be make the highs on everything higher in db's and the lows on everything lower in db's. My issue is, everything is pretty rolled off in the low end. Some stuff at 60, some at 80, some at 220, etc. The ONLY things that don't have a semi-aggressive roll off are the bass guitar (hell even that is rolled to 50) and the kick drum. Most of the stuff has a roll off slope of anywhere from -6 octave all the way up to -24 octave. I wanted to preserve SOME low end in some of the tracks like rhythm guits and the like, so I gave those ones less steep of a slope. So maybe I should make the slope as steep as it goes for every track other than the bass and kick? Seems drastic.
So if I went in to adjust the bass guitar and kick to have less bass freq's they would sound too thin imo. I want them to occupy the low end. If I go and turn up the highs on all the tracks that are intended to have good healthy highs, they get too trebly each on their own. So to me, eq'ing the whole mix sounds like a better strategy so I'm not making drastic adjustments on every single track to make the graph look better and potentially changes the way the individual instruments sound.
Some may say if it sounds fine, leave it. So I would, but the main concern i am saying/asking all this is because when i listen to it in the car with the bass up to a healthy level or cranked on soundcloud with headphones (soundcloud compresses it quite a bit) the floor tom and kick drum are distorting the speakers a bit in the low end. It's not the waveform that's distorted, I think it's just that low frequency build up from all the tracks at once causing that.
What should I do? Fix it in mix and risk having a thin kick and bass guitar? Adjust the whole wave with eq and mulitband compression? Make the roll off slopes of everything steeper? etc..
Maybe this belongs in the mixing thread (?), but hopefully you can help. Thanks!
I just finished doing a first mix down of a song that my band recorded in my studio. I've been working on it and have done all the mixing to a point where all of the effects, pans, eq's, compression and volume levels are all satisfactory. I sent to the band and they're all happy to proceed with mastering. When I look as the master bus with a frequency spectrum analyser it looks something similar to this:
. Sorry I don't have a screen shot since I'm not at home. But what it is is a little more build up of the low end and the high end being light.When I listen to the mix in the studio or anywhere else, everything is translating well and nothing sounds bad, frequency wise. Each element sounds good on it's own and in the mix and the whole mix sounds pretty balanced. Of course, mastering will help give it that final polish, but the highs, mid and lows sound good to my ears. It's not too dull or overly bright imo.
So my question is, what should I do to fix that issue I see on the graph? Even though it sounds decent, I feel that it should be pretty even all the way across. I plan on doing quick and dirty mastering on my own for each individual song, until they're all done, then we'll get them professionally mastered some day. Some of you will maybe say use a multi-band compressor and some eq to adjust the overall mix. Some will say to go into the mix and adjust the levels there. So in this case, it'd be make the highs on everything higher in db's and the lows on everything lower in db's. My issue is, everything is pretty rolled off in the low end. Some stuff at 60, some at 80, some at 220, etc. The ONLY things that don't have a semi-aggressive roll off are the bass guitar (hell even that is rolled to 50) and the kick drum. Most of the stuff has a roll off slope of anywhere from -6 octave all the way up to -24 octave. I wanted to preserve SOME low end in some of the tracks like rhythm guits and the like, so I gave those ones less steep of a slope. So maybe I should make the slope as steep as it goes for every track other than the bass and kick? Seems drastic.
So if I went in to adjust the bass guitar and kick to have less bass freq's they would sound too thin imo. I want them to occupy the low end. If I go and turn up the highs on all the tracks that are intended to have good healthy highs, they get too trebly each on their own. So to me, eq'ing the whole mix sounds like a better strategy so I'm not making drastic adjustments on every single track to make the graph look better and potentially changes the way the individual instruments sound.
Some may say if it sounds fine, leave it. So I would, but the main concern i am saying/asking all this is because when i listen to it in the car with the bass up to a healthy level or cranked on soundcloud with headphones (soundcloud compresses it quite a bit) the floor tom and kick drum are distorting the speakers a bit in the low end. It's not the waveform that's distorted, I think it's just that low frequency build up from all the tracks at once causing that.
What should I do? Fix it in mix and risk having a thin kick and bass guitar? Adjust the whole wave with eq and mulitband compression? Make the roll off slopes of everything steeper? etc..
Maybe this belongs in the mixing thread (?), but hopefully you can help. Thanks!
