combining mixing and mastering

[KingstonRock]

I'm on my third demo recording for friend's bands and my band is almost done with the album. If the album comes out good I'll have it professionally mastered. But as far as the demos go, when I try to mix and "master," some compression and peak limiting, seperately the relative levels of all the instruments get messed up, specfically the stuff in the middle of the mix goes down and the far left and right get louder.

Lately I've been trying to mix with a compressor and ultramaximizer on the main buss and that way I can get my levels right with peak limiting. Any obvious reasons why this is a bad idea?

But of course in the pro realm mixing and mastering is always seperate. So are drums and vocals actually louder in the original pro mixes, or is pro mastering just a more transparent, as far as relative levels, process?

Another question, a local studio just got a trident console, dont know what kind but its big, and an array of apogee conversion. I've heard the summing on a good analog board is much better than in multi track recording apps, so for our album would it be worth it to get a day of studio time for mixdown through their huge board and apogee converters. I figured I could do the mixes at home, and then bring my computer to the studio and all I would have to do is dial in the pans on their board and mix down to their masterlink or back to my computer.

 

[sjoko2]

Never mix with mastering plug-ins / limiting / compression on your LR bus. If you do, all you do is fool yourself.
Get your mixes to sound right "clean".
Also, if you mix with mastering toys on the LR bus you will present a mastering engineer with a file that is basically useless to him.

Mix your songs properly, take your time, until you arte satisfied that they sound as good as they can get. Don't push it, leave at least one Db room at the top. If you have a particular track that peaks to much, by all means apply some limiting to it to ensure you don't get any digital overs.

However, NEVER USE MASTERING PLUG-INS ON INDIVIDUAL TRACKS. I am getting more and more mastering jobs where this has been done to individual tracks, which does 2 things:
1. If fucks up the timing, as mastering plug-ins cause severe latency.
2. It severely limits a ME's ability to select / apply good sounding processing (a Db of compression on the whole track might for instance send the whole track over the top).

 

[KingstonRock]

getting the mix to sound good clean makes sense, If im losing the drums with peak limiting, maybe I'm just using to much.

I know not to peak limit my mixes before mastering, I was just talking about for demos where there will be no true mastering stage.

Do you have a website for your mastering service? I have no preference for ME as of now and I'd like to give some business to a fellow bbs member

 

[sjoko2]

Just email me for details