Leaving fadeouts to mastering

[awilliams]

Soon I will be in the mixing stage of my project and since most of my tracks fade out at the end, I wonder how common it is to let the mastering engineer do the fadeouts instead of the mixdown engineer. I'm working with Cubase 5 and a computer workstation. I would imagine the mastering people are better equipped to do these fadeouts more smoothly.

 

[tmix]

YES YES YES!

Please leave the fades for the ME.
He can do a better job of it. When They start compressing and and otherwise altering the mix it also changes the potential time that is needed for a smooth fade (usually longer). They will be listening at loud volumes at high definition for a really smooth tail. It screws things up when they are trimmed too quick.
Another equally important thing is to leave some header space at the beginning. Particularly if it has a sample of ambient hiss or track hiss for them to sound print in the event they need to do noise removal.

You are on the right track!

Tom

 

[sonusman]

The only time I apply fades during the mixing stage is when there are intentional fades that certain instruments must have. An example is in the past I have mixed some songs where the music faded out underneath a vocal part that didn't. I of course applied a fade out to the mix, but not the vocal part.

Other than that, a good reason to leave fade out's to the ME is because there is a good chance that he will be increasing the overall volume of the mix, and depending upon how much that is changed, any fade out you applied will sound quite different after the volume increase. This could lead to problems with the fade out sounding "musical".

DO make sure though that you at least mute any tracks that may have noise on them that may show up during the fade out. It is mostly impossible to remove noises the drummer might have made that are on the final mix, or the hiss from a noisy effects processor that isn't supplying any effects during the fade. Make sure those things are silent.

Good luck with your mixes.

Ed