Mixing for Pre-Master so no compression?

[Dizzy991]

Hello,

I followed this site's link to the digido.com site where there is extensive info on mastering your projects. My take on the article is that I basically should leave everything as raw as possible for the mastering house so that they can polish it up for you. So this basically means that when I mix down I shouldn't use any type of compression, fade in/outs, and leave that to the mastering house? Also, based
upon the tremendous impact a pro mastering house can seem (seem since I have no basis for judgement) to have, can I assume that most quality mixes done on a medium greater than 4 track cassette (or even 4 track cassette?!) can be polished into a "real" song/album? Thanks in advance for any info/advice.

 

[Brenton Trott]

It depends at what stage you are asking about, while mixing, you should mix it the way you want it using whatever you need to achieve the result you want, including compression.
Once you have finished the mix, if it is going to a mastering house, then don't do anymore to it. Leave it to them.

Their job is to improve the overall tonal quality and to ensure that it will sound relatively good on a lot of different sounding systems.

Your second question is a little harder, theoretically anything can be made into an album (including 4 track) but will it be good??? Mastering can improve the sound to an extent, it can't make something that isn't there already.

Hope this helps
Brenton