mixing/mastering problem......

  • Thread starter Thread starter bkkornaker
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bkkornaker

bkkornaker

www.bryankmusic.com
ok, heres my problem......

when i mix a song.......everything sounds great, nice and punchy.....everything is in its place......what more could a guy ask for!?

I attempt to master it myself (i know its a no no), and i really dont need to do much to it other than slap a main limiter on it to bring it up in volume, and i do tend to bring it up to loud commercial volumes (RMS of the finished song is about -11 db) but the limiter is killing my snare drum!!!!! it kills it to the point where you barely hear the 'smack' of the hit, only the washed out reverb sound of it! The Limiter is killing the main body and transistant sound of the snare!

whats a guy to do?

so i thought to myself......ill put a limiter on the main bus while i mix, and crank it up to commercial volumes while i mix......and see what happens....

but what im finding is.....while doing this...im turning up the snare way too much. It sounds fine while im doing it this way with the limiter on...........but ill turn the limiter 'off', and my mix is nothin but a loud ass snare.

whats a guy to do? It only happens to the snare drum, and nothing else is really effected by this dilema.

i know it has to do something with the way im using this limiter (Izotope Ozone)......any suggestions so i dont have to crank the hell out of the snare drum while in "mix mode"?
 
Hmmmm... I mix the damn thing good and ready and turn it to a single stereo wav.

When using Ozones limiter I tend to throw an EQ and a multiband-compressor in the bus before the limiter, listening the end result after the limiter, I tweak with compressor and EQ before the limiter.

...I do admit this has resulted in some pretty f*cking laughably insane curves in EQ..:eek::D

But the end result counts in your ears.

The Ozones limiter changes the sound drastically, it doesn't sound like a boosted-only version of the mix at all...:(
 
bkkornaker said:
ok, heres my problem......RMS of the finished song is about -11 db
Click to expand...
I LOVE when people answer their own questions right in the first post :D.

If your snare is all reverb, that basically says that you are squashing your snare down to the volume level of it's own reverb. Of *course* that is going to sound like crap. The fact is your snare is not going to smash that far. Nor should it. This is a good example of what is meant by certain mixes not being able to handle extreme flattening.

My strongest recommendation is to lay off of the limiter. If your mix sounds great before it, why would you possibly want to sacrifice that quality just to automatically do what a volume control will do? What more could a guy ask for? :) You can pull up your mix a little, but once it starts to break apart, stop. The mix just won't go further. If you can't get -11, you can't get -11. Live with it.

However, I know you probably won't accept that answer, and I don't feel like arguing about it, I have to save my energy to go out and shovel snow. So try this: Submix your tracks into seperate rhythm, guitar and vocal submixes. Apply your squashing to the seperate submixes. Do not bite everything off all at once with a limiter, but rather incrementally tighten each submix with more gentle compression. This will allow you to apply different types and levels of compression to the different subs. Then pull the submixes together into a test mix and see what's up. Tweak and repeat as necessary. Apply the final limiter to the final mix only after the rest is done, and even then only to tighten things up a dB or two.

And for god's sake, stop looking at the RMS numbers and let your ears tell you when the mix is flattened out :).

G.
 
whats a guy to do?
Click to expand...

don't limit the mix so hard. the snare has the highest peaks of anything in a mix, so when you start lopping shit off with the limiter, the snare is the 1st thing to go, and is usually followed by the kick.
 
I don't limit my final mix just very light eq and compression, but I try to get the mix to a state where I don't really need a limiter before I mixdown. I really have no clue on the mastering end of things and I figure if I mess with it too much I'm only going to fuck it up.
I render to a stereo wave and then add some light eq and compression.

Keep in mind that I'm not doing this for a commercial release or for CDs to sell at gigs this is just to make CDs for friends and family or to practice to between band practices.
If I was doing this for something to sell or really represent me and my band........... I'd leave it to a pro.
 
ok, .....just to explain a bit more detail.......

the plugs im using for the most part is WAVES SSL400 channel plug on the drums....and i hit the snare pretty good with some compression from that to begin with, and some EQ to get the snare to crack out some body and help bring it forward in the mix......

i also use the WAVES SSL400 compressor on the main bus of my mix, so all tracks are kinda getting some compression overall, and taming that snare a bit some more....

(keep in mind, at this point...the mix is still kicking ass and sounding good)

Now i know....for limiting (in the mastering stage), there is alot of talk about dont squish the hell out of it, do it enough to keep the dynamics intact.....

but how can you bring it to commercial level....without killing it? I hear alot of commmercial CDs, that still have the snare right there in your face with lots of body and crack.....how do they bring it up to that loud of a level,without killing it?

In OZONE, i do use the EQ to sweeten the song up some, and i really dont touch the multiband compressor (cause i use compression on the main bus while mixing) and i dont seem to need it.....so really im just using it just to bring the songs overall volume back up.....

any way to do it without separations mastering? any tips would be greatly welcomed.......
 
It would be easier to help you if you could post some links to the song. I find when something dissapears in the mix after mastering it's because you are relying too much on track volume to make that part cut through instead of finding it's own niche in the frequency range. Usually a bit of hard limiting on the track can help it sit better then EQ as needed to help it cut through the dense parts.
 
for a link......

www.soundclick.com/bryank

the songs im talking about are the ones titled "backing track", which are found at the bottom of the list.....

pretty much any one of those all have them same problem.....

(those are the ones.......that have been limited, and snare is almost gone)
 
never mind guys....ive got if figured out.

after messing with the limiter in Ozone, i tweaked the settings a bit and got it so i can have it nice and loud....and still have the snare poppin and crackin!

character settings on the limter (faster release time), and tweaked some of the compressors expansion settings.......

done....issue solved.
 
I always have lite compression and an L2 in my stereo bus. Its what I learned from a lot of people who know what their doing. I do export to wav and then do some finishing, but it has always worked great for me.
 
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