bryank said:
i can under stand if ther are ALOT of instuments involved.....maybe over 10-12 tracks of stuff or more......maybe then it would be a good idea to try this type of mix/mastering. the more tracks you have, for me the harder it seems to mix.
Agreed.
The question is, however, where the mixing leaves off and the mastering begins. If one is doing everything himself, then submixing before doing the final 2-mix is often a good idea. In that case, though, the submixes are not really "stems", they are just submixes as part of the overall mixing process; e.g. sub mix the rhythm section first, then submix the gits and keyboards, then submix all the vocals. Then you have just three submix groups to mix together into the stereo mixdown. But then you stll have the stereo mixdown to performing the mastering process to as always.
With stems - or seperation mastering (BTW, does that mean that Brad has "seperation anxiety"?
) - one is not really making a 2-mix or stereo mixdown (except maybe as an example mix for the ME to use as a guide), but rather the mixing engineer is creating a series of submixes and leaving the final mixing for the ME to do.
I agree with John that if there's a need to create different final mixes for multiple release from the studio, that stems are a good idea (even required in some cases). But if one is just creating a single stereo product, then the mix engineer should, IMHO, create the mix himself and leave the ME just to polish the mix and perform all the other standard mastering duties. For me, asking the ME to do the mixing is asking the ME to do my job for me, which means that I am either just phoning in my work and should be fired for it, or I just don't have the chops to be a mixing engineer and should be fired for it.
If one is doing both the mixing and mastering themselves, and they submix first, and then turn to seperation mastering by mastering the submixes first before doing the final mixdown, that just seems like putting the cart before the horse to me. The whole idea of mastering processing is to polish the mix; how can one polish the mix properly before it's even assembled (unless one is really, really, really good
)?
It's like assembling the fenders, doors and quarterpanels of a car; one does not polish them individually and then put them together uness they want that polish job to get all smeared and fingereprinted and generally messed up. They assemble the pieces first and then apply the polish as the final step. It seems to me that - with the special purpose exceptions made by John and Tom - mastering should be treated the same way; it is the polish that needs to be applied
after the mix is completed, not while the mix is still under construction.
IMHO YMMV TGIF QWERTY
G.
