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Oct. 3rd, 2005 11:07 amThis mixing malarkey is really starting to get to me. I know an awful lot more about it now than I did this time three weeks ago, but I'm still not getting final results as good as I'd like.
I can now get mixes that sound pretty exciting, this is cool. It's taken a lot of fiddling to work out what to do with the vocal reverb so that the vocals sit *in* the song, sound like they're part of it, but I think I've got that. The mixes I have at that stage, though, then need generally boosting in volume and a sort of finishing tweak. I was working on the idea of getting the vocals to sit in and then finally bring them back out a little more with the mastering stage. For mastering I'm messing around with a four-band compressor and a nice EQ thingy and these seem to make sense, do something useful while setting up and considering the changes they make, but no matter how minor and subtly augmenting these changes seem at the time, by the time I've got the final version exported and on my main sound system it sounds like I've killed it. I don't know what I'm doing wrong.
The problem seems to me to be not least with getting the final volume up. People complain if the track is slightly quieter than the last song they listened to, but if you amplify into the realms of limiting, it sounds dead because the dynamic range has just been shot. I understand that loudness is the standard, I was complaining this time a year ago that all the money we'd paid for mixing and mastering on the SON demo had produced only a limp quiet thing, but knowing any of this still doesn't bring a solution. At least this time I'm not paying thirty quid a track for someone else to fuck it up, but what would be ideal would be working out how to not fuck it up myself.
I can now get mixes that sound pretty exciting, this is cool. It's taken a lot of fiddling to work out what to do with the vocal reverb so that the vocals sit *in* the song, sound like they're part of it, but I think I've got that. The mixes I have at that stage, though, then need generally boosting in volume and a sort of finishing tweak. I was working on the idea of getting the vocals to sit in and then finally bring them back out a little more with the mastering stage. For mastering I'm messing around with a four-band compressor and a nice EQ thingy and these seem to make sense, do something useful while setting up and considering the changes they make, but no matter how minor and subtly augmenting these changes seem at the time, by the time I've got the final version exported and on my main sound system it sounds like I've killed it. I don't know what I'm doing wrong.
The problem seems to me to be not least with getting the final volume up. People complain if the track is slightly quieter than the last song they listened to, but if you amplify into the realms of limiting, it sounds dead because the dynamic range has just been shot. I understand that loudness is the standard, I was complaining this time a year ago that all the money we'd paid for mixing and mastering on the SON demo had produced only a limp quiet thing, but knowing any of this still doesn't bring a solution. At least this time I'm not paying thirty quid a track for someone else to fuck it up, but what would be ideal would be working out how to not fuck it up myself.