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Everything posted by ectogemia
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well, the advantage of mastering your own music is getting it to sound the way you want it to sound. i don't buy that whole "unbiased perspective thing" so long as you're a competent producer. the advantage of someone else mastering it is getting it to sound the way someone else wants to sound. sometimes that different perspective is what you *really* wanted all along, but you couldn't possibly have conceived of the other guy's vision for the tune, so you didn't *know* that was the sound you wanted. other times, the other person's master of your work will sound completely wrong to you.
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also, a little compression on the master (totaling about 4-6 db of gain reduction with no more than that much makeup gain + a moderate to long attack and release like 30-40 and 250-400 ms respectively and a soft knee -- just as much transparency as possible) does wonders for bringing out the quiet parts of the whole mix and suppressing some of the peaks which hurt the balance of the mix. i add this compressor after my master gain reducer to bring down my rms (any plugin with a gain control works), and i usually toss it in after i've laid down the first fleshed-out part of my track. pretty early on.
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we can have a little heart-to-heart.
but briefly, in my opinion, the key is in mixing at a low master bus rms (like -10 db to -20 db) so you can avoid triggering the limiter while mixing. the power in this technique is that it allows you to balance the levels of each track as best as possible because the limiter is not obfuscating the dynamics of the track. being that level balancing is the most important part of mixing, it doesn't much matter if you're familiar with eq, mb compression, etc. if you can't balance levels, all the other techniques are just different ways to polish a turd.