Ok I Done It All Wrong

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Skimrok
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21 Jul 2019

Ok I do things completely wrong and now want to get it better or right

ive been cracking away and instead of having stages set IE

1. Make Tune

2. Mixdown

3. Mastering

Ive been making tune and as I go along I have compressor on and limiter on and when tune is done I export and that's it


so now im going to do it in stage ie 3 above my question is as followers


is above now the best way forward? Treat them with 3 hats and don't break the rule and any personal suggestions please let me know how you crack on with making music , I be very greatful ;)
12 with 11 Suite :reason:/ Akai Mini Mk3 / MPD218 /Eve SC207 Monitors / Mrs10 Sub / Motu M2 / Zen Can

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Loque
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21 Jul 2019

As always, there are no rules. Do what works best for you and always have fun and enjoy making music.

Some guys turn on the compressor and limiter right from the start. I do not like it, because the mixing gets weird the more progress in song writing i make and in the end it often sounds overcompressed and crap.

Personally i do the 3 things you said in exactly this order. Just the mixing i do in between, in the final stage and always sometimes i go back to mixing while mastering. I always try to get the whole structure as quick as possible and do the fine tuning and mixing later, which prevents me for beeing anoyed by my own tune too fast.

There are just a few things i need to do better in future while writing the song: better working on the tuning, which keeps the spectrum clean and less muddy and use less, but better tracks and sounds, which prevents cluttering up the frequency spectrum and mudd again. That means, the better my song writing is, the less i need to do in the mixing and mastering.
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MannequinRaces
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21 Jul 2019

Yes, this is the proper way to do it but it can be very hard to adhere to because everything is in the box and it’s tempting to turn the limiter and compressor on to hear things louder.

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Loque
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21 Jul 2019

MannequinRaces wrote:
21 Jul 2019
Yes, this is the proper way to do it but it can be very hard to adhere to because everything is in the box and it’s tempting to turn the limiter and compressor on to hear things louder.
Agree. But today i just turn up the volume on my speakers as much as my nighbours do not kill me. This way i can hear the dynamics, frequencies/pitch, problems.... I can always make it louder and crank up the maximzer in the end to win the loudness war.
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MannequinRaces
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21 Jul 2019

Loque wrote:
21 Jul 2019
MannequinRaces wrote:
21 Jul 2019
Yes, this is the proper way to do it but it can be very hard to adhere to because everything is in the box and it’s tempting to turn the limiter and compressor on to hear things louder.
Agree. But today i just turn up the volume on my speakers as much as my nighbours do not kill me. This way i can hear the dynamics, frequencies/pitch, problems.... I can always make it louder and crank up the maximzer in the end to win the loudness war.
Yes, that’s what that volume knob is for! :) To the OP if you are making an album it is imperative to save mastering until the very end when all the songs are done being mixed. If you are releasing singles and want to get tracks out into the world that way then you don’t necessarily need to bounce down to a stereo file before ‘mastering.’ Basically you should be mixing at lower levels to leave headroom in your mix and at the end is when you want to raise the overall volume to commercial levels.

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Skimrok
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21 Jul 2019

Thanks for your input guys , im only doing it for fun and have no plans for album releases or Eps however I do want them back to back as other tunes which may be played out or sits well next to other tunes which are either streamed or played

lets face it if anything which may be good or on par for release I worry about that if that ever happens at the time, I rather have fun with it all and learn as I go along that's more important for me , and eliminate much of the mistakes from now on is my goal
12 with 11 Suite :reason:/ Akai Mini Mk3 / MPD218 /Eve SC207 Monitors / Mrs10 Sub / Motu M2 / Zen Can

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reasonsuser88
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21 Jul 2019

FWIW a lot of people mix into a compressor (not a limiter) after they get the skeleton of the composition down. One of the most talented professional artists I've heard on a personal level does this although he is a professional engineer too. Advanced technique for future reference. Also, it's quite common for people to mix as they make the tune in electronic music.

You have it right though.
The time has come for you to take care and comb your hair. :wave:

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guitfnky
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21 Jul 2019

there’s no such thing as a “proper” workflow to follow. your list is widely accepted as the industry standard, but as Loque says, you really should be doing whatever works best for *you*. whatever suits your goals best is the only truly “proper” way to produce your art. have some fun!
I write good music for good people

https://slowrobot.bandcamp.com/

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Skimrok
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21 Jul 2019

That was interesting I just took off the compressor and Limiter with my tune and it was clipping, actually had to go down 6db to get it away from clipping so that’s a learning curve on its own, :(
12 with 11 Suite :reason:/ Akai Mini Mk3 / MPD218 /Eve SC207 Monitors / Mrs10 Sub / Motu M2 / Zen Can

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Loque
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21 Jul 2019

Skimrok wrote:
21 Jul 2019
That was interesting I just took off the compressor and Limiter with my tune and it was clipping, actually had to go down 6db to get it away from clipping so that’s a learning curve on its own, :(
:-D yea...i have the faders down around 10-12db and start from there.
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retreed
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21 Jul 2019

Selig's video can be very helpful for this topic:

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TritoneAddiction
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21 Jul 2019

I guess I'm doing everything wrong then. I do whatever feels right at the moment intuitively. Song writing, choosing sounds, tweaking, mixing, adding effects, mastering. It's all a creative blur.
Whenever a song is about to be finished, most of the mixing and mastering is already done. I don't even really look at mixing as "mixing" necessarily. I view it more as shaping sounds, like tweaking a synth or adding distortion. I don't think about the progress logically. Stuff just happens and all of a sudden a tune is done and ready to be released.

reggie1979
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21 Jul 2019

retreed wrote:
21 Jul 2019
Selig's video can be very helpful for this topic:
Enjoyable, not quite sure it's exactly what I do but it's good advice.

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Skimrok
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21 Jul 2019

I do have some bad habits after reading

I need to clarify something I been leaving the channel faders at 0db and been using the input gain pots at the top of the mixer , is this correct or wrong to do volume control?

I can’t even think why Ive done this and just checking is this ok to do? Or another facepalm moment for me


Thanks in advance
12 with 11 Suite :reason:/ Akai Mini Mk3 / MPD218 /Eve SC207 Monitors / Mrs10 Sub / Motu M2 / Zen Can

reggie1979
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21 Jul 2019

I don't know the answer frankly, hopefully someone can chime in.

Don't be so hard on yourself man, that's what this thread is for :)

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Loque
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21 Jul 2019

Skimrok wrote:
21 Jul 2019
I do have some bad habits after reading

I need to clarify something I been leaving the channel faders at 0db and been using the input gain pots at the top of the mixer , is this correct or wrong to do volume control?

I can’t even think why Ive done this and just checking is this ok to do? Or another facepalm moment for me


Thanks in advance
It controls the input to the SSL mixer, so yes you can use it. Note, that you do not have any metering there. Selig was using his "Selig Gain" for bringing the levels down and checking the peak.

You can try this, its free (but i am not sure if it shows peaks):
https://www.propellerheads.com/shop/rac ... /khs-gain/
Reason12, Win10

reggie1979
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21 Jul 2019

Selig gain is 19 bucks, and you can demo it for 30 days :)

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mcatalao
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21 Jul 2019

Skimrok wrote:
21 Jul 2019
(...)
Ive been making tune and as I go along I have compressor on and limiter on and when tune is done I export and that's it

so now im going to do it in stage ie 3 above my question is as followers

is above now the best way forward? Treat them with 3 hats and don't break the rule and any personal suggestions please let me know how you crack on with making music , I be very greatful ;)
Hey man, remember that ad? No rules, great music. ;)

The "problem" with DAW's is that you can do everything there. A good daw, is a composing and sequencing tool, is able to record your instruments and vocals, and has a mixer that loads plugins that are great for mixing, and in the end you also can master in it, adding stuff to the master bus.

But here's the catch... Even if you do the most insane kind of music, a little bit of order is important to have a final work.

So, the separation of the production process is imho completely necessary when you have a team of multiple people around the project.
Most stuff is still produced like that and it evolved from the pop production form for years and years. The separation level can even be bigger in more complex project, with composers, multiple orchestrators and arrangers, a tech for live instruments, a tech for mixing, a tech for mastering, and ultimately a producer and of course the whole lot of performers if the project is not electronic. Separation is of paramount importance, and in this situations, you prepare the song as a project with tasks that you send to the multiple people and also manage dependencies and so on.

Ok, but then if you are a one man show as most of us are? Well if you are not a pro, and you just want to have fun, do whatever makes you happy (ultimately my best advice to you in life is do whatever makes you happy as long as it doesn't involve taking others happiness, or it's right to pursuit it...). Ok problem is, if you're trying to make something for others and the result is sub par, or if the sound you're getting of your stuff is letting you down (i.e. unhappy) and this stuff is no longer fun.

Take it from me, i've done it both ways and both have its merits, oddities and cons:

1 - Do everything in one project
Pros:
- You can go back and forth and tweak stuff when you feel you need as long as you didn't have destructive processes in the middle.
- You're free to overlap techniques (taking care of a bass in the master you can go to the mix real quick and get the bass down, or eq it differently, or in the mix, review a drum timing to unmask the transients of 2 similar instruments)
- In the beginning you can have a good feel of how the song is gonna sound later in the mix, cause you start levelling and panning right at the sequencing process.
- It feels a more creative process.
- You don't feel the pressure of committing to a given stage.

Cons:
- For me the worst one, is that if you don't feel the pressure to commit to a given stage (and specially if you don't have a pressure to deliver a final product, or a timestamp to publish), you simply don't commit, and you end up NEVER getting anything done. You get stuck to never finished songs.
- You start mixing 8 bar loops, mesmerised by sound work. It sounds great. It's not a song. It's even not an A, and you need to be objective to get it from something to an A part of a song, then a b, then a verse and so on.
- You are mediocre at everything but not really good at anything, and every step will have issues, because you didn't give it the thought on each process (because you're doing everything at the same time) plus you lack the objectivity over each step.
- For multiple song projects, you master each song separately and the songs end up with an incohesive final sound.
- And finally your project is full of stuff, everything steaming, from synths you never bounced to audio, to plugins that were never committed, and the mastering section also with a 5+ plugin chain that probably has to go through 1 cpu stream. So in complex projects you better have a great CPU.

2 - Separate Sequencing, Mixing and Mastering
Pros:
- You do more focused work. You think of the song musically in the composing and sequencing and recording steps, and you think upfront making good decisions for your project.
- You listen better to what you're doing because you change papers and mindsets.
- You separate your work and direct your effort to simpler, focused tasks, and you know what to do to have a better result in each step.
- You commit. To what you've done in the previous step. To the decisions you've made to get you where you are.
- You might end with more projects, even more space used but each project is way lighter on your CPU.
- You know you have to commit, so you make better decisions.
- You are more objective over each process.
- You master full projects with more context, objectivity and development (a 10 song project will have 10 mix files and only one mastering file with 10 songs).

Cons:
- The process can be a tad slower because you have to manage more saves, bounces and exports.
- You use more space, because ideally you should bounce to audio at the beginning of each step. Oh and if you save every little change in different versions, then its even worse!
- Tweaking stuff in the mix makes you export the mix again, manage different projects, and redo stuff in the mastering project (so, commit to each step). Same applies between the sequencing/composing/recording and mixing stages.
- You need to be organised because each song will have 2 projects plus the mastering project (and you also need to be organised inside the project, labelling stuff and colour coding).

So how do i do it?
I usually sequence and mix on the same project but i rarely do sequencing stuff after i start mixing. So i naturally commit to my songs. Even after discussing stuff with other people, i tend to prefer to let the songs have their life, and i don't go back to "fix it". This is another discussion, but putting it simpler, i do music for myself first. I do it because i love it. If i show a song to 3 friends and all of them tell me 3 different things i can't "fix it" for the 3 of them. So if my computer can take it, I start by sequencing and arranging (i compose at the piano) and have a melody.

I stick to this until i have a finalised song and the only stuff i do that could be at the mixing stage are levelling if the levels are too stupid (like stuff peaking by itself) and panning because i like to feel the separation of different instruments.

But it the project is already giving a hard time to my CPU after sequencing, I don't have any problem to commit to it and bounce at least the heaviest parts.

Finally i rarely master on the same project of the mix because most of the stuff i'm doing ends up together with at least 2 or 3 more songs either my own or for clients. Most my clients ask me 2 to 4 songs or full projects, and i want some cohesion for my stuff so most of it has 3 to even 12 songs in a mastering project.

I hope it makes any sense to you.

Good Luck,
MC

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mcatalao
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21 Jul 2019

TritoneAddiction wrote:
21 Jul 2019
I guess I'm doing everything wrong then. I do whatever feels right at the moment intuitively. Song writing, choosing sounds, tweaking, mixing, adding effects, mastering. It's all a creative blur.
Whenever a song is about to be finished, most of the mixing and mastering is already done. I don't even really look at mixing as "mixing" necessarily. I view it more as shaping sounds, like tweaking a synth or adding distortion. I don't think about the progress logically. Stuff just happens and all of a sudden a tune is done and ready to be released.
Don't feel bad. If it works for you it's good. And not wrong.

Let me give you an example, i usually don't make my own sounds. But there are people that can introduce sound design in their music making process. They think of sounds colours rather than instruments per se. That's imho a talent in itself.

If you mingle everything and it sounds good... it can't be wrong. No rules, great music.

reggie1979
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21 Jul 2019

I thought this was funny, kinda relevant.


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Heigen5
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21 Jul 2019

Someone commented that if I use Brickwall limiting in the middle of the mastering-chain, I do it wrong, but that's having a big role in my sound tbh. Go figure!

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boingy
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21 Jul 2019

As stated, there is no right and wrong way to do it but if you want to be more efficient then separating the process into some set steps and locking in decisions earlier will make you more productive.

I, like many others, am always reluctant to irreversibly commit anything to a track. I always want to keep the intermediate stages, the midi tracks, the guide vocal, all the crap takes, the chord backing that will not make it into the final mix etc. Pretty soon I have hundreds of tracks kicking around for a 16 track song. It's not a problem because I only do this for fun but it does mean I can spend too much time going back and forth when I really should be moving on. Contrast that with pro studios where they'll get everything into the computer as audio ASAP and then work from that.

Compare me with my professional session musician friend when recording a synth line.

Me: Records MIDI with any old bass patch, fiddles with timing, messes in the piano roll, changes the patch a dozen times, fiddles a bit more and eventually bounces the MIDI down to audio, carefully archiving the MIDI track, and making a few notes in case I want to go back to it.

Him: Spends a bit of time selecting the bass patch, arms an audio track, plays bass line live until he is happy, selects the best take, permanently deletes the rest.

I wish I could be more like that but I can't!

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selig
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21 Jul 2019

Heigen5 wrote:
21 Jul 2019
Someone commented that if I use Brickwall limiting in the middle of the mastering-chain, I do it wrong, but that's having a big role in my sound tbh. Go figure!
If you're using a brick wall limiter to prevent overs/clipping, then it must be the the last position. If you're using it to make things louder, fine - but you'll still want one at the end of the chain to prevent clipping, I would guess.
:)
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Heigen5
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21 Jul 2019

selig wrote:
21 Jul 2019
Heigen5 wrote:
21 Jul 2019
Someone commented that if I use Brickwall limiting in the middle of the mastering-chain, I do it wrong, but that's having a big role in my sound tbh. Go figure!
If you're using a brick wall limiter to prevent overs/clipping, then it must be the the last position. If you're using it to make things louder, fine - but you'll still want one at the end of the chain to prevent clipping, I would guess.
:)
Of course, I have another limiter for that as well. Anyway this method makes the signal 'prepared' for the next device in the chain, which is a compressor. I think the sound can be louder as you stated, but also more dynamically quantized. :thumbs_up: ;)

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selig
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22 Jul 2019

Heigen5 wrote:
21 Jul 2019
selig wrote:
21 Jul 2019


If you're using a brick wall limiter to prevent overs/clipping, then it must be the the last position. If you're using it to make things louder, fine - but you'll still want one at the end of the chain to prevent clipping, I would guess.
:)
Of course, I have another limiter for that as well. Anyway this method makes the signal 'prepared' for the next device in the chain, which is a compressor. I think the sound can be louder as you stated, but also more dynamically quantized. :thumbs_up: ;)
I've done lots of "experiments" over the years, and have found a few things that seem to be consistent to my ears. One is that when using serial compression (two compressors in the same processing path, one before the other), the best results were when using a slower compressor first, then a harder/faster compressor last. I have a few theories* about why this works, but more importantly it's always sounded better this way to my ears.

Since most agree that the last thing on your mastering chain must be a brick wall limiter (even if you use it to catch 1-2 over, or use it to crush the signal to within a dB of it's life), it makes sense to use slower compression earlier due to the "glue" effect it can have.

Took me a while to finally realize that using the SSL master compressor during mixing was doing exactly that, because it was always followed by a brick wall limiter durning mastering.

Notes on serial compression:
Serial compression became common when multitrack recording became more common. This is because you could now use the same compressor twice: during tracking/recording, and during mixing. Say you compress your kick during tracking, then you also compress your drum bus during mixing. You kick is not "serial compressed". If you use compression on the mix bus, it's further serially compressed!

That is to say, you don't always have to literally have two compressors in the insert to achieve serial compression.

*My theory about why slow compression first, fast compression second.
If you do the opposite, brick wall limit, then compress again later (either slow or fast compression), you remove transients with the first/brick wall process. Thus, there's nothing you can do with further compression to shape the transients as effectively as if you have used slower compression first. Two brick wall compressors in a row doesn't make sense to me because it's not much different running one brick wall limiter with 6 dB reduction vs two brick wall limiters each with 3 dB compression. There may be some difference in the release area, but none that have been overly obvious to me in this scenario.
Selig Audio, LLC

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