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Post by donr on Jun 17, 2019 15:13:43 GMT -6
No wonder I can't wrap my ears around most of it. The loudness is oppressive. Add rote song structure and over-tuning, and what's left to like? Get off my lawn!
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Post by ragan on Jun 17, 2019 16:07:07 GMT -6
What's amazing is just how shitty modern sausage masters sound when level matched to something with some dynamic range and punch. The modern stuff always sounds like it's way bigger and more impressive than classic recordings when it's just back to back on someone's stereo because it's just so much louder. But if you throw that corporate pop nonsense in the DAW next to Abbey Road or something *and level match them*, the modern pop sounds like someone should lose their job for letting it out the door. Like it's broken.
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Post by M57 on Jun 17, 2019 16:09:44 GMT -6
No wonder I can't wrap my ears around most of it. The loudness is oppressive. Add rote song structure and over-tuning, and what's left to like? Get off my lawn! Isn't that what your parents said about the music you listened to? "Son, why would you wanna go and electrify a perfectly good guitar? ..and why would you want to repeat the same lyric over and over in the chorus? Cole Porter would never do that!" There's actually a reasonable amount of it that I can get into - except for the part where my ears start to bleed after about a minute. Oh, and I almost forgot the part where I get nauseous from low frequencies. Amplifiers, compressors, limiters, digital everything.. Damn technology is to blame.
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Post by donr on Jun 17, 2019 17:25:07 GMT -6
Sure. I remember adults not getting Elvis and Chuck Berry. My dad never "got" rock and roll, although he got used to it once I started making records. But he played sax all his life and never played anything newer than "Desifinado" and other stuff by Jobim. Mainly the pop 'standards' from the 40's.
There were loud 45rpm singles, I remember The Champs' "Tequila" just ripping out of the record player, but todays tools, wow.
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Post by kcatthedog on Jun 17, 2019 17:28:14 GMT -6
Kind of need Jerome to weigh is as he has the dangerous music Convert AD+ and overdriving the converters is part of its built in functionality?
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Post by Guitar on Jun 17, 2019 20:40:14 GMT -6
I shoot for -6 RMS on peaks on a VU meter. Like svart said you gotta mix loud. Compress the tracks, then the bus groups, then the master, then maybe a Standard Clip Pro or some tape emu, then the limiter doing the final push. My go to is Elevate from Newfangled Audio. I know Metallica won the loudness wars, but I'm still pushing the limit here as I can.
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Post by trakworxmastering on Jun 17, 2019 20:52:41 GMT -6
The harsh truth is that you have to mix loud if you want the master to be loud. Mastering guys can't take a -16dB mix and make it a -3dB radio mix. Not to argue, but in my experience the sheer loudness of the mix before mastering has little effect on how loud I can master it. In fact I can do a better job of making a loud master if the mix is not clipped or limited before it gets to me. It's the other qualities of the mix that determine it's loudness potential. The arrangement, instrument tones, recording quality, level balance, spectral balance, etc., all affect the loudness potential. Straight loudness of the unmastered mix does not help IME. When I'm sent a loud mix I have to turn it down in order to process it and then turn it back up again at the end, so it ends up getting smashed twice. Twice smashed = twice compromised. Better to leave the limiting/clipping to the ME at the very end of the process. Having said that, you certainly can mix for a loud mastering, but clipping or limiting before mastering can be quite counterproductive. Cheers,
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Post by svart on Jun 17, 2019 20:55:47 GMT -6
The harsh truth is that you have to mix loud if you want the master to be loud. Mastering guys can't take a -16dB mix and make it a -3dB radio mix. The arrangement, instrument tones, recording quality, level balance, spectral balance, etc., all affect the loudness potential. Exactly what I meant, and I still stand by what I said.
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Post by trakworxmastering on Jun 17, 2019 21:01:15 GMT -6
The arrangement, instrument tones, recording quality, level balance, spectral balance, etc., all affect the loudness potential. Exactly what I meant, and I still stand by what I said. You can have all of those qualities in a -16dB mix. Or a -30dB mix. Happens all the time. Turning a well mixed track up is easy.
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Post by nomatic on Jun 18, 2019 6:19:26 GMT -6
I agree with Justin on this....
A well mixed track with headroom unclipped is easy to get quite loud ...
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Post by svart on Jun 18, 2019 6:29:17 GMT -6
I agree with Justin on this.... A well mixed track with headroom unclipped is easy to get quite loud ... "Well mixed" includes all of the things I mentioned.. But does it stay "well mixed" after being crushed? In my opinion, rarely. It might have become very loud though, but that's not the same thing A good mix will likely change balance and tonality pretty heavily when crushed, and would benefit from being mixed differently to attain the correct balance and tonality once crushed.
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Post by M57 on Jun 18, 2019 6:35:07 GMT -6
A good mix will likely change balance and tonality pretty heavily when crushed, and would benefit from being mixed differently to attain the correct balance and tonality once crushed. This is an argument for mixing into a 'rough' master even if you plan to send it out for professional mastering, right? I.e., What does "well-mixed" mean?
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Post by nomatic on Jun 18, 2019 6:43:35 GMT -6
Well Mixed as in nothing to pokey in the overall frequency balance ...
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Post by svart on Jun 18, 2019 7:12:42 GMT -6
A good mix will likely change balance and tonality pretty heavily when crushed, and would benefit from being mixed differently to attain the correct balance and tonality once crushed. This is an argument for mixing into a 'rough' master even if you plan to send it out for professional mastering, right? I.e., What does "well-mixed" mean? Always. Personally, when I mix, I want it to end up exactly how I want it to be. I don't want to mix it to some point and then just go "I hope the mastering engineer can do something with this". I want the mastering person to take a listen and say "I don't need to do anything to this", because if they need to do a bunch of stuff to my mix to make it sound finished, then I haven't done my job well enough.
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Post by Tbone81 on Jun 18, 2019 9:01:48 GMT -6
This is an argument for mixing into a 'rough' master even if you plan to send it out for professional mastering, right? I.e., What does "well-mixed" mean? Always. Personally, when I mix, I want it to end up exactly how I want it to be. I don't want to mix it to some point and then just go "I hope the mastering engineer can do something with this". I want the mastering person to take a listen and say "I don't need to do anything to this", because if they need to do a bunch of stuff to my mix to make it sound finished, then I haven't done my job well enough. Totally agree. I've come to find, after many years, that a loud mix is the sum of its parts. It takes (tasteful) compression, saturation, clipping etc, on individual tracks AND busses AND the master bus. Mastering used to always make my mixes sound worse, now mastering always makes my mixes sound better (even if its subtle) because I'm not relying on the Mastering Engineer to make it loud, even though he does...if that makes sense?
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Post by svart on Jun 18, 2019 9:09:59 GMT -6
Always. Personally, when I mix, I want it to end up exactly how I want it to be. I don't want to mix it to some point and then just go "I hope the mastering engineer can do something with this". I want the mastering person to take a listen and say "I don't need to do anything to this", because if they need to do a bunch of stuff to my mix to make it sound finished, then I haven't done my job well enough. Totally agree. I've come to find, after many years, that a loud mix is the sum of its parts. It takes (tasteful) compression, saturation, clipping etc, on individual tracks AND busses AND the master bus. Mastering used to always make my mixes sound worse, now mastering always makes my mixes sound better (even if its subtle) because I'm not relying on the Mastering Engineer to make it loud, even though he does...if that makes sense? Makes sense to me. It's what I do as well. Sure, a ME can make things LOUD, but do they sound good when simply made loud? IMHO, no, they usually sound worse no matter the valiant effort by the ME to try to rebalance the mix. That's the difference to me, it takes a lot of work to make something loud AND sound good, and it MUST start in the mix, not after it. We can't fix it in the mix in regards to poorly recorded tracks, so it follows that MEs can't fix it in the master either. Most of the times when people say "I hate crushed mastering" it really means that the mix was not conducive to crushing and the tonality has changed for the worse because mix engineers have an adversity to pushing mixes hotter due to the popular belief that it's the mastering engineer's job to do the crushing. Or it could be due to the other belief that one should never produce a mix that has greater than -16db RMS levels or whatever the nonsense rule-of-thumb has risen out of the "loudness wars".
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Post by trakworxmastering on Jun 18, 2019 10:02:37 GMT -6
Honestly, I think there are too many different possible scenarios to apply blanket statements about how to mix and master. What works for one engineer, one genre of music or even one song won't work for another.
I have mastering clients who use all those modern techniques mentioned here to make their mixes stand out and I have clients who mix purely "old school". And clients everywhere in between. I haven't noticed a consistent correlation between any mixing approach and loudness potential. There are too many other factors. One consistent thing I have noticed is that clipped/limited mixes are harder to master well. Just my observations from 25 years mastering other people's mixes.
Keep doing what works for you!
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