Preparing your mix for mastering: appropriate loudness
In this series, we’re examining how to best prepare your mixes for the mastering process, by looking at some of the most common problems I see with DIY mixes coming into my mastering studio.
First up: excessive mix volume. You really don’t want to send a mix that is too loud up to your mastering engineer.
The short answer and quick solution: keep your mixes well in the green at all times, and make sure you leave some empty space at the top of your master track meter.
More in-depth discussion below.
Analog vs. digital meters
If you’re mixing on your own, trying to learn by watching Youtube videos, and haven’t had the benefit of a quality education in professional audio, this is a very easy mistake to make. That’s because it’s easy to assume that the digital meter that you see inside your audio software works in exactly the same way as an analog meter you might have seen on an analog mixing board.
It doesn’t.
On an analog mixing board, you can push your volume right up to the top of the meter and sometimes into the red, and you won’t always hear audible clipping on your track.
That’s because the engineers who designed those analog meters were smart, and the point at which you would hear audible clipping and distortion is actually much higher than what the top of the meter is showing you. In technical terms, this means that “headroom” has been built into the metering system, where the top of the meter isn’t where clipping would actually occur.
That’s not the case when it comes to working with digital audio. In digital land, the top of the meter is actually the top of the meter, and if you go over that point you can square off your waveform and add audible clipping onto your music. That will sound really bad, especially if your mastering engineer were to then make that clipping even louder during the mastering process.
Is using a limiter during mixing a solution?
You might be thinking, well why not just use a limiter in your mixes, so you can make your mix louder without adding clipping? You can indeed do this, and it’s as simple as placing a limiting plugin on your master track.
But, if you do that, that limiter is going to be sucking up important audio information that you really want to be keeping in.
In the tracking and mixing process, you’ve just spent a lot of time and money making sure that you’ve captured as much high quality audio information as possible. So, it seems a shame to throw any amount of that good work away inside the buffer of some digital limiting plugin.
Using a limiter during mixing isn’t a huge deal when you’re talking about digital distribution of a song (streaming, etc). It’s kind of a mixing and musical style thing; there’s nothing necessarily wrong with doing it.
But, it can be a really big deal and interfere with something like vinyl record production. That’s a big reason why it usually makes sense to pay more for additional special vinyl masters to be made if you’re thinking of doing a vinyl run. Avoiding digital limiters altogether is how I do my own vinyl masters, because it’s the best way to get great sound on your vinyl record pressing.
Limiting on the master track is a decision I would generally leave to your mastering engineer. We’re the ones with specialized equipment and expertise to know when and how to limit a mix properly, so that it sounds its best and is prepared for the distribution mediums you want to release your music in.
Diagnosing a mix that’s too loud
Here’s what a maxed out meter looks like:
That’s a no. Here’s a yes:
Our mix is well in the green, looking good!
Additional solutions to avoid clipped mixes
Remember: the music creation process is not complete once your mixes are done. Understand that you don’t need to worry if your mix is sounding a bit soft before mastering takes place; that’s ok! A big part of the mastering process that takes place after mixing is adding additional loudness to your mix. But, the mastering crew are the ones who can add that additional volume in a way that ensures your music will sound consistent and awesome everywhere you hear it.
Remember: any comparisons we make in audio need to be apples to apples comparisons. For an accurate conclusion to be made, you can only compare mastered tracks to other mastered tracks. Comparing a mixed track to a fully mastered track is like comparing a chicken to an apple, and you can draw very inaccurate conclusions if you try to compare these two very different things to each other directly.
