Audio Recording

Welcome to the modern age of music production where home music producers are doing all the three major processes in one roof. These major processes are recording, mixing and mastering. Before; when home music production is still not popular or common; the record producer will be tracking, mixing and mastering in different studios. The cost of producing an album is very high.

Now that home music producers are doing these processes on their own with the help of digital technology, there are times when they mix and master their records all at once. Common wisdom tells you that you should never mix and master your own work because it results to some biases and inaccuracies in the decision process.

This post will give some tips on how you can produce the best work possible in a low budget home studio music productions in relation to audio mixing and mastering.

Quality Audio Master always comes from a Great Mix

Some home producers and engineers always feel that mastering can be a problem in later stage of music production. In fact the reality is opposite. To have a quality master and a straightforward mastering process, you should be working first in producing a great mix. Why?
Consider the following scenario:

1.) If you are cutting corners in mixing or done it hurriedly; you miss to fix a lot of issues that can make a great sounding mix.

2.) Then when the time you will be self-mastering your work; it takes a lot of time and needs tremendous amount of adjustments since the mix does not sound good.

3.) More adjustments would make your mix sound unnatural or even worse which would be more prone to errors/over-adjustment.

Therefore the first tip is to produce a great sounding mix. I recommend spending MORE time perfecting your mix. Do not complete it in a single day. I suggest giving them 3 days for one song at a minimum. For highly critical songs, you can even give it around 7 days for the full mix final version to be decided.

Why giving a mix some time can make it sound really great?

1.) At first, your ears are fatigue when you are doing the recording session. Imagine you are recording the entire tracks in a single day. Your ears can still fatigue even when you are not mixing but just simply listening to the recordings.

2.) When your ears are tired and then you rush to audio mixing, you cannot accurate make the right decision because the most important studio equipment which is the ear needs some rest.

3.) When you give your mix another day to work on it, your ears are very fresh at the start of the mixing session. Fresh ears can reveal a LOT of remaining issues in your mix which you have not detected on the previous mixing sessions.

4.) Once you know the problem specifically; you can implement the necessary effects to resolve this such as EQ, compression, adjusting levels etc.

5.) Doing this repetitively in a couple days can dramatically improve your mix because every time you would be listening with fresh ears, any remaining issues would be revealed and fix. After a week, you mix should now sound PERFECT!

Why a perfect sounding mix is VERY easy to master?

OK supposing you re-review your mix on a daily basis until it now sounds perfect. How the mastering is being done?

The mastering process is very simple. Consider the usual mastering steps below:

1.) EQ – you would be simply be applying minimum EQ because the mix sounds good, all you need is to boost up some presence (+0.5dB to 2.0 dB at 2000Hz Q=0.5) and it’s done.

2.) Compression – the work should not need any compression particularly if it now sounds great and the dynamics are well preserved.

3.) The only work needed is to pass the mix through a brick wall limiter which would maximize the volume. Popular brick wall limiter includes L1 from Waves.

Basically the most important settings are as follows:

Threshold = -14dB – Average RMS (before limiting)
Out of ceiling = -0.2dB

To find out the average RMS, you should use audio mastering software that can analyze the audio statistics of your wave.
In some cases, applying a brick wall limiter is even enough provided the mix down sounds really good and loud. Therefore the secret to self-audio mastering your work lies in having a great sounding mix down. So spend more time crafting and perfecting your mix so that when it comes to mastering, it would be simply as easy as applying a brick wall limiter.