work on production/mixing before you get into mastering.

took my quite a few years of fucking about with mixing and whatnots before i even decided to start mastering, but i am glad i did.

If you want that squashed sound, these aren't going to be useful for you, but here are some really good articles on mastering/mixdowns/dynamics that no one has mentioned yet:

http://www.tarekith.com/assets/mixdowns.html
http://www.tarekith.com/assets/mastering.html
http://www.tarekith.com/assets/dynamics.html

http://monolake.de/interviews/mastering.html

..and these are ali b.´s secret weapons

thanks for posting them, again!

One

Hi all,

We are offering 3 for 2 on mix and master packes... £60 but only £50 if you state "GLITCH HOP FORUM" on the email.

Please feel free to get in touch whether you are a producer looking for tracks to be mixed, or an engineer wanting some extra mix work.

Thanks,

Sam

sam@sampleandholdproductions.com

Hi all,

We are offering 3 for 2 on mix and master packes... £60 but only £50 if you state "GLITCH HOP FORUM" on the email.

Please feel free to get in touch whether you are a producer looking for tracks to be mixed, or an engineer wanting some extra mix work.

Thanks,

Sam

sam@sampleandholdproductions.com

wow thanks for the pointers! i have been trying to solve the problem of my music lacking that full sound, and i think this will be a big help!

if Sample & Hold isn't a paying sponsor can a mod please delete the spam? Plz & thk u

Apologies, didnt mean to spam....

http://www.sae.edu/reference_material/a ... lindex.htm

Bunch of definitions, tips etc across the board, but most importantly... mix effects etc...

Dope !!
Thanks bro

i know this may have been mentioned but i didnt have time to read all the replies. i have just spent months mastering a live album for the club i work in so thought id share what i have learned.

i personally dont like the way ozone sounds and find i lose a lot of the warmth from the bottom end when i use it. i do like the harmonic exciter which i occasionally use on the top end but thats about it. i prefer using hardware for mastering as you get a much brighter sound in my opinion [ i use an ivory series tl valve compressor and an ensonique dp2 for mastering fx] outboard gear is much more fun to use and you can get some decent [not berhinger] stuff dirt cheap these days.

i would be very careful when limiting your tracks because if you dont get your ratio's correct the compression can muffle and distort. i find that producing the track correctly in the first place is your best bet. when i export my final mix i can generally see what is peaking too much, discover that it is this or that sound and go back and turn it down. failing that i will only hard limit out large peaks that dont conform to the average db level and then amplify by the amount i have limited. if you limit too much or normalise you will lose all the dynamics and the punch everyone is trying to achieve. remember many of the channels you use will have some compression plus maybe one on the master. do you really then need to export and compress again?

finally ... i now use an allen and heath zed 10 fx and my dp2 just for slight mastering fx recording them live over the track. a cheeky reverb / mod delay flanger used very sparingly on the 16 or 32 bar breaks brings out the drops and makes the track jump out of the speakers a little more.

do any of you dither? i have only really just started experimenting with this but is very important when bouncing down from 24 bit 96 k to 16 bit 44.1 k as without dithering you lose lots of clarity for obvious reasons.

you should always dither when you change bit rates to a lower bit. you only need to do it once though, it will work for all bit changes after that.

EPROM's music that he plays live sounds better than 99% of the music online that I have either bought or been given to by other artist. this man has got shit on lock down!

Yeah i've been tweaking my mix lately and have now did a few sessions on mastering a tarck.

I have gone back and set some levels in the mix differently because -for example- the compressor did not only bring up the amience, but it muddled the bass.
So went back to cut the bass at 40Hz / 50Hz and lower its volume by about 2 dB and that cleaned the sound up quite a bit.

Also overall reverbs get tricky when your compressor's threshold dips down too deep or your ratio is too high.

I'm not a M.E. by any means. But I do want my track to sound right when I put it online and send a couple of dubs out to DJ's at least.

Nice tips!

(edit: lol when was this written?
"If you're DAW doesn't support track grouping *cough* Ableton Live *cough*, then you'll need to go and lower the faders of each track by the same amount."
Ableton has grouping and you've always been able to select multiple tracks at once and change mixer settings on all of them at the same time.)

Found this article, some good tips: http://www.modernbeats.com/hit-talk/mas ... t-racks-3/

*edit* accidentally quoted something from my phone. ignore this.

Also posted this in that other thread about loudness, but here are 2 two Red Bull Music Academy lectures with very experienced Mastering Engineers.

It's help you understand that as a musician it's not really your place to worry about mastering, rather to make very good music.
And as a (electronic music-) producer, also make sure you get your mix right. The rest is up to them.

RBMA - Stuart Hawkes (Loud Mastering, Taunton, UK)

RBMA - John Dent (Metropolis Studios, London, UK)

I find great comfort in knowing that if I make a good tune, it's be more likely to be released and handled by a real Mastering Engineer.
I just have to worry about making the tune as sincere, interesting, beautiful, or pumping as I can, then getting the mix right and you're done.

Do a quick and light EQ and compression over your mixdown so you can test-play the track out in your DJ sets and put it on soundcloud maybe.

Thanks Eprom for hooking up the tips as well as everyone else! quick question. (for ozone) how do I turn the low band to mono in the stereo imaging section of ozone without switching all the bands to mono? I tried clicking the channel ops and selecting 'mono' only to find it affects all the bands. I don't see the solo option or slider you made reference to and could use a little point in the right direction. Cheers!

Loom: set width to 0%

Loom you could also do stereo narrowing by lowering the width parameter to a negative integer.

this is still some awesome info!

No offense Eprom but this guide to mastering is totally bogus. I know you wrote it in 2009 but the way you talk about each feature is as a novice who barely knows the program. It sounds like you found some settings that worked well on one track, decided "this is it!!!" and posted it here as a mastering guide. The section you wrote on the multiband dynamics mainly made me think this. Ozone's Reverb can be nice, and please note that it can be set to certain bands -- therefore eliminating the problem of "muddying up your bass." You should learn how to use it and all Ozone's features. The delay effect on the harmonic exciter does not make it harder to mix the track, and why would you even be mixing the track at the point when you're using Ozone? Read the manual to learn more about the harmonic exciter. Your description of the Limiter makes no sense at all. :/

I don't mean to bash, I'm just kind of baffled at all the praise and commotion up in this thread.