loud, quality tracks - am i doing it wrong

[hydrogen]

if your home master doesnt sound as loud as other professional masters, there a lot of reasons the most common is:

1) shitty mix

2) too much low end in the mix, which forms point 1)

on point once again. +1

post a 32bar loop and we see.

*edit... i mean hear.

[steevio]

if your home master doesnt sound as loud as other professional masters, there a lot of reasons the most common is:

1) shitty mix

2) too much low end in the mix, which forms point 1)

+1

too much emphasis on sending tracks to be mastered on the forum imo, get you mixes right at source, pay attention to the bass frequencies you are using, keep your bass tight, spectrum analyse your tunes and look for excess sub bass frequencies, if you've got big spikes below 40 Hz, go back and rethink the bass, change the notes or emphasise the first harmonic of the bass and back off the fundamental so the bass comes more upfront without taking up so much headroom.

[Keagan]

it starts at square one with conscious mixing, you gotta know what youre after and after the fact- what your track is capable of
most of my purely synthetic tracks are really loud, in tracks that i use a lot of samples they tend to be a bit "quieter".. I don't feel like i can control this and i don't really care

for a while now i start with a kick drum and immediately compress it to a point that i know that it will cut through anything
and then i move the fader down to -4db or -6db and bring in the hook, or sample i was working on before and mold the kick around that i like big 909 kicks so i usually don't turn it down much after that

i always put a dbx distressor on my master buss for some extra oomp- i've never had any complants from mastering camps, besides that i feel like 95% of my tracks don't need to past through those hands at all

[briobox]

for a while now i start with a kick drum and immediately compress it to a point that i know that it will cut through anything
and then i move the fader down to -4db or -6db and bring in the hook, or sample i was working on before and mold the kick around that i like big 909 kicks so i usually don't turn it down much after that

by compress to a point that it will cut through anything, do you mean tuning a sidechain on it or a compressor directly after the kick channel? thanks.

[G3rard]

I think he means compressing the actual kick drum so that it is tight and solid, so it will cut through the bassline and still be audable even when its lower in the mix.

[hydrogen]

oh yeah... and watch andivax's mixing secrets lots of good stuff in there. but he breaks the -6db concept in the video that everyone mentions here... I didn't think so b4 but that is very important.

[damagedgoods]

oh yeah... and watch andivax's mixing secrets lots of good stuff in there. but he breaks the -6db concept in the video that everyone mentions here... I didn't think so b4 but that is very important.

Depends on your DAW. Most of them can go *well* above 0dB before they actually clip. Like, assuming 32 bits (so conservatively), that's about 750 dB above or below 0. There are factors that make it more complicated but in general the signal quality doesn't degrade with level per se; either you're clipping or you're not.

[Opuswerk]

oh yeah... and watch andivax's mixing secrets lots of good stuff in there. but he breaks the -6db concept in the video that everyone mentions here... I didn't think so b4 but that is very important.

Depends on your DAW. Most of them can go *well* above 0dB before they actually clip. Like, assuming 32 bits (so conservatively), that's about 750 dB above or below 0. There are factors that make it more complicated but in general the signal quality doesn't degrade with level per se; either you're clipping or you're not.

This is very untrue when using ableton Live. My mixes have started sounding much much better as soon as i've put all those channels down to -6db Helped loads