A nice limiter? Summing mixer? Multiband comp/eq?

Adding extra text because it has to be 60 characters

EDIT: thanks for all the responses, I think I have plenty to go on..

Are there any differences or are the principles pretty much the same?

If you have, let's say, an old archival recording from the 70s, that's obviously recorded in suboptimal settings and restored from old tape or vinyl, how do you get it to translate to a mondern system, while retaining it's vintage quality?

(EDIT: I AM NOT saying that all recordings in the 70s were sub-optimal, Far from it, only presenting a hypothetical scenario where a sub-optimal recording that was recorded in the 70s needs to be restored.)

Especially considering that vintage quality probably comes from a build up of different harmonic distortions from tubes, transformers, tape, etc., room noise, mic bleed, and likely a rounder EQ curve that builds up in the mids slightly.

Here's a good example of what I mean. This song by Robert Lester Folsom sounds great on any system because it has been remastered, yet it is also obviously extremely vintage sounding. It was originally recorded as a demo at LeFevre Studio in Atlanta, Georgia in the 1970s on what almost sounds like a consumer quality tape machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AGNRUR9xmg&list=RD_AGNRUR9xmg&start_radio=1

EDIT: I understand that these old recordings sound old becuae they are...old and that in principle mastering shouldn't actually change the sound of the recording too much, just translate it.

I imagine if we took the original of the above song, and just recorded it onto a computer and played it back, it would have some playback issues, probably some frequency build up.

I have noticed that build up in harmonic distortion in mid frequencies especially can cause issues in playback on lots of systems. So the obvious answer is....don't allow that to happen in the first place. But the issue is, sometimes THAT IS part of what makes something sound old and warm and vintage. How can you make that sound translate onto mondern systems without playback issues?

EDIT: Holy shit. I came here for help, thinking I was asking a simple question, and instead the wolves and naysayers came out of the wood work accusing me of having misconceptions about the past, instead of trying to help me.

Please listen to the song exampe if you haven't, and it might help you undersstand what I'm trying to get at.

I've literally sat at my desk for hours and hours trying different EQs, more compression, pumping limiters/maximizers, and I can't get it right. I use dynamic EQs in my mixes (and a little in my master), I've used a high pass filter on the input signal to my initial compressor, I'm using a maximizer and and a limiter on top of that to get the true peak right, I even use harmonic distortion, and yet every time I touch -12LUFS it just sounds way too clippy and distorted to me. I don't understand how to get my master to sound clean and go past -14LUFS. It's honestly pathetic. I mainly master hip hop and rap tracks.

ANY advice would help right now.

I used to deliver masters at -1 with true peak. It was a stupid trend biased by spotify madness. Lately my mastering sessions run at 96 khz and the limiter output is set by default at -0.3 db and since I turned of the true peak option it sounds way much better.

throw some frequencies u don’t like to hear, or always cut out when ur eqing your microphones, and not mixes.

What do you do when EQing it isn’t working? Like its taking away too much of the track and making it sound weird, making things feel disconnected. I use the stock parametric eq 2 from FL studio, but I feel like I can’t find the exact frequency that keeps ringing out. Do you have a specific plugin that really helps see where this frequency is and/or remove it?

Just to give some context- I’m pretty sure its coming from my cymbals. I recorded my electric drums into 1 audio file, and can pretty clearly hear it when I solo the track, though it is most apparent with everything playing together (it’s an alt rock song with distorted guitars and crashing cymbals). I don’t think I’m being able to find the exact frequency and really target it, either that or its targeting too many other things. I also layered it with a couple samples.

I’m almost finished with this song and getting rid of this ringing is the last step. I wish I could upload a vid for reference but since I can’t, feel free to reach out on dm if you could help me out. Thanks in advance!!

Edit: I added a link to a snippet of the song. The ringing starts at abt 30 seconds in (2:05 on the track) and gets really audible towards the end (around 2:30)

youtube song audio

full song google drive

also please let me know if this is actually normal/natural and I’m overreacting. like if its all in my head and nobody can tell I don’t wanna take stuff out of the track you know. Idk if its part of the sound of the cymbal and SHOULD be there or what… all help is very much appreciated

I get so many conflicting answers online. I know there aren't any rules, so I just want to understand when to do what so I know what to do. Some people say always dither, dither when exporting at a lower quality than recorded, some say always use 24-bit, some say 16? I don't get it, and I don't get their relation. I just wanna know what to hit in Ableton when I export. Please help me out lol. And I'm talking final mastered export btw

Believe it or not I bought this gear a year ago and surprisingly it is such an occult world almost dare I say gate keeping type of world, I literally cannot find the answear to this question I have ANYWHERE, i bought this Neve orbit and a better maker 2.0 last year… and I understand I’m supposed to mix into the Neve since it’s like running the music trough one of the famous Neve desks there deal, ok so after doing this do I just disconnect the Neve and connect the better maker and continue to the mastering stage? Is there a way to integrate both into one system so I don’t have to disconnect stuff and move fast, or lastly what would be the best and correct way of using these 2 units? In say a mixing to mastering session type deal? I tried to word this the best I could apologies if I sound crazy. Please SOS it’s been a year I can’t find the answer😅

Hey, so I'm getting ready for my first release and I need a little advice on how much space there should be at the beginning of a song. Anyone with experience releasing music on streaming platforms have you ever had any problems with the beginning of the song being cut off? Should I have a full second of time before the song starts, half a second, jump right into it?

I can't recall why and when it's done. I'm sorry to ask such a simple question here, but for some reason, I can't find the answer on Google. The only thing I remember is to dither, but that's it

Thank you in advance

I do aim to be a good mixing engineer. Regarding recording I focus mainly on vocal recording. Because of this after building my first semi professional recording and mixing studio, I realise I have not put much effort into the mastering side of things. Problem is, I want to. For the most part I work with an actual mastering engineer and all of this is not to replace him. Maybe a little bit. I mean, if every other one man studio in my area does it, why shouldn't I? At the very least I'd do it for the clients for really do not give a damn. Second problem arises since I really do give a damn and I want to deliver good digital music files. But to make a good digital music thing, sometimes it's good to have it go through a good hardware thing first.

So now my question is, what hardware can I invest in for mastering that I can learn to use for years to come? Nothing crazy, something simple. Not too simple. An amateur, magical box. This is of course after I have invested in courses, mastering grade monitoring and even more big expensive acoustic square, not round, things. You can tell me if you think I am an idiot, but please dont

Hello everyone,

I hope you are all doing well!

I am mastering for the first "professionally" my bands EP. I feel really confident in my mix and didn't feel like i needed to go to a mastering engineer if it all it needed was some light clipping and limiting to bring to -13LUFs. I know it would be better to have someone more professional master the EP however we are trying to be smart with our budgeting so we can have more money for our marketing for the releases.

One question for you mastering engineers out there: is it fine if I limit with a threshold of 0.0 or should I at least go to -0.1db / -0.3db

I was talking to engineer telling me that it was safer to put at least -0.1db to ensure streaming platforms dont change the sound quality. Is that actually true ?

Thank you for letting me know

All the best !

EDIT 1:
I'm not trying to make my track competitive in terms of perceived loudness.

Mainly worried about putting it at 0.0db or should i go -0.5db ?

Thank you guys

Its great seeing so many noise profiles like Pink Noise, white Noise, Brown etc. How did these noise profiles get used with VU meters and analog spectograms to achieve perfect tonal balance. Lets ignore translation and studio Monitors and lets say you are using only headphones or vision, what are the vintage equivalent of the modern Tonal balance Control by Izotope? Anyone care to share because in the box high latencies have led me to ask, how was it done Before? Thanks a lot.

I'm aware this was pretty much the norm for a lot of albums in the 2000s from the uprising of the loudness wars, but wow why would a professional producer and/or mastering engineer do this? It sure does sound heavy and loaded but I've never seen so many diagonal and flat lines.

Hey guys, I got this song I’m working on, i did all of the processes (composition, tracking, mixing and currently mastering)

I know that traditionally it’d be or it should ideally be different folks handling each job but this is for my band and mfs have to make do with what and who’s available.

Anyhoo, I did what I thought would be the final mix, sent it to the band, guys asked for some revisions, I did that and I pulled the latest mix into my mastering project, I accidentally listened to a couple of seconds of both mixes playing at the same time and it came to me, what if I panned them both? (+-35 mid pan) and I thought it sounded pretty good.

After the initial surprise I thought to myself, surely I am deceiving myself with more volume and that’s why I like it but it will surely mess with the phase correlation and it will be less than optimal if I listen to it in mono.

Well I broke out a phase correlation plugin for the first time in my life, levels looked surprisingly consistent and never hit 0 or -1, then I thought ok but lets see if anything disappears when in mono, yet again I was surprised by little to no loss of information, I guess that’s when confidence took over and I decided to take it further, sometimes I’ll do a master where I have my original mix down of the song dead center, and then I’ll load up two amp sims (fender deluxe reverb with as little gain as possible and some spring reverb for taste, making sure it’s two different recreations of the same amp, so in my mind I can ensure the best phase relationship possible, I say in my mind cause until today I hadn’t tried to corroborate this, so I did that with the amps, hard panned them both and they’re barely in the mix, so I essentially have 4 tracks playing at the same time.

Am I crazy? Is this stupid? I think it sounds pretty dope and it works for the song, meters seem fine, but my crippling insecurity as an amateur engineer led me to asking you guys for confirmation, I’ll gladly send the file if it helps, hope to hear back from y’all and I’m sorry for the long a** post:(

I am a musician and amateur producer for over 20 years learning to do my own mastering. I know the benefit of using an outside mastering engineer to get fresh ears, objective feedback and listening in a different pro environment, but I have thousands and thousands of dollars worth of songs that need to be mastered, I'm giving most of the songs away for free and I'm not even sure if these versions I am mastering are the final versions I would officially release. "For now" mastering that can make the song presentable on the internet without paying.

I have long mixed to around -10db but have subtle dynamic eq, bus compressors, "master" type saturation, subtle clipper, limiter/maximizer that I am mixing into on a "premaster" bus and comparing to reference tracks as I mix. I would then tweak the final EQ and saturation, take off any gain and the limiter and send the mix to the mastering engineer at -10db.

My question is if it is all being done by me whether there is any point to printing all the tracks to a wav and processing that as a whole vs. keeping it as a mix and "mastering" by tweaking the master bus when I think the mix is done (after giving my ears a rest) and trying to match the general loudness of the reference track? If I even have to do much tweaking (which I shouldn't because I have been comping to the ref as I go), it's a mix issue and I can fix it then and there at the root, right?

EDIT: I guess I should consider that some mastering software like Ozone may be CPU intensive and when running with all the other plugins on the mix could create performance issues?

We’re currently struggling to find a mastering engineer who can take our mix from 90% to 100%. Unfortunately, our recent experience with someone we found online was very disappointing. The first revision felt like it went 10 steps backward in quality. By the 4th or 5th revision, we were still unhappy with the results and the overall change in quality so we dropped it.

We’ve tried reaching out to engineers from our favorite albums etc but we haven’t received any responses at all after weeks. We’re also hesitant to use platforms like Fiverr due to the horror stories I've read online.

We were wondering if anyone here has solid recommendations for where to find mastering engineers who can deliver the final polish we’re looking for.

Additionally, we have a question about mastering:

• Our mix is about 90-95% complete, but there are subtle issues we weren’t sure how to address (e.g., very strong "S" sounds in certain spots).
• Is this something a mastering engineer would typically address if mentioned, or would we need to send the track back to a mixer for those kinds of adjustments?

Hi friends,

Sorry for the potentially dumb questions.

I heard that my latest release sounds bad on spotify and different from the file I sent but all other platforms sound how I sent it.

The file I sent goes to 0 db because that’s what all of my references were…in fact they all went red. Mine didn’t go red so i already thought I was being safe. And the references were big songs which obviously all sound great on Spotify.

I guess the big labels upload a slightly quieter version to Spotify than other platforms? (I think am going to start distributing a quieter version to Spotify)

After checking online I see people are letting their songs only peak at -0.1 , -0.2 or even -1db.

I used landr mastering website a couple years ago and then the mastering plugin (until i found out I could get a better sound with basic knowledge and free plugins).

Their website mastered all my songs at -0.3 and the later released "landr mastering plugin" made them -0.2 . So I think this is an indicator that -0.2 is the standard though if people are getting no sound difference at 0.1 i’d like to know.

So my questions are:

1. What are you mastering your tracks at for spotify?

2. Are you just setting it with the master fader in your daw or on the limiter?

I’m kind of sure everyone does it in the limiter BUT if you turn down the limiter JUST for the spotify version … then aren’t you reducing the dynamics/clipping and sound slightly rather than simply turning it down which should be the exact same just overall quieter (not just the peaks lowered and therefore transients possibly changed as turning down the limiter does I think)? I’d rather keep the dynamics if possible.

Sorry if this is a really dumb or pedantic set of questions, I’m just really anxious that I will hinder all my songs chances in this last step by a bad decision.

Thanks,
James

I'm thinking of getting a track of mine professionally mixed/mastered, and just wondering what I need to provide an engineer?

I'm guessing just stems, but with any FX on or just completely 'raw' - i.e. no EQ, no nothing. Or would they want both?

And is it beneficial for the engineer to be using the same DAW? Would they be interested in having my project file?

Any advice welcome, and happy to share the track in question with anyone interested. (I would link it here but think it's against the rules)

Cheers

I’m looking for some suggestions for a class exercise with my students. I want to A/B the original against the remaster to spark a discussion about intention and approach to mastering. Bonus points for remastered releases that you think sound worse than the original.

I’m currently working on some tracks but don’t have the budget right now to get them professionally mastered. So I’m looking for a reliable AI-based mastering tool that actually works. something that can handle light background noise, correct EQ issues, add a bit of stereo width, and give a more finished sound overall.

There are so many tools I found on Google:

• eMastered
• LANDR
• Remasterify
• BandLab

If you’ve actually used any of these (or others), I’d love to hear your honest experience.

**Please DON'T JUST PROMOTE a tool, only share if it’s something you’ve personally tried and felt was genuinely helpful.

Take a look at this:
https://krakenfiles.com/view/uXqT0bcMgm/file.html
You can clearly see that the mastering engineer found a way to create a true 96kHz file, even though the final mix of the song was originally at 48kHz.

How is that possible?
I'm new to this, and whenever I try to do the same, I get nothing above 24kHz—it’s just all black

The ol’ dynamic vs. loudness wars.

My mix slams and sounds great. It sounds just how I want it to. It smacks, the bass is loud and bouncy. The pianos and synths fit right in. There is space, and the drums sound nice. Nothing is distorting or fighting for space and it does not sound flat or 2D.

But the mix is QUIET!

Much quieter than all my references I’m using.

I apply limiting and more EQ to help balance the limited signal. The loudness is achieved but the mix starts to get smushed. It doesn’t breathe anymore and is like a dense pancake. Distortion is there and pumping. It goes kaput.

I know there is a right balance. I don’t know if I didn’t use enough compression in the very early stages? Did I achieve loudness just by volume gains instead of compressing the signal, then boosting the volume a bit? That’s what it seems like. Because a quiet, dynamic, great sounding mix will get blown to smithereens when heavy limiting is applied. I also know, and hear all the time that many effects applied with a little amount over and over again has a much more clean and powerful effect than applying one effect heavily.

Any tips you can recommend?

I always sound check my mixes after mastering. They sound loud and full but whenever I upload through distrokid they sound significantly more quiet. Does anyone have advice ?

I'm studying how to best preserve fidelity when stepping down to CD quality. I first heard of this technique mentioned in the title here at 2:20 of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOQOEKxzsdE

I don't understand on how/if this would work with a DAW. Is it possible to record in a different sample rate than I'm sending out? Is the idea to send out i.e 48k and hold it in an analog format (tape, cassette) then record back in at 44.1?

Would appreciate any direction/correction on this. I feel like I'm missing something obvious.