Mostess wrote:And when/where is the release party?
Tomorrow night. You still have time!!
Here are some helpful thoughts for anyone who'll be sending their mixes to a mastering engineer. (And even if you're only posting mixes to Songfight, some of these apply:)
Clean up your low end: "Mud" in the low frequencies is the hardest thing to fix in mastering. Since the meat of the bass, kick, and (sometimes) the snare all reside below 120Hz, it's almost impossible for a M.E. to reduce mud without affecting the interplay of those instruments. Some simple things you can do that may help:
- Gate your toms and vocals. These tracks should be quiet when not in use.
- Use the microphone's bass-rolloff switch when recording guitars. Do the same on vocals if you're singing close to the mic.
- If you can't rolloff on the microphone, do it on the raw tracks. Especially if you have a mic pointing anywhere near an acoustic guitar sound hole, you'll have frequencies below the instrument's fundamental that are only adding mud to the mix.
Look for hiss: This is the high-frequency equivalent of "mud". Some kinds of hiss are unavoidalbe (and even desirable,) specifically tape hiss. But if you're recording in digital, there should be no hiss on your tracks. Solo each track, and make sure you haven't inadvertantly captured a fan or an open window or Yoko Ono. (On one of my songs, I accidentally tracked a guitar part in 16-bit and at too low a level. When I compressed the track, which was necessary for the mix, it brought the original noise floor up high enough that it was audible in places! Wicked hiss.) If you find hiss that you missed in tracking, use a noise remover. Even if you can't completely remove the noise, reducing it will leave the M.E. more high frequencies to tweak.
Use the highest bit rate you can: If your hardware supports 24 bits, use it. This is FAR more important than sample rate (which is a separate religious argument we can have in another thread.) Whether you record at 44K or 48K, you should be capturing everything at 24- or 32-bit.
Leave all your tracks in 24 bit: Let the M.E. dither. If you dither yourself, anything done in mastering happens AFTER the 16-bit (assuming you're mastering for CD) conversion. So send the M.E. a data CD with 24 bit WAV files, rather than trying to burn a redbook CD.
Don't bother with fades: This ties in with dithering. But in short, don't worry about leaving a couple of seconds silence on each end of the track. Most M.E.s prefer this. Tell them how long you want your fades to take, and leave the faders up on your mix.
Leave the master bus alone: This was tough for me. Mixing tracks for Songfight, I'd gotten in the habit of slapping Ozone on my master bus, and basically doing a self-mastering job on the final mix. But the M.E. has access to the same tools you do, and has better ears to boot. So skip the harmonic exciter and stereo widener, and let the M.E. make the call.
For God's sake, don't use compression the final mix: Sure, squash the hell out of the individual tracks. Get your mix the way you want it, but leave the 2-mix the hell alone. Compression is destructive. It can't be reversed if you do it wrong. And since the M.E. has FAR better equipment than you do, you'll be much happier with the end result.
