Why Mix A Song Down?

[Dolce]

I would love to know if anyone mixes and masters like I do - and if you think my way is fundamentally wrong - why is it wrong? ;;;;;

What I tend to do, is produce my song until I am happy with the general way the instruments work together. Then, I use the Master Bus - to place a top quality Parametric EQ - MultibandCompressor -and limiter.

Then I can adjust any parameter in the mix I want - I sometimes find that after multicompressing - I can improve the sound by reducing compression on certain instruments - and changing pre eq in the fx chain to post eq can make the sound fuller and smoother somehow - I try both anyway!

I feel that only the pros know when a mix is ready to bounce down to a single wave file - I have never liked mastering like this -

When I export my song to a AIF/MP3 it is mastered!

[Prometheus]

I would love to know if anyone mixes and masters like I do - and if you think my way is fundamentally wrong - why is it wrong? ;;;;;

What I tend to do, is produce my song until I am happy with the general way the instruments work together. Then, I use the Master Bus - to place a top quality Parametric EQ - MultibandCompressor -and limiter.

Then I can adjust any parameter in the mix I want - I sometimes find that after multicompressing - I can improve the sound by reducing compression on certain instruments - and changing pre eq in the fx chain to post eq can make the sound fuller and smoother somehow - I try both anyway!

I feel that only the pros know when a mix is ready to bounce down to a single wave file - I have never liked mastering like this -

When I export my song to a AIF/MP3 it is mastered!

I wouldn't mixdown to Mp3 if I were you... It's a lossy format. You want to make your final master at 16 bit dynamic range and 44.1KHz sample rate to keep it above the human Nyquist Rate.

Apart from that, the equipment you're using and the way you're routing it sounds reasonable. It just depends what you're doing with it.

[Coises]

I’m just a beginner, so take this with a grain of salt... but I think it’s about keeping your head straight and not trying to wear too many hats at once.

Mixing is about pulling all the performances together and getting the song to sound as good as you can.

Mastering is about getting the mix to fit into a context — all the songs on one CD to match, all the music in a soundtrack to match, and all of it to match the expectations for the genre — so that when John Q. Public listens to it, it sounds “right.”

There is no technological need to separate the two; but for human beings, it helps us focus on the task at hand, which is difficult enough without trying to do both things at once.

That said, so far I have mixed/mastered my songs the way you describe because I have no context into which to place them; they’re just a collection of songwriter’s demos on my web site. If I ever want to make a CD of some of them, though, I’m going to have to go back and re-mix them without the master bus effects, then master them so they all sound like they belong on the same disc.

[Prometheus]

There's a huge misunderstanding about mastering, the difficulties involved in it, the need for specialists to do it et cetera.

Back in the good old days of tiny dynamic ranges, ridiculously miss-managed stereo fields, acetate and physical cutting needles, it was necessary to have a specialist master a disc because any phasing problems in the low end could damage the cutting equipment, which was a very expensive piece of kit.

Frankly, in this day and age we have stereo mixing so clearly understood and well in hand that any recording and mixing engineer worth his salt should never have low end phasing problems in a mix. You'd have to seriously not know what you're doing to allow that to happen.

Still, this mystique remains, perpetuated no doubt by mastering engineers, that ordinary human beings can't handle the process and that you should never master something you've mixed and that all mild mannered mastering engineers are actually from Krypton.

It's absurd. Anyone who studies the processes involved in mastering and practices doing it can become good at it, and whether you've recorded and mixed what you master makes absolutely no difference as long as you have a reasonable process and follow it diligently.