PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Recording, Mixing, Performance and Production The best way to improve at mixing and mastering

2B,

Let me correct myself, as Matt pointed out in jazz, drums are not the loudest.

I am using a generality that applies to rock and pop if there ARE drums. Yes it is about radio ready, but it also about sound in general and the phenomenon of perceived loudness which I will get to it just a bit. (Fingers on a chalkboard are a good example of perceived loudness. They may not actually be that loud but boy do they sound loud, and boy are they as annoying as all get out.)

You start with drums and move them to the loudest level you would get to in your head room, let's say that is -9 dB.

The drum track if you have a single one from Real Tracks (though I always triple the Drum Real Tracks and add different EQs to each track) or the DRUM BUS if you have many different drum tracks (kick, snare, etc.) will fluctuate from about -12 to -9 as the drums are hitting. (Or something in that range.)

-9 is considered your "crest". This is more of a level thing than a "loudness thing" but I was using loudness as a relative term. Because guitars are more "cutting" their levels have to be lower by a hair than the drums. This gets into the science of "perceived loudness." Technically they may not "be" louder but they will "sound" louder if you are not careful.

Now you want to to nudge the bass up until it just hugs the drum line at -9 but is not louder than the drums or it will sound wrong. We are talking fractions of a dB here. You have have to use a bass-specific EQ and compressor with bass specific presets or the bass will bleed over on the bottom and make things sound mushy. You have to experiment. The bass and drums are by far the most important elements of any song that has them, except for the vocals. Don't believe me? Go listen to Carolina In My Mind by James Taylor and tell me what the two loudest instruments are. You may be surprised.

You have to experiment with the other instruments, but generally they will be -.3dB to .-.5dB lower than the drums or people will say "all I can is guitar and where did the drums go!"

THEN, on vocals, GENERALLY speaking, you want the vocals to be about 1 dB to 1.5 dB higher than all the instruments (called the "bed), though you have to ride the fader.

When I mix all my other instruments (drums included) I am "in the green" on my master fader meter at about -9 to - 8 dB.

By this I mean that whenever I get to the almost final mix, I adjust the master bus fader until the bed minus vocals is mostly green and somewhere between -9 and - 7 db with just a hint of orange on the right hand meter strip on the master bus that shows actual dB levels.

When the vocals come in, I want to see that they add about 1.5 dB (or as high as 2 dB at times) to the mix which will give me what looks like a little orange "cap" on the mix but I will have plenty of headroom because I am far from 0 dB. (The color scheme I am referring to is in Sonar, but all DAWS have some sort of color scheme for DB level levels on the master.)

Now, I will listen and tweak until it sounds about perfect.

Using meters, I am looking for these numbers:

About 12 LUFS

about 12 RMS

about 10 to 9 Dynamic range.

If I see these number and I know my vocals are on top because I can see them, and I ride that fader to keep them consistently higher than the bed, I know I am ready to mix down.

Once you have the mix, you will have plenty of room to boost it in the mastering process without getting distortion. This is critical. If you have already made it as loud as you can before you master, your song will be ear-splitting and no one will want to listen to it.

If you listen to my latest song Judgment day, I used exactly this process to get that sound which Joe at PG Music called "good timbre."

It is a complex mix because there are three electrics coming out of an amp, and three acoustic parts, plus piano, vocals and strings.

But I used exactly the method I just described and I believe the separation of the instruments is good and the sound is clear.

What I just described is exactly how I did it.

Hope that helps.

https://soundcloud.com/david-snyder-gigs2/judgment-day