quote: | Originally posted by Woony
Lol, your saturator is barely even doing anything... you should see my master bus Console emulation, heavy saturation across the mix and tape emulation. There's absolutely nothing wrong with saturation on the master bus, loads of people do it, sending the mix bus through tape or analog preamps for saturation is an age old engineer trick. I mean, not everyone has to go as far as I do but a little master saturation almost never hurts. It helps to glue things and makes the track a bit more harmonically rich. However, unless you are "home mastering" to make a track loud enough to play out, I would shy away from corrective mix bus EQ, peak compression and limiting, they all come with side effects that are better to avoid unless you need to. Mastering always has a destructive side, hence why it requires years of experience and skill to get right. That said, a bit of gentle, analog modelled RMS compression can work nicely on the master to glue the mix and add a bit of character, just one or two db of gain reduction will probably be enough - it's basically just decoration rather than actual mix fixing. |
ive always shyed away from doing much on the master, typically mastering engineers have said "give it to me without the limiter on the master bus"
but... recently ive decided that i want to have a proper go at drum and bass, and the truth is a lot of, if not most, of the big guys in DNB mix into a limiter (or two) doing a quite a lot
ive come to understand that this is really for getting the most volume out of a track, then mixing and mastering go hand in hand to some extent - ie with heavy limiting on the master you may well actually have to go back and adjust your track - for example you may have the snare louder on a heavily limited track than you would have without it. Doing a bit of DIY mastering enables you to make adjustments that the mastering engineer wont be able to do
I did a session with a well known drum and bass producer a few years back (hes a friend of a friend and i paid him something)
first question I asked "how do you get such loud powerful mixes" - he pointed to the oxford native limiter on his mater bus. At that time i still didn't want to believe it as it seemed to go against conventional wisdom but im coming round to the idea and will try it in my next mix
agree nothing wrong with stuff on the master, in fact it may be the way forward. the more we understand about mastering the better our mixed will be afterall...
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Last edited by chris marsh on Aug-26-2017 at 19:41
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