How to make a loud mix?

[Forrest77]

Everyone wants to make a very dynamic and clean production, but yet still with a lot of volume. Compression, limiters, normalizers, etc. are all used to create hot mixes; I was wondering if anyone would like to share any formulas/hardware they feel provides a production with the most signal and least noise?

[ReniuR]

My personal experience with OPG (other people's gear) leads me to like SoundForge for mastering. Just take your bounces in there, EQ and limit/compress them, test play a few times, and it comes close, but nothing compares to a professional mastering job. (in price or quality)

Other than that, don't necessarily be affraid of the clip lights. If you don't hear it distorting, it most likely isn't. I've noticed, in a lot of cases, that the red light will come on before it really clips. With softer music tho, the clip lights are good to follow. The live tracks on our site would scare people with the red lights, and in a few places, yes, they did clip, but it still sounds good, and it was our first live recording. (so don't judge too harshly, but feedback is appreciated)

[ July 30, 2001: Message edited by: ReniuR ]

[kalle74]

a loud mix...

seeems to be the holy grail for us poor engineers. it´s true that nothing beats a properly done professional mastering job. but I have a few things...
get a multiband compressing software like T-Racks or better yet, a Waves C4 ( had a demo for 2 weeks, it´s awesome... ). Or you could take the hardware route and get a Behringer Ultradyne ( cheap ) or a TC Finalizer Express or a dbx Quantum ( both very expensive ). Being able to compress multiple frequency bands is a way to the ultimate loudness.
also employ some compression at the mixing state. ( I´m sure you already knew this... )
keep in mind that ultimately loudness is a psychoacoustic thing, so some kind of a psychoacoustic processor ( such as a enhancer of some kind to restore the high end ) would benefit your purposes.
My brother is able to go louder than commercial recordings, though he uses none of the above...he records only on analog tape, which compresses the signal really good

[da BaSsTaRd!]

one of the things i do is record everything as loud as i can. then for the tracks that aren't as loud, i'll double them by sending to an aux track. then you get all the volume without the clipping. then a touch of maxim on a master fader to control clipping and you're set. i routinely send drums to 2 aux tracks.

i also send all tracks (including aux's) to an aux with reverb on it. sometimes i send the "master" reverb track to an aux and insert a highpass filter on that aux.

also, clipping doesn't bother me too much unless i can really hear it so i still got lots of red on the board.

[misterfunnyshoes.com]

i would have to agree with ReniuR. i have used sound forge 5 to master recordings i've done with different software including pro tools le and it really works wonders. just like he was saying, just bounce the track (preferably to a 16 bit, 44.1k wav file) and use the wave hammer plugin to compress it and volume maximize it and then eq as necessary. the eq in sound forge is great because you got graphic, parameteric, and paragraphic. if you decided you need a little more reverb, you need to fade the ending, or any number of things you can run into during the mastering process, it's all right there in a very user friendly little package. download the demo from sonicfoundry.com and see what you think. worse case scenario, you uninstall it and didn't spend anything. (if that didn't sound like an info-mercial, i don't know what would) [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img] seriously though, it is really good and really free, but the demo is limited and i think eq is unfortunately one of the things it's missing.

sarah
mister funny shoes
www.misterfunnyshoes.com
[email protected]

[rsmith123]

Wouldn't you gain the same thing by bouncing to disk and reopening as a 2 track session, compressing/limiting and using effects and bouncing a second time to true stereo?

[Sabe]

...for outboard gear I would highly recommend the TC Electronics Finalizer 96k. It is a great piece of gear for mastering, and can also be used as a channel strip. All the hook ups are digital so latency is very minimal.

It has a feature called "wizard" which can optimize your mix utilizing 5 band parametric eq, and 3 band compression/gate/limit and vatious other mastering tools. Simply play all your tracks thru the finalizer with the "wizard" feature engaged (after a brief setup in the finalizer) and then do some tweaking to suit your tastes and musical style. The results are incredible.

...and now for the bad news. The Finalizer is around 2k US Dollars.

[ReniuR]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:<HR>Originally posted by rsmith123:
Wouldn't you gain the same thing by bouncing to disk and reopening as a 2 track session, compressing/limiting and using effects and bouncing a second time to true stereo?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


Theoretically, yes. But, bounces from protools rarely come out at the volume position that it displays during playback, making it dificult to judge your levels on a process as delicate as mastering.

[homerg]

Rsmith123 is correct in his process, the only difference that I find between doing it that way and using Sound Forge is the EQ plug-in in Sound Forge is much better than what you get with PTLE. However, I've gotten some great, hot, masters using PTLE only. After you bounce to disk as 2 tracks and import back into PTLE, all you do is compress and limit to taste.
If your mix sounds good to begin with then this will work great. If you need to futher EQ and tweek then I recommend using Sound Forge.

[zedhed]

Have you tried the 'MAXIM' rtas plug-in? There's a trial version on the PTLE cd in the plugins demo folder.You may get a pleasant surprise! I did.