mix question

[hasenfus]

i have been having a problem lately, where when i mix a song, both on my monitors and my headphones it sounds great, and the master level is close to peaking, but when i burn it to a disc and listen to it either in my car or on a stereo it sounds compressed. It also sounds very mid/low range, the highs seem to almost dissappear. The levels are always to low also. any advice would be great!!

mark anderson

[SKI]

I noticed you said "lately", does this mean that you have previously mixed things that sounded better?
If this is the case are you using any new or different gear? Have you changed any of your methods that you were using on your earlier mixes?
I have found that small changes can have a dramatic affect on your mix under certain conditions.
If on the other hand your mixes have never sounded quite the way you want them to, keep this in mind. As suggested, listen to similiar music to the type you are mixing to see what is similiar and what is different, and try to listen to you finished mix on as many different sources as possible.

[hasenfus]

i shouldn't of used the term lately. basically, the song i am working on now is the first time i have done a project with a full band. typically, we were using protools for working on songs and then recording them in a professional studio.

here is in detail the two major problems i am having:

the versus with just a basic acoustic track and vocal, and minimal drums and bass, sound great, but when the chorus kicks in, the mix becomes boomey, and all aspects of the song no longer have any definition/attack/punch to them. thats why to me it sounds like that part is being super compressed in the bouncing process. that simply doesn't happen when listening in the protools.

the second problem i am having is the overall volume of the song when bounced. it is so much lower than a typical CD. am i doing something wrong, or is that compensated for in the master process?

[el matador]

what are you using to burn the songs to disk? A cd burning program, like musicmatch, may have an effect turned on when burning. Also, when you bounce the song to a wav file, put in on windows media player and listen to it again with no effects turned on. And keep in mind when playing back in 3rd party software like window media player, you are no longer using the digi001 but the pc soundcard which may have different treble, bass etc. settings on.

It seems that somewhere along the line to the compact disc, an effect like compression is being added.

[mattm]

while you are mixing, you might want to keep a 'reference' handy, like a favorite album/single or something. don't try to make your mix emulate the reference, just use it as a general spectral balance point. keep in mind that 99.9% of commercial releases have been professionally mastered so their overall frequency balance and volume is only ever a 'ball park' reference.

~matt

[pk_hat]

Matt brings up a great point that is often overlooked. There's a great article on this issue at www.digido.com/compression (http://www.digido.com/compression) where he mentions this common procedure of referencing our mixes to commercial CD's, in that these CDs would sound totally different in their pre-master stage.

In other words, focusing on a great mix is the key, while not getting discouraged because it doesn't sound like 'Ok Computer' or have the finesse of Bjork's latest album, all that ferry dust is applied later with tools that would require a second real estate mortgage to acquire.

pk

[homerg]

Without adding a limiter or compression on the master fader your mix is going to be lower than commercail CDs, period. This is one of those things that first time users to ProTools users get frustrated by initially. You need to either have the mix mastered to bring the levels up, or add a limiter and some compression to the master fader in ProTools.
If you're going to have it mastered professionally then don't add anything to the master fader. Let them do it. Or even if you're going to master it yourself with another application, leave it alone. Just mix it.
As far as your current mixes go, have you listened to the mixes on some different systems? Can you play back the mix on the same monitors that you use with ProTools to see if they sound the same?

[mattm]

good call pk.

the digido (http://www.digido.com) sight has some fantastic and informative recording, mixing and mastering relevant information that everyone should take the time to read and understand. a lot of it is particuarly applicable to the digital recording medium (as the sight name suggests...)

~matt