Production Advice

Day 11 of 11eleven easy ways to improve the sound of your music

Since this is the final post in the series, and my speciality is mastering, it would seem to make sense for this to be a mastering tip.

But I’m not going to do that.

Regular readers already know all about my views on levels and mastering ! For example:

How to avoid over-compressing your mix

How to make your music loud (without killing it stone dead)

Learn the Loudness War secret that will give YOUR music an edge

- and there’s no need to repeat myself here. But this tip is about loudness – or rather, levels.

Specifically, gain structure.

Gain structure just means – how loud your audio is, at every point in the audio chain. Back in the days of analogue it was crucial to get the levels as high as possible at every point in the chain to get the best signal-to-noise ratio, but not so loud as to cause distortion.

These days, it’s not really an issue. With over 60 dB of signal to noise ratio in even a 16-bit signal, all we need to do to get clean audio is avoid clipping, and we’re good.

Or, are we ?

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Day 10 of 11eleven easy ways to improve the sound of your music

So far the tips in this series have all been about “less is more”.

From which you might conclude that my mixes and masters use minimal EQ, compression and effects.

This couldn’t be farther from the truth!

In fact, I find that as a mastering engineer I’m often more “hands-on” than many of my peers, and this may be one of the reasons I’ve been successful. In one case I remember adding 46 dB @ 42 Hz to a reggae master coming from analogue tape – and it sounded great !

The key is to process agressively – but selectively.

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Day 9 of 11eleven easy ways to improve the sound of your music

How do you know when a mix is finished ?

Tough question – but my personal opinion is – when you’ve thought about every single bar, and know exactly why things sound the way they do.

There’s something about working with a real mixing desk that makes us want to move faders – and something about DAWs that makes not bother.

I often hear mixes where I think “why didn’t they ride the vocal there ?” or “it would have been good if that synth part had stood out more just there” – or something similar.

In the extreme case, you get “set it and forget it” mixing, where the sound is great in the chorus (say) but loses focus in the verses, or vica versa. There are no moment-by-moment tweaks to make sure every section of the song reaches it’s full potential.

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Day 8 of 11eleven easy ways to improve the sound of your music

Yesterday I recommended you mix naked.

Today’s tip follows on from that idea, but whereas yesterday I was suggesting you take everything off when you’re quite a way into the mix, this assumes you’re starting out with nothing on.

No idea what I’m talking about ? Read yesterday’s post first

So, today the idea is – keep your mix as bare as possible. Start with no processing at all, and keep everything as minimal as possible for as long as possible. Get it sounding as great as you can, just by balancing levels and automating changes. Maybe add some minimal EQ & compression, and a little reverb.

Now stop.

And start panning.

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Day 7 of 11eleven easy ways to improve the sound of your music

We’re into the mixing stage now, and this tip couldn’t be simpler.

Take everything off.

Mix naked.

Wait – no, not like that…!

This is inspired by my experience as a mastering engineer. There’s a point with every song where you have to ask – “Does it sound better than the original, even when level-matched ?”. At which stage you turn the mastered version back down to match the raw mix, and flip between them. If the mastered song still sounds better, you know you’re on the right track.

This is a similar idea, but for mixing.

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