HELP ! SORTING OUT FINAL MIXES FOR MASTERING

[A Toolish Circle]

hey guys i'm mixing my band's tracks now and i'm about to finish all the final mixes .


the question now is what levels are best to send to the mastering house ? at the moment i have an L2 on the mixbus with -0 threshold and -0.5 limit just to catch any unwanted peaks

would u guys recommend this ? and how to u guys usually output ur mixes ? i'm getting very little RMS though like -20 or something and i'm finding it hard to get it up to - 10 RMS ( around where most professional recordings are ) and will the mastering engineer be able to do compensate for this ?

i'll personally be happy to get the loudness to about -12 db RMS so that's about 8db's worth of squashing .


thanks in advance !

Roland
www.seraphim.com.au

 

[vile_ator]

Hey Roland. The general rule has been to keep peaks at about 3db below zero. But really as long as you keep the levels anywhere below zero and keep them consistant from song to song, a mastering engineer can adjust the levels before sending them off the an outboard chain or an internal chain. The only disadvantage to having the levels loud(i.e. louder than -3) is when we want to master digitally. I could clip a plug in like an eq if I used too much boost. So having some headroom allows me to boost a little without running into zero or having to turn down the track digitally. In the past with older workstations, using a fader to turn down the levels, introduced some audible artifacts because the internal math involved was not so good. Now with modern mixing programs with 32 bit float internal headroon, they can do this without degrading audio.

So as long as you dont clip the track, a mastering engineer can work with whatever you send. I still use -3db as my mixdown level just to be safe no matter what. This usually assures that you dont miss a peak somewhere in the track.


Also the mastering engineer will apply eq, compression and limiting during the mastering process. The compression will flatten out the peaks and the limiting will push everything up to zero and squash some of the un-needed dynamics. You can generally expect to get another 8 db or so of peak volume out of your mix after mastering. Sometimes less and sometimes more. It really depends on how dynamic you mix is and how dynamic we need the master to be. Also remember that volume as you percieve it is based on average apparent levels and can be monitored by looking at an analog VU meter or its digital equivelant.

Hope this helps.

Colin

www.imperialmastering.com