ORIGINAL: shawn912
The thing about the mixdowns is that if you look at them in a wav editor the peaks on the snare hits are at 1/-1 while the rest of the mix is around .5/-.5, so I'm thinking maybe the drums actually are out of whack, but no one that's listened to them seems to think they're too loud either, so I don't know what to make of it.
As far as the mix goes, use your ear. It's gotta
sound good.
ORIGINAL: shawn912
Can you say more about the gain staging? Here's what I'm doing now. I have the mixdowns and references on separate tracks in Sonar. I'm using T-Racks3 plugin on the mixdown track and I have a simple chain set up in it: eq > limiter > eq (I don't have just a gain option, so I'm using the eq output for that). I have the limiter set to 0db and I'm adjusting the gains like you suggested to match the references. This worked great for most of the songs (they were around 12 db lower than the references) but a couple of the songs I had to boost the first eq all the way to 18db and that's where I noticed some distortion (it's the bass, mostly--sort of sounds like I'm using distortion fx on the bass track).
A "gain stage" is any point in the signal path where gain is applied - where volume can be changed. Gain can be positive (makes the sound louder), negative (makes the sound quieter), or unity (doesn't change the volume - but it's still a gain stage!). "Gain staging" is the awareness that there are all these gain stages, and it's important to carefully adjust each one so that each processing stage is operating optimally. This means balancing headroom and noise floor to keep the audio as clean as possible. Noise floor is less of an issue in professional digital systems (especially all-software systems such as DAWs), but headroom is still critically important - even more so in today's loudness war.
The distortion you're hearing might be coming from the limiter, not the gain stage. Bypass the limiter and see if the distortion is still occurring. If it is, that means it's coming from somewhere else in the signal chain. If the limiter is causing the distortion, you are applying too much gain. Reduce the gain, or apply EQ or compression to reduce the headroom (the difference between the peak and average levels) required by the audio. See my posts and articles linked earlier in this thread for more detailed explanations of the concepts.
My mastering gain stages (within the DAW) are as such:
(disk file) (no offline gain is applied) ->
Static gain (This is to bring the audio up to levels comparable to my reference material. After this stage, the audio regularly peaks over 0dBfs, but no clipping occurs because the audio engine operates in 32 bit float format) ->
EQ (This shapes the tone of the audio so that it is comparable to my reference material. The EQ's built-in gain is adjusted so that the perceived level is not changed) ->
Limiter (This reduces the peaks that exceed 0dBfs. These days I'm using a blend of clipping and gain reduction) ->
Channel gain (parallel to the other channels with my reference material. At this stage the audio should have the tonal and dynamic characteristics of the reference material. All channels are set to unity.)
(Mix bus) (No gain stages here - just a couple of analysers, but I hardly use them) ->
Master fader (This usually applies massive negative gain because every further gain stage to my monitors is at unity)
Notice two things:
1) My monitors are at unity. That means they're REALLY LOUD (turned up to maximum - no attenuation). That gives me more headroom than I'll ever need. I only ever need to reduce headroom when I'm mastering.
2) I don't use any compressors/exciters/wideners/superawesomeifiers in mastering. Mastering is not about sound. It's a technical process that prepares a song for distribution. The
sound needs to be right in the mix.
-Kim