tracking, mixing, and mastering concepts

Hi! I'm a newbie to learning how to mix/master etc and am wondering how people generally work on their projects.

Could someone explain a little what you would generally expect to do in each of the tracking, mixing, and mastering stage. At the moment, I'm sort of all over the place, expecting to do everything at once, resulting in me destroying most material. I want to learn the patience needed when producing, and splitting into stages, concentrating on one at a time will probably do me the world of good.

Cheers,

Jonny

It's pretty simple really.

Tracking: The recording engineer sets up mics and record the musicians, using mic placement and selection to achieve the most accurate and/or flattering reproduction.

Mixing: The mix engineer mixes the several tracks together to a single stereo (or surround) output, applying effects and additional processing as necessary to individual tracks or groups of tracks to make the tracks sound pleasing and balanced together, so that the material and performance is presented in the most accurate or flattering way.

Mastering: A mastering engineer takes the final stereo or surround mix and formats it to the "master" copy from which the duplicates will be made, checking the file and the master copy carefully for correct formatting and adherence to the appropriate standards and tolerances for the target file format.

Cheers.

So would I be right in thinking that once you've recorded the tracks, you'd probably do the following:

1) Get a good balance between with all of the tracks with regards to pan/volume etc.

2) Apply any processing to individual tracks to get them sounding as good as you can within the mix (running the effects through the effects bin or to a bus so you don't touch alter the original recordings in case of a muck up down the line).

3) Make any further adjustments to the balance so compensate for anything that was slightly 'thrown off' after changing the tracks.

4) Mix all the tracks down to a single stereo track, which would be your pre-master.

5) If burning to CD with other projects, apply any tweaking of the pre-master so it's balanced with the other tracks.

If that's right, when would you apply anything like multi-band compression or multiband EQing which I've seen people refer to? Is it when you're going to make a CD, or would you do it to tweak the pre-master? This bit confuses me because if you did 1-3 properly, you wouldn't need to do any more tweaking(?)

Thanks ohhey. I think I'll do what you suggested and get a the song whose sound/feeling my current one is trying to capture and compare how they sound on my monitors as a guide - cool tip, thanks!

I think what I was getting at with the question wasn't so much as a recipe for the perfect production, but just a general idea to give me some sort of discipline when I'm recording/producing - when to do things, when to leave alone for the time being etc.

At the moment I'm pretty all over the place and will sometimes find myself tinkering with a track before I've even recorded all the parts.

ORIGINAL: Jonny M

So would I be right in thinking that once you've recorded the tracks, you'd probably do the following:

1) Get a good balance between with all of the tracks with regards to pan/volume etc.

2) Apply any processing to individual tracks to get them sounding as good as you can within the mix (running the effects through the effects bin or to a bus so you don't touch alter the original recordings in case of a muck up down the line).

3) Make any further adjustments to the balance so compensate for anything that was slightly 'thrown off' after changing the tracks.

4) Mix all the tracks down to a single stereo track, which would be your pre-master.

5) If burning to CD with other projects, apply any tweaking of the pre-master so it's balanced with the other tracks.

Yeah, you've got it about right. There are a million details and substeps to get bogged down in, but you hit the nail on the head, in terms of the overall theory.

If that's right, when would you apply anything like multi-band compression or multiband EQing which I've seen people refer to? Is it when you're going to make a CD, or would you do it to tweak the pre-master? This bit confuses me because if you did 1-3 properly, you wouldn't need to do any more tweaking(?)

You are right to be confused. Here is why people do this:

1. In conventional commercial recording scenarios, the final mix is sent off to a mastering house that makes the glass master discs for CD reproduction and that cuts the disc that vinyl records will be pressed off of, and so on. Very often, the mastering engineer will also take certain steps to make the sound of the final mix a little more friendly to the inferior target medium, and something that will reproduce a little better. Part of this almost invariably involves raising the RMS level of the recording a few dB by reducing the dynamic range slightly, usually in very transparent ways (quieting a sharp transient here or there, and the like).

2. Often, the mastering engineer will get a mix that is either clearly flawed, or that will not reproduce correctly for one reason or another, so they will do some additional processing to improve upon the work of the mixing engineer. For instance, they may be presented with a mix where the bass guitar extends below the level of the mix engineer's nearfield monitors, and the mix engineer never realized that there are really uneven blurts every time the bass plays a low note. This would be a case where some multiband compression or a shelving eq could tidy up the lows quickly and easily, and would work better than sending the mix back to the engineer with the speakers that bottom out at 80 cycles anyway.

3. Sometimes, the mastering engineer may, out of the goodness of her heart, make purely aesthetic changes that the mix engineer should have done but failed to. They may apply a little bit of high quality reverb to add some shimmer and cohesion to a dull, disconnected mix, or they may use a M-S matrix to widen the stereo spread and increase the size of a small soundscape, or they may use some compression or expansion or gain changes to add some impact or excitement to a flat mix, or use sone narrow filters or bandwidth-limited compression to make muffled vocals more articulate, and so on. These kinds of changes are technically "premastering," but a lot of people refer to them as "mastering."

What happens is that, for the above reasons, a "final mix" will often come back from the mastering house on CD sounding even better than it did when it went out as a 96kHz, 24bit wav file. Even if the mastering engineer stopped at step 1 and didn't make any "improvements," those few extra dB they squeezed out of the recording will make the "mastered" version sound better in a side-by-side at the same playback volume. As a result, a lot of people who have been privvy to the commercial recording process are walking around with the belief that "mastering" is a magic process that really pushes good recordings over the top, and they want to know how they can "master" themselves.

Manufacturers of plugins and effects boxes and so on are not lost on this, and they feed the superstition by making special "mastering" devices and effects that are supposed to allow you to take your already perfect mix and just master the hell out of it. In fact, "mastering" your own mixes is actually a pretty silly endeavor, unless you have a glass disc cutting machine.

If you do the mix right, it doesn't need further aesthetic processing. If you didn't do it right, you should go back and fix it in the mix. Either way, there's no benefit to having the same engineer with the same equipment go back and re-process his own best work as a seperate "mastering" stage, and there is essentially zero benefit that he can achieve when he has his "mastering" smock on that he can't do as well or better with the original multitrack mix.

Cheers.

yep,

Post #3 has to be one of the shortest posts I have seen from you.

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My techniques have been well-documented on the forums. Just do a search and you might find something that can help you somewhere.

As I know you know, a lot of people often want oversimplified answers to complex questions. But oftentimes, people also have overly complex ideas of things that are actually fairly simple.

Yes. I could not agree with you more.

Thanks guys, some valuable advice and tips for me to get my teeth into. WIll definately import some songs to compare to. After that I guess I just have to lock myself away for a few weeks!