Oh, good question Jonesey.  I am eagerly waiting on a Jeff or Danny response to that one.

I guess I have always gone under the assumption that I should mix as balanced as I can and be vary conservative on the compression if I am mixing to have a ME finish my product.

you have a choice.

make it loud, just to compete with pro releases, which means you have squashed the crap out of your original mix, taking it somewhere you never really heard that way while you were tracking...

i call this the knee jerk reaction;


or


make it loud, because you tracked it that way throughout, that's the way you heard it, you limited almost every track, so nothing has any dynamics at all, everything is at the ceiling, but is well recorded and the arrangement allows for a  false sense of 'dynamics'


or


somewhere in between. 

Bristol_Jonesey


You know, this is what has always bothered me about "getting to know your monitors by playing a range of reference material on them".

Every piece of music you pick to "learn your monitors" has already been mastered which will not put you in the right ballpark for producing a MIX.

So how do we compensate for this? 

One obvious one is that, when you set up a monitoring environment so that you can control SPL, you will mark a few spots on your monitor controller's volume knob. One is the correct level for your mixing, i.e. for the K-14 or whatever type of scheme you want to use, so that you know the SPL in the room when your DAW meters are at whatever you choose as your reference dBFS level. If you are going to go further at the end and do some final master buss processing that brings things up to a higher RMS level, you can mark a spot for that, so that you remain at the same SPL at that higher RMS, so that you have a consistent reference and aren't fooled by the higher SPL when making comparisons.
 
You can also mark one for commercial CDs that have been pushed all the way to final levels, so that you can compare yours more easily against them. It's harder to do since you can't control RMS levels on commercial CDs you listen to. But you can provide an overall compensation in the same way that you do for your own mix and mixdown levels. If you really want to be sure you could always measure the CD's RMS levels and provide a few markings on your monitor controller for various final rough RMS levels or something. Or just adjust from that point a bit by ear based on how much you know the CD is squashed.
 

Re using reference material. 

You know, this is what has always bothered me about "getting to know your monitors by playing a range of reference material on them".  Every piece of music you pick to "learn your monitors" has already been mastered which will not put you in the right ballpark for producing a MIX. 

I find the exact opposite is true. If I am about to mix a hip hop track or a modern Jazz track the client will often say listen to this. I love the sound of this CD. So it means it has been well mixed and mastered and the EQ must be accurate. After all chances are it has been done in a very accurate environment.

I am switching this into the room and thinking how lovely this mix is so to me it is exactly in the ballpark for a good mix. You spend most time doing your own mix of course but the ref comes into its own switching to it for comparisons. It might be the reason I don't need ARC for example to be able to mix and master well. I think I switch to ref tracks more than Danny for example may. You stop listening to the sound of your monitors but rather you are listening now to the amount of say mid range present in your mix and the amount of mid range in the ref track. 

I listen to the EQ of the ref more I think. You can ignore how the dynamics are presented. For me it is about tone, the extent of the bass, how the mids are sounding and how much top end is there overall. For a Kurt Rosenwinkel album say the dynamics are going to be superlative. 

When you are using the K system you can keep your ref levels accurate and even. If I have a mix that has been unprocessed completely it will be sitting at my chosen ref levl eg -14 dB FS. If I apply some 2 buss glue compression over the mix the average rms level of the mix may go up but I make sure the output level of that processor is still operating at K -14 dB FS. The actual rms level of the mix has gone up in itself but the level flowing after that process remains the same. This is how I do my gain staging. The sound of the 2 buss glue compression is more important than getting the level up here.

Then on into EQ, the first stage of mastering. It is good to keep a mix at -14 because if you start boosting with the EQ and things the headroom is handy. I also can add some rms gain to the mix even within the EQ because often the signal is well clear of 0 db FS anyway. Compression next and it lifts the rms level up but I leave it up here. Then limiting adds the final volume lift I call it. I can average  K -7dB rms for the mix with the PSP Xenon not breaking up at all. 

You don't guess as to where the rms level of a commercial CD is either. You measure it. The is where the VU's come in handy too. If I import a ref track the rms level of that track can be measured. It is often 7 dB above my K -14 working ref level. So I need the limiter to add the final 4 or 5 dB. (compressor has added 2 to 3 dB as well) 

If each stage of the process only adds a lesser amount the total effect is big yet nothing individually is working that hard, the mix will not break up and sound bad. It is too easy to think that a very loud mix has to be distorted and lack dynamics. All I am saying is that it can be loud and very clean and have huge dynamics.

Bristol_Jonesey


You know, this is what has always bothered me about "getting to know your monitors by playing a range of reference material on them".

Every piece of music you pick to "learn your monitors" has already been mastered which will not put you in the right ballpark for producing a MIX.

So how do we compensate for this?

Just leaving enough headroom for the ME and not worrying about loudness, is a good starting point, but what about the tonal characteristics of your piece? Do you EQ it to get close to your reference?

Or, do you insert your own Mastering chain right at the outset and mix into it?

This has the advantage of being able to match tone AND loudness at the same time.



Genuine questions.

Great question that I knew would come up. :) For me, the object is a clean, clear mix that isn't over-accentuating anything. If it rumbles with lows, I'm using too much. If it's too warm and chocolatey....I'm using too much mids. If it's a bit bright, the highs are starting to kick.
 
See, all this is moot for guys like yourself that may be doing everything themselves. But for me since I like to at least think I know a little bit about this stuff as well as how I like to go about it, the mix is balanced....I'll master in the impact frequencies but I will not ruin the mix based on trying to mix from a reference.
 
Jeff is correct....I do not listen to much reference material. The reason being? I find it nearly useless for the simple fact that you cannot compare what a client has done (instrumentally speaking) to something that is professionally done. Sure, you can borrow the over-all sonics of the mix of a pro, but reference material done by a major label vs. Mr. Shu's all direct instruments and EZDrummer just isn't going to hold up. The drums will be off, the guitars will be off, the vocals will be off...to me it's just moot and we're wasting our time doing things like this to where you try for this with pin-point accuracy.
 
That's not to say that those that do it and are successful are wrong or out of their tree. What it means is...don't get too wrapped up in it because it ain't gonna help as much as you think unless you are using like instruments. I can't expect a Kansas drum sound if I used a kit that sounds like Fuel. Bands think you can magically make them sound like any band they want just because you examine reference material. I've even gone as far as using HAR-BAL to cop a curve and show a client how rediculous it is to even go here. When they heard what the curve sounded like on their material, they got a clue.
 
Jonesey: You sir, can probably rely on reference material more because you are getting some really trippy sounds that are well recorded in a classic rock/prog manner. When you can deliver the goods with your instrumentation, it's easier to say "ok, this is my band...and here's a band that we sort of would like to borrow from". There's no problem with that for guys like you. But trust me when I tell you, 8 times out of 10, someone comes to me that sounds like something else will bring a reference of something simply because they like it...and expect me to make them sound like that. If you use reference material at all, the stuff you are comparing to that reference material must have the flavor and be in the same ball park or it's just never going to work. Sure, you can sort of grab the guitar "aura" of something or like I said, the basic sonics going on...but to me, it's near impossible to do this when the instrumentation is soo different from the reference material. So, I stay away from it and create my own sound from each thing I master.
 
Will I compare it to stuff after? Sure because I'm checking highs, mids and lows to see how I stack up. But most people really go after this reference material where in my opinion, it shouldn't be that intense. You do a quick check and then you move on. The object is to find your sound and identity using your instruments. This can't be done while listening to something else the way people believe it can be. Well, I guess I shouldn't say that....I should say "the way *I* believe it because it just doesn't work for me and it's aggravating trying to capture the vibe of something that doesn't even exist in the material *I* am working on. Hope this answers it at least from my perspective. :)
 
-Danny