mattplaysguitar
Danny, just to clarify, you'll go through a song and use volume automation to bring down any major peaks? Basically manual limiting, before you do your actual limiting. Some would call this excessive. I like excessive. I am a bit of a perfectionist and do this exact kind of thing.
I have not done much 'mastering' but looking at picking up plenty of little tips along the way. I've read Bob Katz's book through a few times and can't wait to perform things like automation over the entire album adjusting every song so it flows perfectly, song to song. I love that kind of stuff.
There really is so much to learn... But understanding the mastering process will really help in mixing. If I know what kind of things I will need to look out for and fix in mastering, I know what I can tweak in mixing to make that process easier later on.
Matt, yeah that's exactly it. I know it's definitely excessive, but if you think about it, you're only going to have as much room as your peaks allow. If we take a mix with lots of peaks that make it look like a heart monitor, and we just compress and limit them, the rest of the mix gets raised and actually compresses more to where you can pick up artifacts from limiting due to trying to keep up with a commercial release.
The more we work the limiter, the more it gets that "limiter" sound we all hate. The first thing you notice is your snare drum loses crack or the mix will pump. If you have all the peaks controlled before you get to this stage and the mix is nice and leveled, when you add the limiter it literally brings the mix together as an entity because it won't be capped as much due to the peak transients. The end result is less limiting, a cleaner mix and less of a chance of any artifacts creeping into the mix due to over-use of the limiter.
Granted, you can still over use it after you manually level because it won't have those transients controlling the way the limiter reacts, but even if over-used, you won't get the same results as when you don't control peaks. Try it and you'll see what I mean. The more something peaks, the harder the limiter works to keep things tight. The more you use a limiter, the more you hear it and that's what we DON'T want. :)
And you're right, understanding the mastering process WILL help you to mix better. It's all a matter of knowing what to listen for and how to fix something. The more you can fix at the mix stage, the smoother the mastering process will be. For example, if you fire up a mix in Sonar and enable the wave preview on your master bus and see loads of high peaks that just don't look right, it's best to control them from the mix and find out where and why they are happening.
Most times it's a kick, snare, hat or something else forceful that just leaps out. Lack of proper compression on kicks and snares is usually the culprit as quite a few people don't know what they are supposed to be listening for then they compress those instruments. They'll use a preset or something and just let it fly not taking into consideration that the preset they are using was created using a DIFFERENT kick or snare drum than the one they are using.
But like you said with it helping you to mix better, after you get a general idea as to how this works, you start to actually go into pre-master mode when you get near the end of your mix-down. Like for me, when I get the mix where I want it, then I start checking for things that I'd be thinking about when listening to the mix in a mastering situation. You just have to try to wear each hat when the time is right and not jump too far ahead. :)
-Danny