swim at your own risk imho...  if the OP is relaying the article correctly, than the advice is pretty bad

Another thing, as soon as you insert a soft synth you should know immediately what sort of level you're dealing with and you should address that right there and then, by raising or lowering the synth output, way before you even consider mixing/freezing.

I am of the opinion that people who need to normalize are not gain-staging properly throughout the project.

Bristol_Jonesey


Another thing, as soon as you insert a soft synth you should know immediately what sort of level you're dealing with and you should address that right there and then, by raising or lowering the synth output, way before you even consider mixing/freezing.

I am of the opinion that people who need to normalize are not gain-staging properly throughout the project.

Or know what the heck they are doing. Much like CM.

Right, why even consider the possibility that a comment that was written by a paid professional, printed in a well known magazine, and taken out of it's context, might have some merit? None of you even seem to feel the author has any right to benefit of the doubt nor shows any interest in what could be a learning situation. Interesting.

I agree with Bristol and Cake2010. If you are concerned with S/N-ratio, you don't solve this by normalizing every single track since the noise is augmented accordingly. Use a decent audio signal to the system instead by correcting the distance to the mikes and adjust the volume levels on the amps. 24 bit gives a lot and sufficient headroom. Also never normalize to 0 dB since some systems (MP3-players, CD-players...) render digital clipping even though it sounds correct in Sonar. I usually go to minus 0.5 dB.

SToons


Right, why even consider the possibility that a comment that was written by a paid professional, printed in a well known magazine, and taken out of it's context, might have some merit? None of you even seem to feel the author has any right to benefit of the doubt nor shows any interest in what could be a learning situation. Interesting.

It could be taken out of context. But I was responding to what is presented. I can't know what is missing in the op from the article.


Beside I think I was clear in my post about why I thought it is wrong. 

Its an old article - from this issue  http://www.musicradar.com/computermusic/computer-music-166-july-issue-on-sale-now-455790

The magazine was making a "chill out" track from scratch, using soft synths (and one vocal sample).  They got each sound (piano, drums, bass, pads, guitar etc) ready, with effects etc, and tracked out the song.  They also added some effects to the master bus.  

Then, to the mixing, and here I use their words :

"Let's get mixing!   With our master bus effects bypassed, we bounce each of our seperate parts down as WAV files and normalise them all."

They then set up a new DAW project, and re-loaded the master bus effects.  Then, in their words :

"We set the mixer faders for the stems to -5.0dB".    And way they went in the mixing process.

They really work hard to waste time.

So, the way I work is the balance my relative volumes before bouncing, or at least I would balance the volumes of the bounced tracks without normalising them.   I'd get my Master bus around the -3dB level for all the (un-normalised) tracks together, then export the final stereo wave for mastering.

As far as I see it, if I normalised all the tracks, I'd just end up lowering their relative levels, and come up with the same -3dB result for the whole song together anyway ...

cake2010


They really work hard to waste time.

lol...