In the end, any mastering engineer will tell you that they can’t work magic on your crappy mix. Forget about volume, pull your reference tracks down to better match your mix, and then make your mix sound as good as theirs. Not because you need fancy equipment to do this (a limiter plugin will do the trick), but because it’s a different mental space. The mastering stage is a much better place for final volume to be addressed. In fact, your goal, with proper gain staging, is to make sure you don’t even come close to clipping the mix buss. In the mixing phase you shouldn’t be concerned with output volume in the least. The only exception to this “mix it to sound mastered” mantra is output volume. Whatever it takes to get your mix to compete with the big boys, now is the time. If that means stereo widening or mid side processing, do it.
If that means tape saturation or console emulation, do it. If that means compression on the mix buss, do it. You should do whatever it takes to get your mix to pop like the pros here and now, in the mixing phase. Mixing is where the song really comes together, not in mastering. Yes, you should be comparing your mixes to mastered tracks.
#TONAL BALANCE CONTROL FOR MIXING OR MASTERING PRO#
The goal of mixing should be to get your song to sound as good if not better than your favorite pro tracks, that are already mastered. Whether you do it yourself or hire an outside engineer, it’s one final step to reference the mixes to others, balance out any tone problems, make sure the mixes translate on other speakers, and then of course get the volume to acceptable levels. Of course it’s also a final step in quality control. Where mixing balances tracks, mastering balances mixes. Mastering is the process of taking great mixes and balancing them against each other to sound good as a collection of song. But it’s important to understand its role properly. I’ve addressed mastering before and I think it’s a very valuable step in the music production process. You “give up” on your mix and defer the responsibility of making your mix awesome to the mastering engineer. You near the end of a mix, but it doesn’t quite sound like the pro tracks that you’re referencing, so you assume it’s because it’s not mastered. The same is happening for many of you when mixing. They defer the responsibility of committing to a tone or performance.
Or they have great sounds, but too many to choose from. What I mean is this: many people setup to record a band and it sounds OK, but they assume it will sound better once it’s mixed, so they settle for mediocre sounds. One of the dumbest things you can do in audio is to defer responsibility to a later stage, or to someone else entirely. My suggestion? Pretend like mastering isn’t even an option. I think much of this is born out of confusion over what really happens in mastering. Many of you have voiced concern about how much processing (specifically on the mix buss) is OK and how much should you leave for the mastering phase. There seems to be a growing debate about how far a mixing engineer should take a track before handing it off to be mastered.