I’m in the beginning stages of mixing and mastering a track and I don’t know what to do. I want to make a loud track. This is what I think I should do can anyone correct me on this?
make sure no tracks clip and make sure the master feed doesn’t go into red.
adjust tracks to taste
do something with multi and compression I have no clue about this stage
come out with a rough mix and apply some plugins to master
turn the master volume all the way up until it gets ugly.
loud song
Is this right? What plugins should I use? I use ableton.
THERE ARE NO RULES, so don’t think like, ‘yh and ive heard something about this compression thing so i need to do it somewhere and every now and then…’ - you need to do it, when you need to do it, thats all. if you dont even know what it is, dont use it, experiment and watch tutorials but make sure (MOST IMPORTANT THING) it sounds the way you want it to sound
turn all tracks down, let the masterchannel on 0 to conserve headroom
you don’t need anything on the master (theoretically) if your mix is topnotch. keep that in mind. your mixdownis everything, real mastering is another issue you don’t have to deal with unless you’re learning professional sound engineering and mastering
your point 5) NO!
your point 6) you don’t want a loud song (unless youre aiming for popculture katy perry-esque sound), you want a quality sounding song with a good amount of dynamics (of course not as dynamic as in classic or jazz music but i hope you get the point)
so make sure you create a ridiculously sounding mix by giving every element its own space in the frequency spectrum and make sure to get rid of as much low end (except from the bass) as possible without it sounding bad for your ears (NOT MEANT TO SOUND BAD IN CONTEXT-CAN DEFINITELY SOUND THIN/BAD IN SOLO)