hey, i generally try and get my finally mix peaking around -3db, but i quite often have tunes that are more around -5 and the occasional bit that peaks at -3, ie a snare roll or something
is that normal or bad, i know we don’t wanna squash the shit out of a tune and take away all the dynamics, but it’s more like little peaks that are stopping me from getting a couple more dbs of volume into a beat
cos most advice i see is like get your final mix peaking at ?db but doesn’t say if that’s like ur main drop or these small moments where it goes up in db
on old dsf there was that dude called macc who had a Lot of advice on mixdowns, kept saying its best to get the loudest point in the track to be around -6db
swear @_ronzlo said somewhere recently that sd laika mixes down at a really low volume
wouldnt say it really matters although quieter, more headspace is generally supposed to be better
if youre not getting it mastered elsewhere then mix it as hot as you feel you can before putting on a limiter or a compressor on the master bus to get it to 0. then keep the gain reduction under like 2-3db on the compressor and preferably 0 on the limiter but then a tiny bit (with fast release) everytime something peaks like a snare or w/e and you shud be fine
for the small moments try to isolate them so that they eat up less frequencies in the mix/clash with other things, that way they will still be loud to your ears but won’t eat up your headroom
hope that helps and isnt hard to read lol
just editing to say its fine to mix ur final thing loud… u dont need loads of headroom for mastering unless its being mastered by a picky engineer
reading that advice, suggests lowering volumes as soon as you put sounds in, ie turn down your sampler or synth, rather than the faders of the daw,
seems good practise, but generally i mix q dramatically with the faders, and generally aim to have a low peak as i make the track like -8 to -5 then when i’m happy with the mix i select all the tracks and bump it up to around the -3 point, is there any reason why this might be bad practice
Another thing to make sure is that none of your plugins are clipping because something earlier in the effect chain could be overloading and if that uses 16bit bit depth (or just less than ur project) then you will be hard clipping the sound.
I found this sometimes happens in protools with some some of the plug ins and it really.fucks up the sound in a bad way
yeah spot on about plugins clipping, most samples are too loud and make any plugin go into the red on my daw, i rarely worry about plugins clipping tho cos i never notice an audible difference