Mixing/Leveling Problems 4Life

[bottleupandx]

Hey everybody, I've got a D24-SD and I'm going insane. I put compression on my drums, bass, and then everything else, but my mixes still never work. They're always too quiet because the ranges of the dynamics are too crazy. I'm a decent drummer so that shouldn't be the problem, but ah man, who knows?

I have to keep lowering things in my mixes so that the mastered tracks do not peak/clip/distort.

Just listen to this first bit of this song and you'll see...

https://soundcloud.com/user-524196185/jump-rope-circles-normalized

AND this is by far one of the best ones I've got close to 0db without it clipping. I think I'm just gonna give up on drums for my tracks and just record acoustic/vocals on this huge recorder.

Thank you for reading and/or listening in advance. This is a great forum and I've read a lot here over the last year or two. Phil Tipping is LEGEND.

-Matt

 

[-mjk-]

@bottleupandx as long as the tracks are clean and you get a good mix, you can compress in Mastering and then normalize to get good levels. Use one of the presets as a starting point in the mastering.

 

[bottleupandx]

Normalizing doesn't do much when you don't have the head room, right? I feel like I've left plenty, but my bass drums, bass gtr, [dang] even my acoustic gtr tracks are too [rangy] and everything as a whole is TOO dynamic. Normalizing doesn't help when everything is mixed together and peaking at different peaks/times.
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The mixes aren't great, but the master are even worse. I can keep it from clipping, but either way, the OVERALL track always sounds quiet.

 

[-mjk-]

Please read it this time:

you can compress in Mastering and then normalize to get good levels

The key is dynamic compression.

Normalizing won't do anything if your peaks are at zero. The average level of your mix is very low, but the spikes are so high that normalizing doesn't seem to do anything, and in some cases normalizing can actually make it sound even quieter. There are many discussions on mastering in the sticky sections. You have to use dynamic compression to reduce the peaks and increase the average volume of the mix.

 

[Arjan P]

I think there may be some confusion here from the terms used. If you consider compression on its own without make-up gain, then you end up with an overall lower signal mix (you compressed the peaks down). Normalizing can then be seen as make-up gain, to bring the whole mix up. Personally, I would consider make-up gain to be part of compression (so I also frowned a bit at using normalization..). @-mjk- Correct me if I interpreted you wrongly here..

 

[-mjk-]

@Arjan P you are right. My assumption is (perhaps incorrectly so) that one would know how to apply compression. In my defense I did suggest starting with a preset.