Hi, and welcome back.
Let's have a little chat about remote mixing and client previews,
while I render this mix out…
This is a session I recorded recently, and which I'm now mixing remotely.
I often work like this these days, and to be honest I prefer it.
While it can be useful to have the client come in for the final stages of the mix,
I can usually work quicker and more efficiently on my own
without having to stop and explain what I’m doing,
or ask the band to stop chatting amongst themselves.
As you can see from the waveform thats building up, I’m rendering this without any limiting
on the mix bus, so this file will be ready for mastering if the mix is approved.
But I don’t really want to send it to the client like this, as it will seem quiet compared
to their references that are already mastered.
Some of my clients are savvy enough to know that the final levels will be set during mastering,
and won’t complain that the mix is too quiet. But not all of them.
And sometimes there’s a long chain of people that need to approve the mix,
including multiple band members, layers of management, and a label:
I don’t want to have to waste time responding to feedback about the mix being too quiet,
or worse still, lose the gig because the band’s manager doesn’t understand what mastering is.
Also, I don’t know what everyone will be listening on: I have to assume that they’ll
be using standard consumer level gear. Sometimes the band might be listening on a tour bus!
So, before this mix goes off to the client, its going to get loaded into a “quick master”
session for a little polish.
This seems like an ideal scenario for an all in one mastering tool such as Ozone: just
skim through the mastering presets until you find one that sounds ok…
and now you can send off your mix with confidence
that it can stand comparison with properly mastered references.
But actually I would urge you not to do this.
Not because there’s anything wrong with Ozone: iZotope make excellent tools,
and Ozone is more than capable of professional results.
And not because there’s anything inherently wrong in using presets: the rightness or wrongness
of a preset depends entirely on the settings, and the audio thats being processed.
The problem here is two-fold: first of all you’re just slapping it on and not listening
properly and carefully to the effect it has on your mix. There’s a good chance that
some of the settings in that preset won’t be appropriate for your mix, and would need
adjusting or the module bypassing, but these negative effects can often be masked by the
overall jump in volume, and are easy to miss if you’re not really careful. This is especially
true if you’re doing this at the end of a mixing session with tired ears.
And the other problem: what if you actually manage to make the mix better? If you’re
applying multi-band processing, enhancement, stereo widening, saturation and so on, this
isn’t your mix anymore. Lets say the client approves it, but then goes for mastering,
and the mix you provide for mastering doesn’t sound the same. Probably the mastering engineer
will be able to recreate what your quick mastering did and make the client happy again.
But the client’s impression will be that actually the mix wasn’t as good as they first thought,
and needed fixing at the mastering stage.
If your mix needs this kind of enhancement to compete with mastered material, it means
your mix probably isn’t ready yet. You should always aim to get the mix sounding right in
every detail except final loudness, and not rely on mastering to take you the final step.
So if necessary, feel free to carefully add some of this kind of processing to the mix bus at the mix stage instead.
You actually have an important advantage over the mastering engineer in this respect,
as you can tweak the mix thats feeding the processing.
If a bit of stereo widening helps the mix, but leaves the vocals seeming a bit too quiet,
you can fix this quickly and easily without having to compromise.
So, there’s only one plugin I add at the quick master stage, and that's a limiter.
You’ll have to use your judgement as to how hard to push it: obviously you don’t
want so much limiting that it starts to change the mix balance at all.
But you can usually get reasonably close to Spotify kind of levels without having to limit more than 2 or 3 dB.
Ok, now I can render it out...
So what should my output format be? I often just bounce these out as MP3s, especially
if I know the band are on tour: I don’t want to force them to download 24 bit wav
files, and I want to be confident that the files will play on any device.
However, sometimes I provide wavs as well, especially if there’s a video editor who wants to start lining up
his or her footage: mp3 isn’t ideal in that case as the timings can change slightly compared to the wav file.
In that case I’ll bounce the files out as 24 bit wavs again, and then
use Reaper’s batch file converter to create mp3s as well.
Ok, now what happens when the client gets back to you and asks for revisions?
In fact the mix you saw me render earlier was mix number two, with a few minor tweaks:
lets pull this into the session on an adjacent track…
And before I bounce out mix two I’m going to level match it with mix one
The SWS loudness extension makes this really quick and easy: integrated loudness is a good
way to compare different versions of the same mix… and I’ll then tweak levels if needed
so that mix 2 is matched to within less than half a dB or so. of mix one
This has two advantages. First of all, it allows me to do a sanity check before sending
off this revision: if they asked for a fatter bass sound, or a louder snare or whatever,
I can A/B my new mix with the previous version to make sure that I have indeed achieved what
they asked for, and haven’t damaged anything else in the process.
And second, when the client listens to this revision and compares it to the previous mix,
they will also hear the changes properly, and won’t be fooled into hearing differences
that are really just the result of a slight volume mis-match.
Ok, thats all for today. Thanks for watching.