Its all good till you get to the car

This is great! My biggest problem is I hate zeroing out a mix that I've been working on & starting over even though I know it's the right thing to do.

Brilliant video Will. The big problem here is if using a Sultan + Shepard track as a reference, it always makes us feel our tracks are garbage in comparison. Proceeded by many hours of clogging up the project with plugins in hope of salvaging something half decent. 😏

You talk about a massive harmonic spike at 150hz like it's a bad thing.😂😂😂

I suggest to pay attention to peak only -12 with the kick because if you have cymbal crashes or fx or whatever other element with relatively long tail or with reverb/delays you might get artifacts (like a sort of digital degradation at the end of the tail), which will be audible if they are in some parts of the track where there's few elements or very quiet parts or at the very end of the track (if the track ends with an fx tail or a fading element in the upper range of frequencies). I don't know exactly why but I think it might happen because the bottom headroom of the channel ends before the quietest sound in that channel and it can't correctly process a sound that is quieter than the minimum bottom threshold. It's like going over -inf. You aren't fully using the digital headroom of the individual channel, and even if you pull the volume up to expand the tail there will be a point where you will need a little bit more tail fading so it won't never be enough because you have the ability to physically and "analogically" hear it, and you NEED to ear it, but the bottom of the channel fader "digitally" ends before.

So, I suggest to mix starting with the kick at -7 while putting a utility gain on the master bus, at +6.
Then, mix kick and bass paying attention to have no masking and to not going over 0dbfs.
Now you have perfectly controlled low end and the freedom to make all the other elements to dance and moving around a solid and controlled foundation.

You might get occasional peaks hitting even + 3 on the master bus, but you won't hear no distortion because it will be caused 100% by an element belonging to a upper range of frequency.

Now tame the occasional peaks to make them to not exceed the 0dbfs and reshape the transient attack (if needed) with 2 comp in series with different behavior, put a limiter at the end with 1 or 2 db of gain reduction and you have a mix which sounds like it was finalized so you can immediately feel (and chose) how it will sound after being mastered (better to say "finalized" in these "single release/EP" era) and you have used all the headroom available. If it's someone else to master your track you just have to pull down the limiter input and set the gain back to 0. Now you have a mix peaking at -6dbfs and never over. Total control. And it's very useful if you mix with headphones but you don't have an hp amplifier to get the sufficient volume/pressure so to have a correct fletcher and Munson curve response according to how we perceive different frequencies at the same volume. This is really fundamental to make the "pro" step in mixing, and understanding the importance of controlling harshness, and WHY it's HARSH. Physics. Individual perception. Fletcher and Munson Curves.

But the first thing for a good mix is a good arrangement/sound selection. It makes 70% imho.


I will be glad If anyone who will read this comment, will try this method and will come back here to say if it worked also  for them or not.

🤝

Wow thank you!  could you make a 5 minute master video of this track please?  so we have the full tutorial on mix & master😁

I've used Ableton for 6 years or so, and have only just today learned about External out bypassing the master via 2x completely different videos using it in different ways. Ableton is nuts!

This is probably the best ever utorial I've found! Biggest was probably the reverb mixing! Thank you mate!

I personally advise skip the -12 bit.

Balance both your track and have the ref at zero or else your setting yourself up to fail when you try to raise the level later.

If you balance/mix at zero then you can use any obvious clipping as a sign of mix inbalance.
That way once you've stopped all obvious clipping (usually just by managing your sub frequencies correctly) the track will be effectively automatically mastered.

That's how I've been releasing for a decade anyway, works a treat.

Great walk through; I preferred the clarity and depth in the re-mix. Would love to see more videos like this. Very very helpful. The static mix is so important to get right and there aren’t enough videos on YT focused on it like this. This is the foundation of a good sounding and loud mix.

This is the most important and useful production video ever, for me, the gain staging volumes is what I needed, thanks, who else needed to hear -12db on the kick and also -12db reduction on the reference? Thanks so much, I am stoked to try this out

And that's all volume level changes, no EQ?

Because I seem to have the same problem sometimes as the original mix.. things sound dull and not punchy, lacking clarity. I could mess around with compressors and Eq for hours just making the mix slowly worse and worse because the elements no longer fix together cohesively.

And all you did was change the levels - allowing the higher, clearer elements to sit correctly, thus solving the problem.

This is quite a magical mix video!

Nice one man, thanks for sharing!

Man we're all now using the same Splice samples in our arrangements lol. Seriously Splice needs to up their vocal content. We need more vocal acapellas in there.

SPAN (at least the vst2 version) offers a way to show the reference as a second layer inside the same plugin. You can set it up by routing the reference track to the sidechain input of the SPAN plugin. Might be helpful?

Even on iPhone speakers the rebalance sounds brighter and fuller

One note to keep in mind: EDM and dance, for the majority, follow a recipe. Sub genres vary. And instead of going in fresh with the faders at 0, rough mixes are always a great tool along with mastered  references to know what’s carrying the groove and the vibe. 👍🏼

This is oh so great

Astounding how every video actually teaches game changing principles 🙌✨

It's a great idea to balance your voiceover with the tutorial's sound.