OT: Mixing first CD

[UpTilDawn]

Finally! We're mixing our first family CD... Never mixed for a music CD before. Just for radio programming. So, I'm on a learning curve...

Don't know if this is your experience or not, but having done a bunch of radio mix projects, myself, I've discovered that the material that sounds best to my ears when I hear it played back on the radio is music that I've mixed "bland" to my tastes. Other music that I hear on that same station (including mixes that I did for my own listening tastes) tends to sound over processed in any number of ways... over compressed, too much highs, or lows, etc.

If I were re-mixing one of those projects for CD release, I'd end up putting all the flavor back in that I thought was missing from the radio version. Maybe the way I put this makes it sound completely "wrong".... Maybe you can relate to what I mean. Anyway, hope it's helpful.

[Cary B. Cornett]

... don't try and make each individual instrument sound great when you solo it. It may sound great soloed but don't make that your goal - make the instrument sound great WITH the mix not out of the mix. A bunch of great sounding soloed instruments played together end up giving you a mess. They all have their place in your mix you just have to find it.

I would have said, "don't try to make each and every individual instrument sound great when you solo it". For the rest, I absolutely agree. It kind of ties in with my earlier riff on "no more than three 'big' sounds". Very often the best treatment of an instrument in the context of the overall mix won't sound very good if you solo it. Context is everything here.

[Kent F]

Thanks for all the input. I've been implementing some of these suggestions and I can hear a difference from the stuff I mixed before I asked.

Couple of more questions:

How much quiet space do you have at the beginning and end of an individual song mix (inside the wav file... not between tracks on the CD)?

What kind of levels are you mixing down to in preparation for the master?

Do you do anything special to prepare the files for the master disc?

Sure appreciate this community... and the software we use.

Kent

[Cary B. Cornett]

One tricky thing to consider is that you might be selling downloads as well as physical CD's. Suppose you have gone to some trouble to make the pauses between cuts "just right" for the transition from each cut to the next. Sometimes you want the next song to hit almost instantly, and other times you may want a pause of exactly so many beats at the tempo of the previous cut. (I sometimes try to make the beginning of the new cut land on the "one" of a bar at the old tempo.) The question is, so you want somebody to experience your "album" on their mp3 player the way they would on your CD. For that, but pause between cuts needs to be built into the end of each .wav file.

Some media player apps also will sometimes add an unwanted "echo" from the previous cut before the next one if you don't build a brief silence into the end of the sound file (effectively clearing buffers in the application).

For both of the above reasons, I will usually build the pause between cuts into the soundfiles, and have a short bit of silence at the end of the last cut.

[Kent F]

If you were to suggest a standard amount of silence at the end of the track how much would you say (for CD)?

[CurtZHP]

2 seconds, maybe?

What I usually do is wait until the last reverb tail dies out and then I draw a breath. That's where I end the track.

[UpTilDawn]

I also have gotten in the habit of leaving 300-500ms of silence before the start of content in a track. That's based on the fact that many CD players have trouble starting exactly at the beginning of the content, if placed dead on the index mark.... at least that's what I have always been told was common practice. It works for me, because even when played on a software player, the music begins just a breath after the click of the keyboard, or mouse, instead of right on it, or the moment the player opens.

[Cary B. Cornett]

If you were to suggest a standard amount of silence at the end of the track how much would you say (for CD)?

At one time, I think 3 seconds was pretty common, but that was back "when vinyl ruled", and some time before the CD took over there were a lot of LP's that abandoned that "rule" for artistic reasons.

These days, it's basically "do what feels right for how each song leads to the next".

One of the beauties of working in SAW is how you can try as many different ways as you want without fear of wrecking your precious master tape. Take advantage of it, then do what your ears tell you.

[Kent F]

Good stuff I wouldn't have known or thought about. Now what about the output levels for each track?

Right now I'm mixing for what sounds good... aiming for the vocal levels to be consistent from song to song... then using the levelizer on the output track - 99% Peak and 96% Normalize. But I'm not exactly sure why

[Cary B. Cornett]

Good stuff I wouldn't have known or thought about. Now what about the output levels for each track?

Right now I'm mixing for what sounds good... aiming for the vocal levels to be consistent from song to song... then using the levelizer on the output track - 99% Peak and 96% Normalize. But I'm not exactly sure why

It took me a minute to get that by "track" you meant "song". If you expect people to want to listen to the whole CD together, as opposed to picking out just one song at a time in some random playlist, you need to think of the whole thing as one larger work, like a symphony for example. A symphony is split up into movements, and the movements are often different from each other in sound and feel, and that includes how loud they are. You will never hear a commercial classical CD where each movement was individually normalized to get the loudest possible peak.

Are some of your songs full of energy, and other songs more reflective, maybe even (shudder) quiet? Then you need to allow the quieter songs to be, well, quieter than the loud songs. So, as you put together the master sequence, stringing the song mixes together in order in one common session (you are doing this, right?), listen to how the songs compare in loudness to each other, and make sure you preserve the emotional differences you had in mind when you wrote (or chose) the songs. You can mark a whole song and make a simple auitomation move to shift its overall level if you need to. When you have all of these level changes properly worked out, you find the loudest place in the entire project, set the normalization for that, and apply it to the whole project as a body. Sure, some songs won't hit max peak, but guess what? They don't have to.

So, normalization, if and when you use it, is for the whole project as one thing, not separately for each song.

<rant> <fast loud disclaimer tag mode>
Of course, if it's all gangsta rap or that tuned chainsaw stuff, you can ignore all of this and just go "full shred" on the whole thing song by song like it seems everyone else does.
</fast loud disclaimer tag mode></rant>

Ah, HTH...