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Methodology for mastering an album of tracks


MikeShapiro

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Imagine that each track on my album, in its own Logic project file, has an identical set of plugins on the mix bus. Let's collectively call them $sharedmixbusplugins.

 

If I render each Logic project individually with nothing on the mix bus (making sure there's no clipping because I removed the limiter), then load the resulting audio files into a new "entire album" Logic project, with each audio file on its own track, then load up $sharedmixbusplugins into the mix bus of this new project, then re-render each track one at a time... will I get the same result as if I had rendered them individually from their own Logic project?

 

My motivation here is to be able to make a change to $sharedmixbusplugins and not have to load 20 Logic projects, one at a time, make the change, and re-render. This way it seems like I could easily experiment with different shared mix busses and render the entire album in one go.

 

Thoughts? Best practices/better ideas? A multitude of thanks in advance.

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If you change anything (including levels to avoid clipping), then the result will be different. How much different is another question.

 

Put differently - if your mix didn't clip without processing, then processing a bounce of it will give identical results to processing the original audio stream.

 

It is good practice to import final, unprocessed mixes into a mastering project to create a more cohesive album. The ballad may actually have to be more quiet if just to make room for the slamming rocker that follows it.

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I used to subscribe to the school of thought that you should have zero plug-ins on your mix bus while mixing to leave more flexibility for mastering, but now my workflow has changed. I found out that when you start mastering you may realize that for example compressing or EQing the entire mix makes a track pop out a little too much during a section and you wish you could go back to the mix to tame that. So now there are some processes I will put on the Stereo Out channel strip while, or even sometimes before mixing. An example of such a workflow is when you setup your Stereo Out channel strip with light compression to emulate a tape like behavior. Then you don't mix the same way. The final results are not the same.

 

So in the end, it depends on you, the way your thought process works, the music genre you're mixing, and the specific project. I'm always wary of sharing blanket advice without even hearing the music. I've been surprised once or twice telling people what they should do and finally hearing the music and realizing my advice wasn't adapted at all.

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i have this 'great' system; i mix in logic, no plugins on the mix bus, levels to about -5 to -10 db. i import my mix into ozone 9 advanced. i always keep the logic mix open.

 

i work on the master. if i decide, for example, that the vocal needs to come up a bit at the 2nd verse, i save my work, quit ozone. then i go back to the logic file, tweak the vocal level, and bounce into the imported file folder for ozone for that song, overwriting what was there before.

 

i open ozone again, and have all my settings as before, but the vocal volume is now tweaked. i go back & forth like this until everything's just right. (this only works with minor tweaks. if i were to re-do the mix in more significant ways, i'd start over in ozone).

 

but the system works. and it's easy to go back-and-forth and make adjustments to the mix to get the master 'perfect' (or my imperfect version of 'perfect').

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Thanks everyone for the thoughtful responses.

 

For me the issue here is efficiency. I've been trying to think of what the individual mixes have in common, and whether I can migrate those things to a shared mastering project. (This could easily be Ozone standalone, as in FisherKing's example, instead of a second Logic Project. In fact I see the advantage there, in being able to simultaneously keep Logic and the mastering environment open.) So for example, it seems like makes sense for all the cues to share a peak limiter, so I don't end up limiting them twice, once individually and once for the album. Likewise if I end up using the same saturation setting across the album, it might make sense to migrate that as well.

 

I really wish that Logic had more elegant support for multiple content timelines in a single Project. (Call them multiple cues, multiple songs, whatever.) It seems like there would be a real opportunity for efficiency in albums, multi-cue scores, or similar projects with shared resources.

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BTW I really like Fisherking's trick of bouncing directly to replace the files used by the mastering app. This seems analogous to the trick that recent versions of Melodyne use, to overwrite the actual files that a DAW is using (while preserving the originals as a backup).

 

this works well, as mentioned, as long as i don't make major changes. but am usually just tweaking a vocal level, or changing small arrangement details; i don't want the mastering to fix my mix, merely present it flatter, a little compressed, and louder... ie, mastered.

 

fwiw, i mix without plugins on the mix out, and aim for a reasonable level. but when i send reference mixes to collabs, i always put the mix level at 0... and run the ozone maximizer on the output. i tell people it's a 'test master'... everyone likes this better than the lower-level, less-hyped mix...

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