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Kind of embarrassing question, my 14 minute epic I fear has run out of headroom . My bad. I have been working on it too long and the kick and bass are putting it over the top. Months ago I pulled everything down, fader by fader and got the mix how I wanted but I keep tweaking and I'm back at the top of my headroom. I really don't want to drop every fader again. That's basically remixing. I cut some of the subs out of the bass and kick and that helped and I have tried running a waves compressor on an out buss very lightly. The L3LL Multimaximer has a slight threshhold of -0.3 and Out Ceiling of -0.2. I'm trying to keep it from going in the red but I would rather not compress. ( let the mastering engineer handle that) Would the Master Fader track help or is there another solution? Thank you

If you give a file with no or little headroom to a good mastering engineer there will be little he can do.

You might like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imx6GK39vEo

The MOTU Dynamic EQ is pretty great at taming certain frequencies like bass drums and raising others in a tasteful way.

Try pulling down the master fader; as long as you are working within the 32 bit floating point environment of DP, you may just be ok. Watch out for busses when bouncing though.

Isolate which tracks are causing the clipping and use AOM invisible limiter.

http://aom-factory.jp/products/invisible-limiter/

This is certainly the most invisible limiter I have used and (like any limiter) much better deployed on individual offending tracks rather than a bus. Take note though, that it may not be any one single track but a combination of two or three tracks causing a 'phantom' transient clip.

In this case, group the offending tracks to an aux bus and apply the AOM limiter there. To find the combination may take a little experimentation soloing tracks or combinations of tracks, but the more you can did you do at the individual channel layer the less you will harm your overall mix

It seems to me that you would have to unnecessarily compromise your mix by ignoring and "patching" the issue...

Yes. It is very annoying when this happens, but if I were you, I would go back to the faders and readjust everything with good gain staging, especially if you haven´t finished mixing yet (how long before you run out of headroom again after those bandaids stop working?).

This time make sure you leave PLENTY of headroom for your mastering engineer. Let him make it loud. Just concentrate on making your mix as good as you can. Otherwise, you will keep running into issues, such as overloading plugins, and a lot of them don´t handle that gracefully, even in a 32 bFP environment.
That will take you less time than battling against your mix to fix the issue.

Here's one solution: Install a trim plug effect on every track set to -6 or -10 db or whatever value you need. Does anyone know of a "non-tedious" way to do this to every track?

Doug

Tidwells@aol.com wrote:Here's one solution: Install a trim plug effect on every track set to -6 or -10 db or whatever value you need. Does anyone know of a "non-tedious" way to do this to every track?

Doug

Option-Drag the Trim Plugin from its original track to each of the other tracks. You can go from track to track, and it will put one on each, with the setup of the original. Not a one-touch solution, but a lot less tedious than setting up each one.

Shoosh

Don't hit the plugs to hard. Put trims before and after the insert chain... pull down the master a few db. Look at the meter bridge with every bank open. Figure out whats over loading and fix it. DP will tend to load up if you are doing ITB mix. So make sure the kick drum and bass are not fighting for the same space. One or the other should carry the sub frequencies. I prefer the kick. I roll the subs below 100 out of the bass and I'm a bass player! Getting the bass right and everything cleans up. If possible tune kick to the fundamental of the song.

Another helpful fix is to find the area that is overloading and do a slight bite reduction. A 2db bite reduction does wonders for overloaded spots..

Try saving what is now your final mix... Then do a copy of the whole song including audio files and put them in their own folder as new version... Reopen new version and turn off the automation Pull down all the faders to zero, save and close. Wait 4 or 5 days. Wake up fresh as early as possible and open the mix. Put your monitors as low as you can. Like half where you usually monitor. Put your master fader to plus 2 or 3. Start pushing up the individual faders starting with the vocal or whatever the focal point instrument is. Once you get the level of the focal point add the snare drum. Then the kick, then the bass. Fill in the other instruments from there doing one low in the spectrum then one high in the spectrum. Try to finish this balance mix in an hour at most. Then shut it down for an hour and come back and make a few tweaks. If you like it. Pull the master down to zero or minus 1. Do the automation moves and cut the master mix. Thats what I do. Don't worry we've all been there and will be again. One more thing... if something starts fighting the snare or vocal take out the offending frequency. Avoid any solo eq'ing at that point...

Another thing to try - very old school. Turn up your monitors - at least twice the level of what you
normally monitor at. Then pull all your faders down, erase all level automation, and start over.

It really is a matter of trying to make everything louder than everything else. You can't. But starting
with your listening level much higher will be a big help in getting your mix under control.

waxman wrote:Don't hit the plugs to hard. Put trims before and after the insert chain... pull down the master a few db. Look at the meter bridge with every bank open. Figure out whats over loading and fix it. DP will tend to load up if you are doing ITB mix. So make sure the kick drum and bass are not fighting for the same space. One or the other should carry the sub frequencies. I prefer the kick. I roll the subs below 100 out of the bass and I'm a bass player! Getting the bass right and everything cleans up. If possible tune kick to the fundamental of the song.

Another helpful fix is to find the area that is overloading and do a slight bite reduction. A 2db bite reduction does wonders for overloaded spots..

Try saving what is now your final mix... Then do a copy of the whole song including audio files and put them in their own folder as new version... Reopen new version and turn off the automation Pull down all the faders to zero, save and close. Wait 4 or 5 days. Wake up fresh as early as possible and open the mix. Put your monitors as low as you can. Like half where you usually monitor. Put your master fader to plus 2 or 3. Start pushing up the individual faders starting with the vocal or whatever the focal point instrument is. Once you get the level of the focal point add the snare drum. Then the kick, then the bass. Fill in the other instruments from there doing one low in the spectrum then one high in the spectrum. Try to finish this balance mix in an hour at most. Then shut it down for an hour and come back and make a few tweaks. If you like it. Pull the master down to zero or minus 1. Do the automation moves and cut the master mix. Thats what I do. Don't worry we've all been there and will be again. One more thing... if something starts fighting the snare or vocal take out the offending frequency. Avoid any solo eq'ing at that point...

This is good advice.

You may change some details to suit your music and workflow, such as when/where/how much snare, kick, bass etc., but what you should NOT change much about Waxman's advice is the stuff that seems unrelated to the mix: turn your volume down (doesn't have to be half, but way lower than normal, and always by the same amount), start fresh and early, work for an hour and take an hour break, give your mind time to forget the recordings before you mix, and give your ears time to recover, often. If you mix into tired ears, you'll come back the next day and wonder who the heck has been messing with your mix!

Turning your volume down to mix serves two purposes: preserves your ears and allows you to mix louder without needing to push limiters to get the sound up after everything else is done. Don't overdo that, though, because not all parts of the sound scale linearly. What sounds good at low volume doesn't necessarily work at higher volume, so when you start bringing in the later stems or parts, start checking it at higher volumes and resting your ears longer.

There's one thing that I do that I don't see people talking about, though I'm sure most people do it to some extent, and that's "mental mixing." I play the song in my head, the way I want it to sound. I take note of the accents, the phrasing, what I'm focusing on in each bar, each phrase, each verse, each section of the song. You can make a song really jump in your mind, but the trick is to freeze that image and analyze it. Then you can easily see what it needs to get the existing tracks to match the ones in your head. When you listen for EQ, relate the sound to pitches you know; I keep a frequency chart on the wall beside me to help me zero in on the actual numbers of the pitches, so I know exactly where to adjust it. It at least saves me a lot of trial-&-error time. I've set up entire mixes of large numbers of tracks in a few hours time. I've also seen mixes "by committee" in large studios drag out for days and not get much really right. A clear mental vision, matched by clear analysis to bridge the existing sounds to the desired final mix will shorten the hands-on time dramatically.

Shooshie

Well, this is why I record most tracks in larger projects at -24 dB down.

Lately I've been bumping that up a bit for MIDI-based projects that are mostly VI based, as I'm more likely to have to do a lot of level-balancing stems first, such as for combining articulations.

In either context (I'll still record non-MIDI rock band projects at -24 dB down), MOTU's Trim control is a godsend. And don't forget to insert it between plug-ins as most meters only show beginning and/or end of an audio chain but damage can be done in between.

Depending on whether you commit and/or do multi-stage mixing (this is how I work, but I'm in the extreme minority as most people never commit anything and only ever bounce a final two-track pre-master), as well as how you use Auxes (regardless of whether you partially or fully commit stem settings as on-disc audio files while mixing), you can use a bunch of Master Faders to tame levels too.

Shooshie wrote:

Tidwells@aol.com wrote:Here's one solution: Install a trim plug effect on every track set to -6 or -10 db or whatever value you need. Does anyone know of a "non-tedious" way to do this to every track?

Doug

Option-Drag the Trim Plugin from its original track to each of the other tracks. You can go from track to track, and it will put one on each, with the setup of the original. Not a one-touch solution, but a lot less tedious than setting up each one.

Shoosh

Just in case:
Option drag Trim plug will copy fine when copying from stereo track to stereo track, and mono to mono.
But will default to 0, when copying from stereo track to mono track, or mono to stereo.
BTW, this does apply with any other plugin...

SMTPE RP200 monitoring level reference is your friend.

I would not do any serious mixing task, in any studio, without this monitoring calibration.

Very good explanations about it (why and how) in Bob Katz book (Mastering Audio, The Art and the Science).

daniel.sneed wrote:

Shooshie wrote:

Tidwells@aol.com wrote:Here's one solution: Install a trim plug effect on every track set to -6 or -10 db or whatever value you need. Does anyone know of a "non-tedious" way to do this to every track?

Doug

Option-Drag the Trim Plugin from its original track to each of the other tracks. You can go from track to track, and it will put one on each, with the setup of the original. Not a one-touch solution, but a lot less tedious than setting up each one.

Shoosh

Just in case:
Option drag Trim plug will copy fine when copying from stereo track to stereo track, and mono to mono.
But will default to 0, when copying from stereo track to mono track, or mono to stereo.
BTW, this does apply with any other plugin...

Correct. I was gonna mention that, too.

Buzzy


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