Biggest Pet Peeve clients do in the studio...

[soundguy]

if the track is going to get mastered don't put anything on the 2 buss!!/quote]

this has been discussed here a bit inthe past. I dont agree with this statement at all. If you dont know what you are doing, perhaps that might be good advice, but if you dont put any compression on your two buss and then you add ANY compression during mastering, Im sorry, but all the relationships within your mix are going to change. I dont see how this is a good thing in the slightest bit.

This also sort of goes with the assumption that people dont want that distortion there. I know what I think sounds good, but there are bands out there that are not happy with their master until it is completely distorted and pancake flat. Hell, how else do you explain the popularity of one certain mastering house that releases distorted master after distorted master after distorted master... The phrase "not loud enough yet" comes to mind...

dave

[Cellotron]

Dave -
We're talking about 2 different things. Sorry if I didn't articulate this well in my earlier post.

There's a huge difference between a high quality compressor on the 2 buss with a gentle ratio set to a pretty high threshold so that everything "sits" right - and the stuff I am referring to - where the "mix engineer" most likely ran it through some kind of cheap peak limiting plugin without any regard for what it sounds like - where you can actually see the tops of the wave form squared off - and it sounds like dog doo-doo. I do a lot of "budget" mastering - mainly for hip-hop guys - and it seems like a 1/3 of the tracks I get these days are mangled this way.

Anyway - I think for most studios these days in order to respond to recent mastering trends and client expectations - need to provide their ref mixes with some form of limiting on them so that the client doesn't complain that their CD sounds "too soft." But it's really helpful to the mastering engineer to have something that hasn't been peaked limited already - as most likely their mastering limiter sounds better than the mix studio's - and when things are already limited you've really tied their hands as to what they can do for you.

Best regards,
Steve Berson

[Cellotron]

By the way, I tend to let the mastering guys do their thing and only interject if something is going horribly wrong. How much input do you look for from the client? I had one mastering session where the engineer thought I was disinterested because I was just flipping through magazines back on the couch- but still listening to what he was doing up at the board. He was doing fine, but I guess I needed to articulate that more to him.

I definitely prefer attended sessions - it just takes all the guess work out of it and it usually means that I don't have to go back to do any retouches. If all I got was flipping pages I might think the guy was bored - but as long I get responses when I stop to A/B things for them or when I ask a question like "when do you want the next track to come in?" then I'm cool with it. I defintely prefer quiet to lots of noise - Lot's of chatter makes things worse - once I had a gospel quartet in and it was non-stop talking that made it difficult to eq some things that weren't recorded that well.

Best regards,
Steve Berson

[soundguy]

Steve-

I did an attend session a few months ago and when the engineer loaded the stuff in, he excitedly turned to his assistant and said "hey check it, you can see the wave!" and Im sitting there all naive like, huh? The both of them commented that the overwhelming majority of mixes they get are square blocks in the wave window before they apply any limiting. Scary.

dave

[joeysimms]

Well fuck, that's plain stupid. Hey bands-about-to-be-mastered: If yer shit's already a square wave, use your mastering fund for chips n' dip instead! Who the fuck would expect anything useful out of a square wave?

[Electricide]

i see dave's point. 2 buss compression even changes your eq settings, sometimes. Maybe your highs aren't so high anymore, and therefore the cymabls and the vocals don't sit right etc etc. Do it, live with it, then if there are no changes, lay off an uncompressed version too.

It only takes another 4:20 to lay off an uncompressed mix as well. Do both.

[Cellotron]

Well fuck, that's plain stupid. Hey bands-about-to-be-mastered: If yer shit's already a square wave, use your mastering fund for chips n' dip instead! Who the fuck would expect anything useful out of a square wave?

Joey -
The issue happens when bands bring in mixes that come in from a bunch of different studios and want to create an album that sounds like a coherent unified whole. I get this all the time - where I get some square bricks and some cuts with reasonable levels. So there is a lot of level & eq matching happening at that point - where somehow the mastering engineer has to try to decrapify the square blocks - and most likely squash the unsquare ones a little more than they would typically like to in order to make the CD have unified levels. Unfortunately I've yet to find an "expander" that can really undo the damage that cheap plugins operated by idiots do.

Best regards,
Steve Berson

[headache9]

back to the peeves


singers that sing along with themselves in the control room while I am trying to listen to the recording.

[soundguy]

you have the plugin people, but its not just them. The guys I mentioned before are doing stuff primarily released on majors, this is stuff mixed on analog consoles, pushed 20:1 into an ssl quad not seeing the needle move....

so far as mixing with compression goes, I suppose everyone has a different approach to how they will use a two buss compressor. I guess for some mixers, they can just turn it on or off and its not a big deal, but I always will build my mixes around that compressor and structure all the other buss compression beneath the final 2 buss compressor, so for me, shutting that thing off if Ive prepped a mix with it on really fucks me up and Ive got to go back and redo the whole thing, everyhing is out of wack. This is partly the reason why I always make a big deal when people say "dont do it" or whatever. If you are into "dont do it" then dont add compression in mastering, just peak limit as your mix is likely to change quite a bit if you have added buss compression along the way to glue it together.

An anecdote and a true one:

I did a record for a dude this past year and in preproduction we had discussed the idea of not using any compression in the mix. He had done his research into the subject, and he was very much wanting to do his record that way. This was a musician, not an engineer. We got around to mixing the thing and Im sitting there watching him get completely unexcited mix after mix. So finally Im like, yo, whats up, whats the problem you dont want to talk to me about? After a bit of hesitation, this guy looks at me and is all, I dont know dave, it just doesnt ROCK. I hear the song wanting to rock, but it just isnt happening. So, I took the mix we had up, put a 33609 on the two buss and *immediately* the guy jumped out of his chair and was all, holy shit, what did you do, thats IT, this is AWESOME. We then remixed the whole thing with the compressor. Now, Im more than willing to accept the fact that my shortcomings as a mix engineer could very well be the foundation of this guys initial disappointment but Im more inclined to believe the following:

If you are making rock records, and you listen to rock records, the trend over the last 15 years has been more and more buss compression. Its just the sound of so many records and its hard to make the bottom of an uncompressed mix move the same way as a compressed mix does, even if you are only adding 1 dB at 1.5:1, it makes a HUGE difference. If Im using a compressor as a crutch, thats cool, so are most of my heroes so I can live with it. It just makes a sound that in my mind is as signature of a difference between playing your guitar through a twin vs. a marshall. I dont think many of us would give the guy looking for marshall sound a twin and explain that something down the line will turn it into the marshall sound. Perhaps an extreme analogy that sorta doesnt work, but maybe someone gets the idea.

Interestingly enough, along the same lines, I mixed a project a while ago with no buss compression. I got to mastering and the engineer had a real SSL quad from an SSL console in his desk. I eyed that and was like, shit, Im just gonna use that thing, I gotta try it. Three songs on that project went through that box, three that I felt didnt get too whacked out of balance by the compressor. To this day, the most feedback I get from that project is on those three songs, people who marginally listen to music will start to tap their foot on those three while they sit still for the rest of the record.

Just some thoughts, my experience, consider it worthless if you have to. Its worth noting however that where I have written "compressor" here its really an abbreviation for "really good sounding compressor used effectively". No compression is way better than a crummy sounding box or the best sounding box screwing up the groove of the song.

dave

[DigitalDon]

Another peeve

After 8 takes in my modest studio (at the end of a 12 hour session) we are finally 99% into a perfect take. As the bass and lead guitar swell up then start to fade at the end the rhythm guitarist (grinning from ear to ear) begins to clap. 7 open mics in the room. Time to call it a day.......

[justinf]

Masturbating to (bad) porn on my FUCKING AUDIO SYSTEM while I'm on break, etc.

DOGS!

[markpar]

Masturbating to (bad) porn on my FUCKING AUDIO SYSTEM while I'm on break, etc.

DOGS!

Holy crap! Did he/she/they at least clean up afterward?

-mark

[justinf]

No, that act was NOT consumated, shall we say. Cold busted.

[soundguy]

unhappy ending...

dave

[sonic documentation]

i always love when bands write new songs in the studio. i feel like a nice guy because i do a lot of projects at a fixed rate, and then the band take 6 extra hours to write a new song. which brings me to my next point: practice at home, not in the studio.