Master Buss Compression Down. Mastering now!

Question

Hello all.
It's been a while for me. On the forum that is
Anyway, I've been tooling around with some compression on my master fader in Logic. I very happy with the results. My mixes sound good, but after I bounce it, what's the best way to get the signal hotter without messing up the dynamics? I'm mastering my own stuff at the moment.
I've been in mastering sessions when there was no master buss compression on the mixes, so the mastering engineer would use a combination of compression and limiting and eq.
Now that I've got the compression covered on my end, all I need now is Volume. I've fed a limiter before but the mix loses dynamics and demension. I've seen a mastering engineer start of by "inflating" my waveforms before any compression or limiting. What did he do? It's like he brought up the level in the computer first then began the processing. Is that common? He's very reputable, masters 300 releases a year. If so, that's what I'm talking about. Like normalizing, but perhaps it was some other process? Maybe that's the whole mystery...
Thanks

Answer 1

Noah Perry wrote:
Yes I know. I'm not talking about the "lets squash everything to death" issue.
As I master more of my music and other peoples music too, I'm paying more attention to this side of
the process.
So, like I said. I've got the mix glued up pretty good with my master bus compressor. When I turn up my monitor volume, it sounds good. When played low, it sounds good.
But, in examining my stereo waveform (both visually and sonically) next to other pro-releases, it's not as loud. And I'm not talking about loud as in bad. These releases still sound great with dynamics preserved. What I mean is theirs is just louder than mine. So what's the best way to get my masters a bit louder with out much sacrafice? Because some of these Limiters that are supposed to be transparent, are still a bit unflattering? And using more of the compressors gain makes the mix a little less cool...
When mastering houses need to juice a song up a bit, but the compression is already where it needs to be, what do they use? Feed a limiter? Do they normalize? Do they just use a gain plugin? That''s all I'm saying, folks....any ideas? anybody been in a mastering session and paid really close attention?
Noah
Hi,
I quote : "What I mean is theirs is just louder than mine."
This is why, on 100% of music playback devices, there is a knob, which is called "Volume", this is so that the listener can turn it up, or down, according to what they like. You can check any of your stereos, if you like. Make sure they all have this knob.
As soon as you stop this way of thinking, then you will realise that it does not matter if your mix is louder than "theirs". As long as you keep thinking that you have to make your mixes the same as everyone else's, then you are in fact playing the loudness war.
The better approach, IMO, is to realise that your mixes are UNIQUE. And to learn to respect that uniqueness. Then, and only then, will you be able to let go of this "mine is lesser than theirs" way of thinking. And then you will be free to make mixes that are GREAT.
Cheers