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Old 08-14-2019, 09:15 PM   #42
ashcat_lt
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Dec 2012
Posts: 7,272
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I need you to take all this with a big grain of salt. I do sometimes get paid to record and mix for other people, but none of the things I have done are actually selling. I don't honestly believe this is really because of how they sound. My clients always seem satisfied if not just blown away, but...


So my "master chain" is usually just super simple:


ReaEQ - preemphais - shelving down the low end a little bit, sometimes pushing the harsh upper mids and maybe the way high "air", all meant to shape and focus the action of the following


ReaComp - lookahead leveler - RMS 500, Precomp 250, A/R 0, ratio usually 1.1:1 (now that it can go lower I might start messing with that), knee maybe 9-12db, threshold set so that we almost never really get there. This very subtly controls the big dynamic swings so that like the loud chorus is not quiet so much louder than quiet verse but also like the one beat where everything just happens to be pretty loud at the same time isn't quite so much louder than the other beats. Things kind of push other things around, and it tends to be what I think of when I hear the word "glue". It is a good, transparent way to decrease DR (and thereby increase perceived volume once normalized) without destroying the faster transients.


ReaEQ - deemphasis/final tone shaping - First basically undoing what the first one did. Together, they work very much like putting an EQ in the sidechain of the compressor, except that here they don't have to be - and usually aren't - exactly opposite. Since the low end isn't getting squashed quite so hard, it often doesn't need to be turned all the way back up, and I can even set different corner frequencies on either side if that works better. It's also just the last EQ in the chain, and I use it to kind of define the overall sonic character of the record. It's way too late to surgically fix individual frequency bands here. I consider it much more like the frequency curve of the master tape back in the analog days.


ReaComp - rail - all time constants at 0, ratio inf:1, knee like 6db, threshold set so that it almost never actually reaches it, auto makeup on, wet at -0.6db. It's a nice curvy soft limiter/saturator that just makes sure nothing ever goes out that's louder than -0.6dbFS. This is a number I chose long ago as a hedge against "intersample overs" that also happens to help with mp3 conversions all the the other things that can make DACs clip even though there are no actual samples going "over" 0.


I don't worry about True Peak and I don't actually care about LUFS. The actual peak sample sample level and the RMS have always told me everything that I couldn't figure out just from listening.


Edit - In certain rare instances where I feel it's necessary, I will put Otium BassLane at the front of this chain to force the real low end to mono. There's a lot of reasons for this, but mostly just to share the load between the two speakers and sort of open headroom for higher frequencies on each channel.
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