Final Polishing

Hey, it's tea-break time again!

It's probably best to take a complete break from listening to anything at all at this point. You are probably quite exhausted. If you feel the urge to sleep, then make yourself a strong coffee. If you go to bed now, things will sound different to your ears in the morning and you will end up spending all of tomorrow redoing everything and all of today's efforts will have been a waste of time. Best to battle on and get it finished today.

When you are ready to continue, listen to some other records very briefly for a few minutes at a quiet level. This will refresh your ears and remind you of how things sound in the big world of music recording outside of your studio. Compare different songs from different people. Listen to the levels of the different parts - especially the vocal level.

Then listen to your mix at domestic listening level, and compare that with listening to it loudly (on main monitor speakers if you have them). It is unlikely that anything major will need changing at this point, but what you will probably notice is that some parts overall are just a teeny bit too loud or too quiet. This should be a very "general" feeling; because you've already smoothed out the levels, there shouldn't be anything that needs changing significantly during the song at all.

To change the overall levels of the two or three parts that might need "tweaking", there are two ways you can do it. You can either program into the automation an overall "trim" of the separate parts, or - my preference - just carefully crank the "trim pots" at the top of the channel (or their software equivalents). It's often much quicker than fiddling about with the automation system, especially now you're tired and likely to do something silly (like erasing the master mix file - it happens, really!).

When you've got everything the way you want it, it is time to consider whether compressing the mix overall will have any benefit.

Before you leap out of your chair and go patching your $200 Alesis across the two weeks of blood, sweat and tears it took to get the song to this stage, consider whether you need to do any compression at all.

On the other hand, don't assume that because you've compressed each instrument individually then overall compression isn't required - the two things are quite separate and the mix compressor will respond to the blend of the instruments in a way that individual instrument compression never can. It can be worth doing mix compression on the night of the mix - you know the song more intimately at this point than you ever have in the past - or will the next day. But you can also be overtired and mess it up completely.

I've written a separate article about compression, but in summary there are a number of reasons why you might want to consider compressing the whole mix at this time:

• The mix doesn't sound loud enough
• The mix isn't "punchy" enough (not enough "bong" and "boff) despite best efforts whilst mixing
• You've worked hard, and the whole mix nearly gels together but not quite.

Using a compressor on a precious, final mix is hard work requiring hard listening and serious concentration. You'll need to do a lot of switching in/out of the compressor to see if you're really making a difference, and in some cases you may be "splitting hairs" and not making enough significant difference to make the compression worthwhile. If it's not making much difference then it probably isn't worth doing at this stage.

If you're not sure (and this only comes with experience) then you really should leave it alone. You can always compress the stereo mix later on another day. If you ruin your mix now you'll be stuck with the results forever.

After you've got the compressor making the mix sound the best you can possibly get it, you might still consider one final round of teeny, teeny instrument level adjustments (this really is hard work, isn't it?). Perhaps the compressor seems to have lost some of the bass from the mix? (quite likely - the subjective effect of compression is often a noticeable loss of extreme bass). Perhaps also some things now sound a wee bit too loud after whole-mix compression? If you think that radical changes are required, then you probably don't have the compressor set up properly, so either redo it or just unpatch it completely and leave mix compression for another day.

This "final polishing" should take no more than about fifteen minutes to half an hour. You're nearly dead as it is...

Record the mix onto DAT or CD right NOW!

Even if you intend to review a computer-based mix in the morning before definitely deciding on it, put it down now onto tape of DAT or CD anyway!! This is supremely important: Between now and tomorrow morning a huge number of things can change. Old outboard effects and other external equipment will have cooled down overnight and may sound slightly different in intangible ways the next day. Other people - or in my case, my pets - may not realise the importance of your precious work and start changing settings inadvertently. Even if the mix is "safe" inside a computer, the software might not perform properly the following day. The file system might even lose the mix. The computer may even crash horribly as you power down tonight just before you go home! I've had it happen. Even if you leave it turned on, it might catch fire. It's working right now, so put the mix down and store a backup outside of the system (on DAT, CD or similar). Even more importantly keep the mix master safe and irrefutably well-labelled.

• Here's a story for you: "Gash tape" is what you call the 2-3 minutes of blank tape on a metal spool that you have left over at the end of a blank reel of master recording tape. Tape spools are expensive, and so if you need one quickly in the studio, if you see a tape spool with some "gash" on it lying around, you just pick up a razor blade, poke it through the hole in the tape spool, and slice straight through the layers of tape to the hub. All of the spare blank tape falls in little bits onto the floor or into the dustbin, and you've got yourself a nice empty metal spool in a hurry. In a London Recording Studio one morning, the bleary-eyed Producer and Engineer staggered into the studio after a late night mix the night before, only to find that the Tape-Op had just chopped last nights Marvin Gaye master mix into 6 inch pieces, mistaking it for "gash".

Horror stories can involve DAT tapes too. It's certainly not unusual to find a DAT tape has gone missing, only to find that the cleaners have accidentally knocked it off the shelf behind some tape machines or behind an equipment rack. Keep it safely stored away.

So if the studio breaks down overnight, or if there is some other disaster, you're going to feel nice and smug if you've got a copy of the mix stored in a safe place. It's happened to me before. It may be nothing more sinister than a simple power-cut for a few hours, but it still puts you out of action if you've not stored your many hours of work onto a portable format such as DAT or CD. This can be a disaster if you've got a mastering session booked that morning.

Important preparation for tomorrow

Don't go to bed. Not yet.

Without changing anything related to the mix setup, do the normal housekeeping duties like emptying the ashtrays, taking the cups to the kitchen for a few minutes.

It's quite possible you might (incredibly) want to listen to some light music at this point. That's fine - but listen quietly though. Resist the urge to listen to your mix again. You're finished with that for today. Personally, I used to like gently playing the lovely Yamaha Grand Piano in the main studio for about half an hour, with the lights dimmed.

Why are you doing all this? Because if you go to bed now, without a break, you will not be relaxed and as a consequence when you climb into bed, you will still be thinking about your mix. You will actually dream about the mix - moving faders in your sleep. You can have bizarre and confusing dreams about the mix if you haven't relaxed properly before getting into bed.

I've literally woken up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night screaming "I've wiped the multitrack!!! I've erased everything!! Oh my god what am I going to do!!!" and then realised I've just been having a nightmare about the mix! It's a horrible experience. You're not going to be in a fit state to do anything the next day if you have a broken nights sleep like that.

So you must relax after the mix session, so that you can get a sound nights sleep without worry!

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 760