p.s. any tips on your mastering approach? I like how loud it is (yet still clean). Gotta play the loudness war to stay competitive
I compiled a list of basic steps with guide videos I found on youtube to help get the concepts and techniques across.
Its not a simple process, but its not overly complicated either. just takes a bit of experience, knowing what to cut and when to cut it, and tuning your ears to hear things like compression, or resonant frequencies, frequencies clashing. The most complicated part is understanding compression, once you get your head around it, getting loud mixes becomes a whole lot easier, more so with clipping. But Id recommend learning compression and understanding it before just using clipping as compression is fundamental in loud mixes at various points down the mixing chain. Like glue compression on a drum bus, or taming the transients on kicks and snares. Controlling the peaks allows you to push things to sound louder, despite having lower peaks due to the compression or clipping, the further you push it the more distortion you introduce and the more you remove the transients, everything is a tradeoff, less is more, everything you add to the signal chain has the potential to colour the sound just by being in the signal chain.
I have spent many years trying to get to grips with the art of mixing, and it's taken me a very long time to get there. I would like to present an article that should hopefully cover some of the basics to get you on your way to really improving the quality of your mixes. This article is about...
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