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Andrew Scheps, Heretic


bitflipper

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I kinda agreed with the video. I've spent years using reference levels from the EBU meter and backing off compressors or tightening them up.

I think it's good practice. I'll never mix as much music as he has. I just don't have that many bands to work with. But I can see from where I sit that I could get to the place where the reference level was kinda in my head and I could let it go... I could mix for the song not a target loudness.

Sometimes, I start targeting 14 and the nature of the band brings me easily to 12 without any real compromise.

I can imagine that the same could be true for 10 or 8. I've never targeted these levels, but I'm sure there is music that would suite them.

I do usually mix a night of music, not just one song. I also mix it to be listened to contiguously. So the volume of the last song needs to feed into the volume of the next song. Some songs can seem a little louder than others, but not a lot louder.

This is a constraint he isn't thinking about (or maybe he is). But if you mix song by song, you can discard concerns about what comes before or after and just mix that song.

Edited by Gswitz
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As I listen to the 65 minutes of stuff I currently have on SoundCloud (as private tracks I hasten to add) I realise that I have it easy.

I have embraced LUFS over the last two years and, thinking about it, it really does suit the kind of material I create. And that is why I am saying, "I have it easy."

A very high proportion of my work is neither compressed or limited. Well, not entirely true, because I have recently been getting to grips with Pro-Q3's "dynamic EQ" tool. I like that, because it is a lot easier to use than compression where you have to understand all the various settings. With Pro-Q3's dynamic EQ, you just apply it... Nothing to learn other than understanding how it alters sounds. And I only really use it with individual notes that sometimes run riot at certain points, so, quite a narrow Q setting.

And my number?

-16

I tried -18 for a time, which gives you more dynamic range, but I felt that it was a bit too "quiet" even for my stuff.

Every now and then I create something with percussion and I ramp it up to -14.

 

Having said all that, I agree with that Scheps character in that  we should mix to suit the material and not some arbitrary level set by others. Sure, there are times when a common level across various genres, or stuff that gets listened to together, is a big plus. You don't want to be reaching for the volume control because your playlist contains some tracks that were mixed and mastered back in the early seventies and some that were done in the late nineties.

 

okay... carry on...

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When I started using EBU standards as my guide, the first thing I did was go through all my old mixes and see how close they'd come to meeting those targets.

Surprisingly, most weren't terribly far off the mark. But I noticed that some of them were way too "quiet" when objectively measured. In particular, pure orchestrations tended to fall around -20 or even -22. "Now, that won't do!" I thought, and proceeded to pull them up to match the rest. 

To my dismay, those pseudo-classical pieces sounded just awful when raised up to match the pop/rock stuff. At the other end of the spectrum, some of the already too-loud mixes also suffered a little when turned down. Worst of all, when concatenated into an album, the subjective volume variation seemed to get worse, not more consistent as expected.

The lesson learned: yes, it really does depend on the song: its genre, instrumentation, tonal profile and even its arrangement.

Of course, loudness levels should at least respect if not conform to standards for movies, streaming, radio and television. But trusting a meter exclusively can have its own perils.

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About two weeks ago I did an all day Mix with the Masters class with Scheps (highly recommend these events if you can swing it!) and he was illuminating.

A big part of him moving in the box was he because he says that the converters are the weakest link in the chain. When you go AD or DA you are approximating the wave form - no matter how good the converters are. And by staying 100% in the box he doesn't have to deal with gain staging the way those that leave and come back do - he can have levels crazy hot in the mix and only needs to pull down the master fader at the end before rendering. He talked about what he has on VCAs and how he sets that up - it's important because if you start pulling down levels that fead parallel channels you change the mix. He kept talking about how many things people do that change the mix.

He also mixes into a limiter! He doesn't do any special mix for the client - as he says "the mix is the mix". So he mixes into the limiter and gets it sounding the way he wants and then off that goes to mastering with the limiter imprinted on his track. He sends them 32bit files so if the file is too hot the mastering engineer can pull it down with no damage to the file.

I got so inspired that I bypassed my summing and all my 2bus gear, set up a 2bus chain like he has, and I'll be damned my mix was better. I immediately started selling all my 2bus analog gear and now I'm fully in the box and happy.

Very enlightening lesson - the guy is a geek through and through and he knows the science and he's tested the variables.

When Scheps speaks, people should listen.

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7 hours ago, synkrotron said:

Blah, blah, blah...

okay... carry on...

All I can say Andy is, whatever you've been doing, keep it up!  Your stuff sounds great on my systems.

Right now, you're entire discography is at the top of my foobar2000 playlist of a couple of thousand songs.  I always add new stuff at the bottom then keep forgetting that it loops to the top.  I don't know how many I stop working and think "Ooo...  Now that's nice!" only to realize the player had looped back to your stuff - lol!

Ok, enough buttering up.  Where's the next album Budsk? 😜

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