The Journey from Mess to Master.

We thought you might want to know about what happens between the moment you send us your recordings and the moment you get your finished mixdown.
At first, we considered explaining it, but then we thought: sod that – we’ll put together a playlist of the same mix at different stages in production, to show you exactly how each product would sound if you decided to buy it.
So, without further ado, I hereby present you with the playlist:

 

 

 

As you can see, we've taken one of our old favourites, Buried Alive by Hunters Grace, and yesterday afternoon, we made four different tracks out of it.

We chose Buried Alive because it’s a good way to show off.  As any audio engineer will tell you, heavy metal of any kind is your natural enemy when mixing.  There’s just so much stuff going on at any one time, that it’s really easy to end up with a sludgy mess that sounds worse than when it started.

First of all, we took all the stems and simply dropped them into our sequencer.  Go ahead and take a listen to the one called “Buried Alive – Before Mixing – we’ll wait…

Heard it?  Sounds pretty naff, doesn’t it?

Not to worry.  The second track on the playlist is an example of of one of our products called the “Demo Mix”.  This is essentially, a nice, transparent mix done with no extraneous special effects – really useful for handing out at shows or sending out to labels.

Third on our list is our standard mix, here called the “advanced mix”.  For the purposes of this example we have raised the volume to make it into a reference mix, so it doesn’t sound too quiet by comparison to the other tracks.  This track is mixed with all the bells and whistles, like exciters, saturation, emulation and so forth.  This is how a track should sound before it gets mastered.

Last of all, is the “Mix & Master”.  This represents all the work that goes into making a song ready to publish.  Notice how it not only sounds louder, but fuller?  It is, in fact no louder at its highest amplitude than any of the other tracks in the list.  It is simply very carefully compressed and limited, with plenty of subtle tweaks and sweeps up and down the equaliser to give it all the power and punch it needs to sound perfect.