Nice in depth video with Swedish House Mafia revealing the production and mixing techniques for their 2010 summer hit.
May 032012
There are many options if you’re looking for professional red book CD mastering and burning software. Some of the most popular ones are Sony’s CD Architect and Steinberg’s Wavelab. But what if you’d like to make your pre master CDs free and on a professional level? E.g. you want to include CD text, ISRC codes, add indexes? Well, with the combination of a little cue sheet coding and using free burning software you can do all these.
Let’s see it step by step:
- Note where your songs start (minutes:seconds:frames, two digits each, 1 frame is 1/75 seconds)
- Mix down your final masters into one single wave file
- Open a text editor like PSPad or Notepad++ and create the cue sheet (see example below)
- Save the text file with the extension .cue in the same folder where you’ve put the wave file
- Select the “write image file to disc” option and open the .cue file with your burning software (ImgBurn is a great free one)
- Burn the disc
Now let’s see the cue sheet syntax. Let’s have the following album as an example:
Artist: Peter M. Junior
Album title: Remixes 2012
Track titles: Let It Ride, Need U Right Here, Falling
ISRC: 123456789012, 123456789013, 123456789014
Here’s how the above would look in the .cue file including CD text and ISRC:
TITLE "Remixes 2012"
PERFORMER "Peter M. Junior"
FILE "cdmasters.wav" WAVE
TRACK 01 AUDIO
TITLE "Let It Ride"
PERFORMER "Electric Alibi"
ISRC 123456789012
INDEX 01 00:00:00
TRACK 02 AUDIO
TITLE "Need U Right Here"
PERFORMER "Electric Alibi"
ISRC 123456789013
INDEX 01 05:46:13
TRACK 03 AUDIO
TITLE "Falling"
PERFORMER "Figures At Dawn"
ISRC 123456789014
INDEX 01 09:50:27
Quite simple isn’t it? Just a few notes: the TITLE and PERFORMER tags can be either per disc or per track attributes. You can freely define both. You can also leave out the TITLE, PERFORMER and ISRC attributes if you don’t need them.
Hope you enjoyed this little tutorial and will make good use of it. For more info on cue sheet editing check out these great sources I also used for reference:
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Cue_sheet
http://digitalx.org/cue-sheet
Here’s the next set of presets for ValhallaRoom. These are my “bread and butter” settings which I usually use as starting points in my mixing projects. Instructions included in the zip file. Have fun!
Download link: Sound 29 presets
And the most annoying answer is: it depends… But indeed, there’s no right setup, however you can follow some general guidelines.
When I’m mixing a song I always have to make this decision quite a number of times. First thing is to get to know your equipment. Know how your compressors react to low, mid and high frequency content and how your equalizers can compensate for the loss or attenuate the boost. For example if a compressor tends to distort low frequencies you might consider applying a low shelf EQ before the comp. If your compressor rolls off high frequencies you may put your go-to high shelf equalizer after it to give the shine back. Or if you have a compressor which produces a massive mid-range boost (aka presence), you can apply a bell cut EQ before of after it depending on the sound you’re after.
Besides these common cases many compressors have a unique “sound” or “color” so it would be quite hard to tell if you need to put your EQ before or after the unit. Most of the time it’s a matter of taste or application. Best thing to do is experimenting with the options, chaining EQs and compressors before, after or all the way round each other. Lucky accidents do happen during mixing. 
Running stereo buses or full mixes through analogue devices like compressors, equalizers, summing boxes etc. is fun. They can add that magical touch to your track – a bit of stardust, the so-called 3D effect, punch, fullness and all sorts of adorable favours. But many times you face a problem even with high-end devices: the stereo image shifts…
I was mastering a track recently which has been run through a very expensive channel strip unit to add some shine to the mix. Sounded gorgeous except that the mix – most noticeably the bass and the vocals – slightly shifted to the left, which was kind of annoying.
I asked my client to send me the mix without the channel strip processor applied on it. Then I measured the RMS levels for the left and right channels on both versions of the song (you can use Voxengo SPAN for such tasks). It looked like this:
Original (in the box) mix: Left: -18.2 dB, Right: -18.3 dB
Mix run through the channel strip: Left: -19.4 dB, Right: -20.4
You can see that the right channel has become 0.9 dB quieter compared to the relative levels of the original mix. To compensate for this I used the free Stereo Tool VST plugin from Flux where you can adjust the levels of the left and right channels independently (besides many other options). I increased the level of the right channel by 0.9 dB: now the vocals and the bass came back to the center. Problem solved!
Just a final note. Always check the mix with your ears too because RMS values are sometimes misleading. So don’t compensate for the stereo image shift in the mix blindly.
Check out this neat little dubstep remix produced at Sound 29 for Electric Alibi! Signed by Dirtbox Music, the official release is coming soon.
Here are some tips for mixing your songs which will help you to achieve more clarity and definition. None of this is craved into stone but can help you out in many situations.
- When using equalizers it’s usually better to cut than boost
- You can achieve more clarity if you high-pass every track around 80 Hz, except bass instruments
- Use a wide Q setting for equalizers unless you need surgical adjustments
- If you need more punch for your bassdrums boost high frequencies instead of lows which will “sharpen” the attack
- Use small amounts of reverb – it’s better to feel it instead of hearing obviously
- Shorter reverb settings contribute to more clarity in the mix
- Add both reverb and delay to pads to make them sound bigger
- Add a little ambience reverb to dry sounding drums and bass tracks
- Filter the delay effects with high- and low-pass filters to avoid your mix sounding busy
- It’s generally better to use a low compression ratio for single tracks and buses
- Applying parallel compression on drums and vocals will result in a more powerful sound
- Watch drum transients – make them sound snappy instead of smeared
- Organize instruments into groups and apply bus compression instead of compressing every single track
- Don’t mix too hot, apply proper gain staging by setting your channels to 0 VU using an analog style VU meter (prior to mixing)
- Use an autopanner on some of the tracks to make them sound more alive
- Pan backing vocals to sides
- Avoid hard panning of single instruments
- Spread instruments in the stereo space
- Place lead vocals, kick, snare and bass instruments in the center
- If an instrument sounds too narrow apply a 10-20 ms channel delay between the left and right channels
- Avoid the “big mono” effect when every sound comes from two sides
- Don’t invert the phase for only the left or right channel of a track - this will lead to mono compatibility issues
- Fix smaller noise issues with a noise gate instead of a denoiser plugin
- Keep your hihats lower in level, too loud is ear fatiguing
- A little chorus on the bassline can make it sound fuller
- Check your mixes on multiple systems: e.g. on headphones, in the car, on laptop speakers etc. to make sure they translate well
- If you don’t have a decent monitoring system use a spectrum analyzer to spot errors in the frequency balance
- Build up the mix: start with the drums, then the bass, the vocals, lead instruments and finally the background elements such as pads, strings. This will result in better balancing.
- Always compare your finished mix to commercial releases
