mixing for vinyl record - need advice!

F

frodebeats

New member
Hi all,

Over the years i have produced a great deal of songs for a friend. Now he wants to make a vinyl record out of it:hmmm:

My question is - what do i have to do to these songs to prepare them, especially thinking about:

-Bass levels
-Mastering and peak levels
-Any coding of the masters?

Vinyl is a little bit before my time, so i basically need any help and info. Anyone here that have gone through the process?
 
Mixing a record for vinyl sounds pointless due to it's limitations in comparison to other media....., but who cares about that?

I've never personally worked with vinyl, but two things to consider are that vinyl has less dynamic range than digital and doesn't handle low frequencies well. Don't know if the dynamic range part would be an issue (depends on what genre you are working with). For low frequencies you may need to filter out some lows (I don't know a good cutoff point).
 
every thing you raised as a possible point of disappointment is dealt with in the mastering phase for vinyl: dynamic range compression would be applied to bring the mix in line with the limitations of the medium

at this phase the RIAA curve is applied before the cutting lathe is used to create your acetate masters:

if the bass needs to be compensated further then a mastering engineer will apply corrective eq to make certain that lathe does not cut the groove too deep or too wide
 
So do all the "vinyl plants" do this process? Don`t yet know what company my friend will use...

Is it also true that you have less bass/dynamics the more song you have on the record? Or is it just a difference between say a 12" with 2 songs and an album?

As for "mixing a record for vinyl sounds pointless" Its not my decision, i quess its a nostalgic thing.
 
Mix as usual.
Because it's a vinyl release, the mastering will be done by the lacquer cutter.
 
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