Today I was watching a tutorial to see the perspective of other producer views and when he was done making the beat and went to mix it , i LIE TO YOU NOT , all he did was adjust the volume in 1 min , no panning and barely eq'd AND I LIE TO YOU NOT. His Shxt sounded better then any mix I had ever crafted. That really pissed me off but he did TEACH ME SOMETHING I ALREADY KNEW BUT STOPPED DOING, & that was stop over doing shxt & also bringing the faders all the way down then raising them one by one is much better and helpful to the ear.
Here are some soft rules, don't follow these 100% strictly but do it 100% strictly early on to break into a better sound territory.
In a great monitoring environment you can get far only by using the volume faders. When you push the faders into a monitoring frequency response that don't make false emphasis on certain frequencies you can avoid a lot of harsh resonances and more easily notice what frequencies you need to boost or cut. Another thing is that with a lot of effects activated some of these might start to turn harsh later on when you gain stage towards the target loudness, partly because of inherent noise in the effects and partly because the signal is pushed near or beyond the clipping point at various fx stages. With too little gain you might get too little modulation and with too much gain you might get too much noise. Many software effects also lack enough oversampling, this can make the effects introduce significant amounts of aliasing artifacts.
The next time you mix, try to gain your mix iteratively with +3 dB of gain at each iteration, starting at -17 LUFS at the loudest chorus. Early on ensure you get the panning right (while the sound sources are closer to the null point in the 3D sound field), then the more loud you make it, focus more on the meters of the fx stages to ensure you maintain headroom. Apply de-essing at mastering, but not across the entire stereo signal, only selectively where needed. Don't go beyond -11 LUFS in the post mix, instead print the post mix stems at this loudness and work with these master stems in a separate mastering session.
Early on when you start to master, focus on getting the saturation of the mid and the side applied first of all while the signal is not yet so hot. I recommend a combination of tube and tape saturation on the center master tracks and a combination of crisp and tape saturation on the side master tracks. By applying the saturation not on the entire master, you ensure you maintain the sound field boundaries of the sound sources within the stereo field. Now that you have a warm signal that you want to make hot, I think a good strategy is to simply gain the tracks towards a hot loudness level like -7 LUFS using multiband expanders. This step you can combine with song section and master track specific RMS normalization, you might for instance want to increase the RMS of some tracks in the verses a little because the mix was prepared to warm mode rather than hot mode. This will introduce a lot of noise (add the de-essing at this level/stage), but by making it this hot you can more easily hear A) what post mix tracks you need to reduce in gain later on roughly by how much and B) how much compression various master tracks need. When you then have achieved a noise reduction and made it sound nice at -7 LUFS using multiband expanders and RMS normalization, then you start to reduce the gain on the master tracks you know need it, until the master is somewhere at -8 LUFS in loudness. When it sounds great at this loudness level, grab a stereo widener and a transparent brickwall peak limiter and adjust the combination towards where the mix is a bit wider and louder, adding around +0.3 LUFS to the mix so that the final loudness is -7.7 LUFS, with a true peak of around -0.4 dBFS. The combination of all of this produces a very thick waveform but within it you have a lot of correct amounts of dynamics, low amounts of noise and high amounts of modulation.
This is some basic mastering. In real world pro mastering you will also introduce some additional dynamics processing and EQing (and other effects) in some of these stages for sound/dynamics/gain. You might for instance want a little chorus added on the side in conjunction with the saturation and/or stereo widening to enhance the warmth and/or stereo. Under the guidance of SIDE solo it can add important character to the final master.
Please also note that when you create impact in the mid range, you might lose impact in the low end, which removes perceived depth. It is therefore important that when you gain and do so to add mid range at the same time, try to focus enough of that towards the sides, so that the low end in the center remains well defined. When you notice that the mix is a bit dense and low end heavy, that is typically when you need more mid range. It's just that you need to add it to the master so that you are not removing the depth of the low end. So distribute the mid frequency boosts in appropriate amounts relative to the master tracks.
As long as you work at the right stroke level and keep it soft and mild using your ears, you can do quite a lot before the signal breaks up. It is when you are working at the wrong stroke level, with sharp cuts and boosts and work mathematically/visually that it starts to sound bad, especially when you get some clipping in there too. It is very important to move the knobs/faders quite a lot while using your ears to pay attention to what happens and hence be able to more easily spot roughly where the knob/fader should be.
I like to keep the rhythm element very gentle far into the process and later on carve it out, often simply just by adding gain. I don't like when the drums make the mix heavy and the sound noisy and the mix is not yet where it needs to be in terms of loudness. I avoid as much of that as possible as far into the process as possible, instead I ensure I have the side chains properly dialed in. Overall I don't like to have the noisy sound sources added early, I tend to want to add them when the beautiful stuff is in balance. So overall I tend not to want to mix with e.g. bass and drums enabled early on, I much rather prefer establishing a balance between the rest of the music and the vocals first to get a good sense of the music before all of the noise. Noise can be extremely distracting and mess with the mixing and mastering. I also don't like a situation when either the bass is too loud or too quiet, like no matter how you balance it you are never satisfied with it. That happens when it is not side chained and when it is not filtered a little in the subs. Just like with drums I prefer also the bass to be able to move around pretty freely within the dynamics of the mix, that requires some side chaining. I tend to want to add some RMS normalization on the bass master track to make the bass line stand out a little more and to even out the frequency response of the master as a whole.
