I was watching a old stream Tristam made a long time ago, I saw it when I was younger but didn't understand what he was saying, I do now though. Izotope has a built in frequency display thing that shows the average levels and its like a > slope, bass is loudest highs are lowest going down.
I was curious, so that is how a track should be properly mixed and mastered? It even had it to where you could import tracks and basically copy their mix's it seems like cheating in a brilliant way.
So does this mean when I mix I need to make sure highs are the most quiet and whatnot or how does this work? If you check out my SC people say my mixes have to many high frequencies which I've been trying to figure out but sound fine on my headphones, I love leaving highs on my saws and stuff it makes em so crisp!
No. The brain has a sensitivity curve to the frequencies across the frequency spectrum, this curve ascends towards 2 - 4 kHz and then descends. This means that the ears do not "hear" the low frequencies as much and hence when you balance the mix you automatically get more low frequencies when the mix is in balance, even when the mix is pretty bass weak. So you can take almost any mix and you will notice the same overall pattern due to this. What is different between mixes though is the average frequency. The higher the average frequency is, the louder the mix because it approaches the most sensitive area near 2 - 4 kHz. By default when you are new to mixing and mix against monitors that are low end weak, you might end up with an average frequency of say 800 - 900 Hz, depending on the genre. These kinds of mixes are dense and silent. With more mixing experience the average frequency of say a chorus tends to go beyond 950 - 1 kHz, these mixes are brighter and are not pushed as hard to get to that loudness. In order to understand the perceived true loudness of a chorus you can use the combination of integrated LUFS, average frequency, RMS and true peak, on MID and SIDE respectively. That will give you a near identical loudness perception relative to some reference, the only thing that possibly might be left as a diff in that case is the compressor attack time of tracks inside of the mix - the transient shape of the stereo waveform.
These days I tend to like to use max slow attack time and medium release time on compressors as a default setting far into the process and then later on I lower the attack time to tighten up sounds in the mix and finally I tune the release time, these moves add additional perceived loudness, but I do these moves against my mix loudness targets, not after I've achieved the mix loudness targets and not as late as in mastering. During mastering I might again start to increase the attack time to compensate and also compensate with the release time. I use dedicated loudness targets for mix and master respectively.
Typically I don't like the sounds in the SIDE component or panned hard L R, to have very short compressor attack time. It should be fast enough to define the transients as distinctly as possible by tightening them, that is very important, but I am careful not to go further, because that can thicken sounds near the ears in an unpleasant way.
When it comes to loudness I tend to want to mix against -11.5 integrated LUFS during the mixing process because at that loudness I am still able to sense the emotions that stem from perceiving the contrasts between hard and soft playing, after -11.5 integrated LUFS the contrasts between soft and loud playing starts to naturally decrease to levels that seriously impact the perceived emotion of the mix, so therefore it is key to first of all have the right dynamics in the mix prior to mastering, but also to mix with mastering in mind so that you know you will be able to maximize the mix at mastering without loss of emotion.
At mastering the loudness increase might to some degree be indirectly coming from broad gain stage compensation when you dynamically soften particular frequency ranges. To succeed with loudness, it is good to have it prepared as early as possible, preferrably already during the arrangement process. The louder you can have each sound source in the mix, the more modulation and the higher the stereo image quality. The only issue you get is an unbalanced resulting dynamic response, like you might get certain bands much too loud, so that you might end up in a situation when you constantly adjust the volume faders without getting anywhere (some sound source is constantly too loud), while the faders also gradually start to move downwards, which means modulation loss. The art is hence to get high amounts of modulation per sound source and get these to combine into a smooth dynamic response. This in turn you achieve already during arranging and recording. So keep in mind that it is ideal to get this right already during arranging, but that adjustments are needed later on during mixing and mastering. Loud resonances at particular frequencies are a result of bad recording room, bad tracking gear, bad monitors and on top no handling of it later on.
