PT Logic

Final Output

Leon Gilroy

Leon Gilroy

Logician
Hi all,
When bouncing (after realizing im terrible at the final mixdown) i've become accustomed to trying to mix and process the individual tracks as clean and coherent as possible and really only using an adaptive limiter on the output to boost and limit loudness.

I've moved from using 7+ effects to using ozone and feeling like my master out is a chronological story of firstly destroying the song then battling to make it sound pro before moving to the mentioned technique.

My problem regardless of all three of these is i've noticed my final bounce isn't as loud as alot of other peoples even if the output is pushed to 0.0 just about to clip.
EVerything is clear and im not having to turn my speakers up to max but i definitely have to turn them down before playing even another non professional song on soundcloud/youtube/mp3.

sample-

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Has anybody ever had similar results and if so what are the ways to go about it?

🙂
 
Last edited by a moderator:
One thing to try is to first just do your mix with nothing on the outputs, so you can then reimport it into a new project and treat that as a separate mastering project, rather than trying to do the two things together. This way you get your mix sounding how you want and can come back to it with fresh ears for any sweetening or loudening.

If I'm not sending something off for mastering there are a few things I might try.

EQ: take an existing track you like ina similar genre and use the match EQ plugin. You can apply +/- 100%. This is a wonderful tool, don't think of it as cheating (I know one or two pro mastering enginners who use it)

Loudness:

A multiband comnpressor /limiter will give you more loudness with less damage to the overall dynamics or unwanted pumping. I don't have much experience with Logic's, but I imagine the prestest are a great place to start.

I use Vintagewarmer (highly recommnded) , starting off with a medium compression setting, then push the input gain until it starts to sound too harsh or distorted, then back off a few dB. It's really surprising how much nice rich loudness without any of the overcompressed nasties you can achieve with this.

Come back the next morning with fresh ears and a few final adjustments generally do the trick.
 
Thanks heaps for the advice!

I'm tussling with the vintage warmer, looking at youtube video's and it looks great but my musics not as organic as it should be so not sure if i'd do it justice. From first hand use do you reckon its broad enough for the £93 price tag in regard to electronic or natural projects?

Definitely going to give everything you said a go,i've actually being using match eq to help resolve frequency clashes , especially when using orchestral instruments, never thought of matching the peaks of another song.

But with importing into a fresh track would you recommend bouncing each track down individually and/or changing the sample rate of the AIFF ?
Oh and should i uncheck normalise beforehand to preserve headroom for refining?

Again thanks alot for the advice
 
Leon Gilroy said:
But with importing into a fresh track would you recommend bouncing each track down individually and/or changing the sample rate of the AIFF ?
Oh and should i uncheck normalise beforehand to preserve headroom for refining?
Click to expand...

No, not individual track bounces. I'm talking about one file stereo final mixdown keeping at 24 bit and whatever your project sample rate is. No need to normalise. If you need a different sample rate for your fila file, then do it in the final (mastered) bounce. Likewise that is the time to dither to 16bit if it's a CD master.
 
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