Hey friends. Question, so I have been mastering songs from the session musician community here in Brisbane Australia, and most of them have like ZERO headroom. Because its just for training purposes, I dont ask them to resend the mix with more headroom, I pull down the gain until I have -6db of headroom. So my question is, what are the CONS to pulling down gain on a final mix when beginning the mastering chain? The masters I have done compete with the final masters that have been sent with the final mix, and was wondering, if I can still get to the same quality by reducing gain and then boosting from there, what is the point of getting the client to send the mix with -6db, when I can just reduce gain and boost from there? To my ears (albeit only been studying here for 2 months) it still sounds great, but am I losing anything by following this process? @Dane Holmes @Jake Kodweis @Caleb Loveless

I have just released the first single from my debut album. I used the skills gained from @Dane Holmes @Jake Kodweis and @Caleb Loveless over the last 2 months to really hone in on the sound in my head. I cannot tell you how much this has helped me. Give it a spin if you'd like to hear the results of Mastering.com first hand.

Hey everyone Iv been part of the program for just under a month. Loving it. So I have gone back and re-mixed a tune from my upcoming album using the methods discussed in the latest Fix-The-Mix challenge. Here are some of my findings during the process. 1. Volume Mix Only - Turned everything down to negative infinity and then brought each fader up to unity gain and "normalised" the gain sit at between -10 & -20db until the whole mix was audible , starting with the drums and then bass ect until I could hear the instruments. 2. I then automated the volume for different parts of each track so the written parts flowed dynamically. 3. Only at this stage did I start placing EQ where needed (every track needed EQ lol), and placed a clipper on nearly EVERYTHING (buses and sends too) to control transients ect. It was at this stage that i seriously started noticing clarity of each instrument. Especially in the horn section. 4. Then I started playing with an Extreme Dynamic Processor called "the Monster" (which btw @Jake Kodweis is definitely not free 😂) on the drum sum stack but only used it at about 25% as this plugin is aptly named! Got some lovely colouration on the drums but boosted the Db of the entire drum sum stack, still I have it under control at around -12db to -10db. 5. I begin Spatial processing, send the drums to a bus where I put a long verb on at around 1.9ms. I dont think Jake demonstrated the "Bucket Method" with long and short verbs on drums because the drums he had in his session were "roomy" enough with the OH's and Room mic, hence why I only used a long verb. I do the same with the other instruments and at this stage everything is sounding great and the excitement is starting to build. 7. At this stage, all of my tracks are still between -10 and -20db, and the Master Out track is showing a total of around -6.6 consistently. Except for literally one small section which gets bumped up to -4.8 but then comes right back down to under -6db again for the rest of the tune. So my first query is how important (if at all) is it that we tame that one second part in the song that gets bumped by 2db. Please note I have gone back into the mix and tried clipping, limiting, and volume automating that part on ALL tracks to find the culprit and still cant seem to get it to not bump the DB up.

Which of these production techniques do you struggle with more? Answering this will help us focus our teaching for any future webinars for y'all! A) Compression B) EQ Comment below 👇👇👇