Mixing and Mastering

At the start of this project, the original aim was to have the album professionally mixed and mastered, however, financial limitations mean this is no longer the direction I plan to go in.

Instead, I have been studying various methods to achieve these results myself, the first of which is VU mixing. This is done by placing a VU meter on the stereo out, soloing your kick and bringing it to -3dB, then bringing in your bass and bringing the stereo levels up to 0dB. It is then easy to mix the rest of your sounds around this framework. ("VU Meter and Mixing Levels - Sonimus", n.d.)

The second stage of mixing my tracks was to go back and make sure there was no prevalent clipping, as many of the tracks featured cut-up samples with frequencies that clashed with other elements, as well as small pops from some of the vinyl samples. There were two methods I used to negate these effects, the first was the noise reduction feature on audacity. By taking a sample of the noise my vinyl player created before a track started I was able to reduce these sounds later on in the sample. The second method was to manually identify where pops were audible and to either EQ or manually cut out these sections. ("8 Tips for Mixing Rap and Hip-Hop", n.d.)

The third exploration I looked into was that of limiting within music. My thought here was that I wanted to avoid aggressive limiting and compression as much as possible, as many of the samples used would have already been mastered to some degree. When it comes to the 'loudness war' ("'Dynamic Range' & The Loudness War", n.d.) I decided to go for a better dynamic range instead of increased volume.

References

'Dynamic Range' & The Loudness War. Retrieved 14 May 2020, from https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/dynamic-range-loudness-war

8 Tips for Mixing Rap and Hip-Hop. Retrieved 14 May 2020, from https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/8-tips-for-mixing-rap-and-hip-hop.html

VU Meter and Mixing Levels - Sonimus. Retrieved 14 May 2020, from https://sonimus.com/blog/tutorials/vu-meter-and-mixing-levels.html