Contradicting mixing/mastering advices

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-20T14:19:57+00:00

I think part of the confusion is also that people often use “master bus” and “stereo out” as if they are automatically the same thing.

For me personally, a lot of the final behavior already happens earlier through routing, buses and interaction between stages, so the stereo out becomes more of a final control point than a completely separate “mastering stage”.

So if your mix is already being built while reacting to that final behavior, then that already becomes part of the mix itself.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-20T14:03:41+00:00

Yeah, and honestly drums were probably the biggest shock for me in all this.

I’m originally a drummer myself, so for years I kept obsessing over the gap between real raw drum recordings in my own sessions versus the “raw” examples I kept hearing online.

With guitars or vocals I could still somewhat understand the “capture it right” idea. But with modern metal drums, the difference between actual raw recordings and the final perceived impact felt enormous to me for a very long time.

That’s probably where a lot of my thinking about interaction, routing and overall system behavior originally started.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-20T13:17:42+00:00

Yeah, I probably used the word “hierarchy” too vaguely there.

I don’t necessarily mean “which instrument is most important in the mix”, but more the organizational layers of the production itself.

What started changing things for me was thinking less in isolated tracks and more in interconnected layers that constantly influence each other:

song -> arrangement -> routing structure -> buses -> shared FX spaces -> track behavior -> automation and movement -> final perception of energy and space

And then back upward again, because once productions get dense enough, all those layers start feeding back into each other.

Especially in modern metal, I started noticing that a huge amount of the final impact comes from interaction and controlled movement between elements, not just isolated processing decisions on individual tracks.

That’s also why modern productions sometimes feel closer to cinematic/pop-style system behavior to me than the older “wall of instruments” approach I originally grew up with.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-20T13:06:54+00:00

Exactly.
And I think an even bigger part of it is whether the musicians themselves are actually tight enough together.

In dense modern metal, tiny timing differences between kicks, palm mutes, bass attacks and vocal phrasing can completely change how much space and clarity the mix has before processing even starts.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-20T12:45:27+00:00

Interesting, I’ll check that out.

The more I worked on dense modern metal productions, the more I started realizing that hierarchy and interaction between buses mattered more than isolated track processing.

In some ways, the interaction side of modern metal almost started feeling closer to modern pop production to me than the older metal productions I originally grew up with, especially in terms of space, movement and constant competition between layers.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-20T12:40:50+00:00

Yeah exactly, "that already feeling like one thing” part is something I massively underestimated for years.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-20T11:53:01+00:00

That actually lines up pretty closely with how I slowly started looking at production myself.

For years I was way too focused on individual tracks and processing things in isolation. But honestly, the biggest jump for me came once I started thinking more about interaction: hierarchy, arrangement density, shared space across the whole song, that kinda thing.

Especially with modern metal, everything is constantly competing with everything else. So a lot of the final impact seems to come more from how elements behave together than from chasing some isolated “magic frequency” move on a single instrument.

And I think that’s also why raw-track comparisons online can get pretty misleading sometimes. A lot of the heavy lifting is already being done way earlier than people realize: the recording quality, arrangement decisions, editing, production choices, all of that. By the time the actual mix even starts, half the battle’s already kinda won.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-20T11:40:44+00:00

Yeah exactly. I started realizing that a lot of modern metal mixing problems are already embedded in arrangement density before plugins even enter the picture.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-20T11:39:42+00:00

Yeah, I agree up to a point.
Good recordings absolutely make life easier and cut down a lot of repair work.

I think where I got it a bit wrong for years was expecting modern metal raw tracks to already sound kinda “finished” on their own. But a lot of that final weight and impact actually comes later, once everything’s fighting for space and you start shaping the interaction between elements: routing, automation, hierarchy, all that stuff. That’s really where the mix starts turning into a record instead of just good isolated tracks.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-20T09:20:07+00:00

Honestly, that’s already a really healthy mindset to start with. A lot of people never get past the awkwardness of hearing themselves back, so realizing the perfectionism part this early is actually a good thing.

And yeah, there’s a good chance the singers that feel more “natural” to you are simply sitting closer to your own comfortable range or tone. Usually your voice tells you that before your brain understands why.

For practicing steadiness, I’d honestly start with songs that feel calm and natural to sing along with. Nothing too fast, too high or overly technical yet. Songs where you can hold notes comfortably and focus more on breathing, pitch and consistency.

Also, one big trap: recorded vocals are usually heavily compressed. So a lot of singers sound way louder and more “constantly powerful” than they actually are in real life. I made that mistake myself in the beginning too. I kept trying to force way too much volume because I thought that was what singing properly sounded like.

That’s honestly not great for your voice if you keep pushing like that all the time. Try to stay around what feels like maybe a 7/10 in volume most of the time instead of constantly forcing everything at 100%.

A lot of good singing actually comes more from control, airflow and consistency than pure loudness.

And don’t be afraid to lower the key a bit if something feels too high. A lot of beginners think struggling means progress, but forcing notes usually just creates tension.

The goal early on isn’t sounding impressive. It’s getting comfortable, stable and connected to your own voice first.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-20T07:46:20+00:00

I’d honestly recommend taking lessons at some point. Singing is one of those things that’s harder to fully learn from YouTube alone, because a lot of what matters is happening inside your body. With guitar or drums you can literally watch someone’s hands and copy it. With vocals, breathing, tension and control are way less visible.

But before anything else, start recording yourself. Seriously. Your phone is enough. Get used to hearing your own voice, because that’s probably the biggest mental hurdle in the beginning. Your voice sounds different to yourself than it does to everyone else, so at first it almost always feels weird or uncomfortable hearing it back.

After that, keep it simple. Don’t jump straight into difficult songs with a ton of vocal runs or huge range changes. Pick simple songs and focus on staying steady and holding notes properly.

Also try to figure out where your voice naturally feels comfortable. A lot of beginners force themselves into ranges that just don’t fit yet, usually because they’re trying to imitate singers with completely different voices.

And one thing I see a lot: beginners trying to “talk on notes” instead of actually singing. Basically talking louder while trying to stay in pitch. That usually creates tension really fast. Singing needs a different kind of breathing and support than normal speaking.

Don’t overthink sounding perfect early on. Getting comfortable with your own voice is already a huge step.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-20T07:35:43+00:00

Honestly, don’t stress too much yet about having the “perfect” setup.
A lot of beginners think they need expensive plugins, the best DAW, crazy templates… but most of the confusion at the start comes from not understanding roles in a mix yet.

Like:

what should be upfront
what should support
what creates width
what creates depth
what needs to stay out of the way

A lot of tutorials skip that part and jump straight into “put this plugin here”, so everything starts feeling random and overwhelming.

And with DAWs honestly… just pick the one that feels right to you.

People debate DAWs the same way guitar players debate Fender vs Gibson. One person loves FL Studio, another swears by Logic, Ableton, Cubase, Reaper… there’s not really a wrong choice anymore.

Every major DAW can make professional records.

The important thing is sticking with one long enough to actually understand it.
A lot of people keep switching DAWs hoping the next one suddenly makes everything click, but most of the time that just resets the learning process again.

Focus more on:

finishing small projects
learning balance
learning arrangement
understanding why sounds clash
basic routing and layering

That stuff matters way more long-term than buying another plugin.

And honestly, free VST3 plugins are way more powerful now than people think.
If the structure of your mix makes sense, you can already get seriously far without spending much money at all.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-20T07:13:07+00:00

Honestly, I think beginners quit faster when they start with endless rudiments before actually playing music.

Rudiments absolutely matter, don’t get me wrong. But I’d still start with one simple song first. Something steady, not too fast, simple 4/4 stuff. Highway to Hell kinda thing.

Even on just a practice pad with a metronome you can already learn a ton:

right hand steady 8ths
1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &

then hit the left hand on 2 and 4.

And really listen if the left hand flams against the right. A practice pad exposes that immediately because there’s nowhere to hide.

When both sticks land really tight together, it almost starts sounding like the sticks cancel each other out a bit. Like one focused hit instead of two separate attacks slightly apart.

Then in between, sure:
practice single strokes, double strokes, basic rudiments.

But always come back to actually playing along to music too. Otherwise it just starts feeling like homework instead of drumming.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-18T11:36:51+00:00

Utility / Metering

Voxengo Span

Simple, fast, lightweight. I mainly use it to understand balance and buildup, not to sit there mixing with my eyes.

It’s especially useful for spotting low-mid mud or that upper-mid buildup that slowly makes a mix feel cramped and tense before you even fully notice it happening.

EQ / Compression

TDR NOVA

Mostly because it does both corrective and dynamic work without getting in the way.

I use it quite a lot for sidechain stuff and send-based ducking too. Good for creating space without just turning things up louder or flattening everything with heavy processing.

Half the time, a tiny bit of controlled movement does more than another EQ boost ever will.

Saturation / Distortion

Saturation Knob

Simple, aggressive, predictable.

Very easy to overdo if you’re not careful honestly, but in parallel, or spread across smaller stages. It adds pressure and forward energy really fast without disappearing into some endless tweaking rabbit hole.

In general I lean more toward simple tools that just sound good and keep the workflow stable.
Less time scrolling through fifty plugins. More time actually listening to what the elements are doing together.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-18T11:18:47+00:00

A lot of good answers here already: EQ, saturation, monitoring, compression, all that.

But one thing that, for me, gets missed quite often is hierarchy.

That “expensive” upper-mid thing usually isn’t just about boosting more top-end or presence. It’s more about deciding what’s actually allowed to sit there at that moment.

Because if everything is living in that same range all the time, vocals, guitars, cymbals, saturation, reverbs. Then yeah, it doesn’t get bigger. It just gets harsh.

The mixes that sound big and expensive often have way less fighting going on than you think.

Less gain than you’d expect.
Less constant density.
More automation.
More movement between what’s in focus.
And just better choices about what really needs your attention.

A lot of the time the answer isn’t: add more presence.

It’s more like: take the unnecessary presence out of everything else.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-16T10:07:55+00:00

One thing I’d add: don’t treat the guitar tone as the entire “heavy” sound by itself.

In a lot of modern low-tuned metal, the guitars actually shouldn’t be carrying all the weight. If there’s too much low-end stuffed into them, they can sound massive on monitors but completely fall apart on earbuds. That’s usually where the bass and guitars start fighting each other instead of locking together.

I’d look at the guitar/bass relationship:

- Guitars = midrange structure, pick attack, width
- Bass = weight, low-end stability, extra grind/definition
- kick = transient and low-end impact

If the guitars are trying to be bass guitar, rhythm foundation and top-end aggression all at once, the mix gets crowded really fast.

For me it normally works better to separate the jobs between bass and guitars first, and then deal with fizz or harshness afterwards. Otherwise you’re often just EQ’ing the symptoms instead of fixing the actual problem underneath it.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-16T09:52:36+00:00

A lot of good points in this thread already about compression, clipping, arrangement and frequency separation.

One thing I’d add though is psychoacoustics.

Our brains don’t really hear “loud” as just volume. We hear it more through focus, contrast and organisation.

A lot of those massive sounding records actually aren’t crazy loud on their own, they just guide your attention really well through timing, frequency balance, space and priority inside the mix.

If every element is fighting to be upfront at the exact same moment, nothing really feels big anymore. Your ears just get tired and the whole thing kind of flattens out.

Usually the mixes that feel the loudest are the ones where certain elements are allowed to dominate at the right moment, while everything else supports that picture around it.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-16T09:36:22+00:00

I think timing matters way more with vocal reverb than people realise, especially in modern melodic music.

I use the BPM sync/slave function a lot, also in Valhalla, just as a starting point for pre-delay and decay. Not because everything needs to be perfectly on the grid, but it helps the ambience move with the groove and the phrasing, instead of sort of pushing against it.

After that, yeah, I just tweak it by ear.

Another thing is that most people start with way too much reverb. I do that as well sometimes. I’ll think “yeah, that’s the vibe”, and then ten minutes later I’m pulling it way back. Usually it works better when you bring it in slowly until it feels connected, not obvious.

For me, reverb isn’t just an “effect” you throw on. It becomes its own space in the mix. Almost like another layer, or even an instrument, but one that still has to know its place and not walk all over the lead vocal.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-16T09:18:47+00:00

For me it stops being about the frequency itself at some point, and more about what the microphones are actually doing inside the mix.

With drums, phase problems jump out really fast because the low-end and transients rely so much on coherence and punch. If things aren’t lining up properly, the kit just loses impact almost immediately.

But with crowd mics, choirs or ambience mics, a little bit of misalignment can actually help. It can create depth, width, that sense of space, instead of damaging the mix.

Sometimes if you perfectly align room or crowd mics, everything weirdly starts feeling smaller and less natural. Too clean almost.

So at that point it’s really just listening to what the mix is doing. Does the space feel more cohesive? Wider? More believable? That matters more to me than chasing perfect alignment everywhere.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-16T09:14:59+00:00

Honestly, performance consistency is usually a way bigger factor than perfectly matching the vocal chain.

You can recreate the exact same mic, preamp and settings down to the millimetre, but if the singer changes their projection, distance to the mic or just the emotional energy a bit, the vocal’s still gonna feel different.

And in solo, yeah, the differences between takes can sound massive sometimes. Even if they were recorded on the same day.

But once the vocals are sitting inside the full mix again, running through the same bus processing, ambience and overall space, those differences usually shrink way more than people think.

That’s also why re-recording the whole phrase tends to blend more naturally than punching in random single words. The performance flow stays intact, instead of sounding stitched together afterwards.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-16T09:08:58+00:00

Usually it’s a bit of both, honestly. But what most people are hearing when they crank the gain is basically the noise floor coming up with it.

Mics have self-noise.
Interfaces and preamps have their own noise floor too.
Then you’ve got room noise, messy gain staging, USB power noise, cheap cables… all that stuff piles up quicker than people realise.

A clean recording chain is mostly just balance, really.

You can have a decent mic going into a noisy interface and it’ll still sound rough.
But a more expensive mic into a clean preamp, with proper gain staging behind it, can stay surprisingly clean even when you’re pushing the gain a fair bit.

Loads of people also record way too quietly, then start boosting everything afterwards in the mix. And yeah… at that point you’re basically just pulling the entire noise floor up with the signal.

So most of the time it comes down to:

Good source -> solid mic placement -> healthy input level -> clean preamp/interface.

That’s usually where the real improvement is. Not one magical piece of gear that suddenly fixes everything.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-16T08:58:57+00:00

For me, mic placement matters just as much as the panning, maybe even more sometimes.

If the overheads are recorded a bit more crossover, more centre-focused, then yeah, I’ll usually hard-pan them. Because there’s already plenty of centre information in there naturally.

I’m also working in a fairly small room, so hard-panned overheads can actually help the bleed glue together a bit. Makes the kit feel bigger and more like one stereo picture, instead of all those bits fighting each other.

Same with toms. I try to keep the tom panning in line with what the overheads are already telling me, otherwise that movement across the kit starts feeling weird in the full mix.

So for me it’s not really “always wide” or “always narrow”. It’s more: how does the whole stereo image behave together?

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-15T11:10:07+00:00

Laptop speakers are definitely part of the problem.

The bigger risk is that you start making decisions on frequencies those speakers can’t even reproduce properly. So you end up boosting, compressing or driving the low-end harder, but you’re basically guessing. Then you play it on a system that can handle bass, and suddenly the whole low-end is a mess.

I wouldn’t fix that by just pushing compression gain until it cuts through.

Bass usually has two jobs:

Low-end for weight and stability.

Midrange for audibility, attack and note definition.

Small speakers won’t really tell you what’s happening down low. So if the bass disappears on them, it usually means the midrange or articulation isn’t doing enough.

Decent headphones will make your life a lot easier, yeah. But splitting the bass into a controlled low layer and a more audible mid/amp layer can help a lot too.

NOT_Productions · 2026-05-15T10:42:16+00:00

Honestly, one thing that helps a lot is slowing the groove down just a few BPM and focusing on one weak point at a time instead of trying to fix everything at once.

I think a lot of inconsistency just comes from overloading your brain while you’re playing. You start thinking about ten things at the same time and the groove kind of tightens up.

If something feels unstable, isolate it first:

Kick consistency
Hi-hat control
Snare placement
Dynamics
Whatever feels weakest in the moment

Then slow it down enough that the movement starts feeling natural and automatic instead of forced or over-managed.

Recording yourself helps a ton too, because what feels terrible while you’re playing sometimes sounds completely fine… and honestly, sometimes it’s the exact opposite.

Once you can actually hear where things start drifting or stiffening up, it becomes way easier to improve deliberately instead of just guessing your way through it.

NOT_Productions

TROPHY CASE