a professional approach to a production issue

so ive noticed that with some of my stuff, especially my older stuff, the synths become momentarily and subtly quieted by the presence of a kick or snare hit. has anyone noticed this with their music? i can think of several ways to get around this issue, as im sure you can, but im wondering what a professional audio man would do

any thoughts?

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i'd say you just need to use a compressor and limiter to mesh the frequencies and get the levels right.. not necessarily any specific software.

ya it's most likely just an issue of competing frequencies. Can't imagine it would be so noticeable though. I usually try to play w/ the synth timbres a bit in the mixing stage to get those kinds of things worked out.

change the kick sound or pitch it up or down to suit

sometime a kick with have a fast pitch sweep of some kind which can give it a more upfront sound and less will subtle it down a bit more in the background but as already mentioned its most likely competing frequencies cancelling or phasing each other out especially if you using static samples

Do you have a compressor/vintage warmer/limiter/finalizer or similar bullshit stuck on your main mix? If so, your professional approach to production is causing your problems.

  On 2/22/2011 at 10:27 AM, Gocab said:

Do you have a compressor/vintage warmer/limiter/finalizer or similar bullshit stuck on your main mix?

Aye, was gonna suggest just that. The fact that the audio levels are ducking when a kick or snare is triggered seems a big give-away. Either that or there's an inbuilt limiter to you DAW and your kicks are dominating the volume of the whole mix.

Hey, ET, I think my answer was a bit rude, here are my tips:

Give your mix lots of headroom and try to get the levels and eq for each individual track to sit right in the mix. Keep the audio levels well below -10db, stay in the green. Try listening on different speakers/headsets, when it sounds like gold on all of these, increase the volume on the main mix and slap some subtle compression at the end if you really feel the NEED for it to be loud... If you've got all the channels peaking out from the get go, fighting eachother and trying to force it into a decent mix by putting a compressor at the end stage youre fucked.

This is without having heard any of your music though, so maybe you've go this all figured out already. I'm just speculating.

Proper EQing your instruments can get you way more far, than you might think! :)

Try and crawl through this thread here and suck all the information out.

http://forum.watmm.com/topic/58913-masteringloudness/