hello all. so i have these fulled mixed tracks that are not professionally mastered or compressed. they're rap songs and they have very hard metronomes (snares?), and in order to hear the song well you have to turn them up quite a bit (like a lot of late 80's early 90's music).

i've been using this program by wave arts called finalplug (http://wavearts.com/products/plugins/finalplug/) and it's been doing a great job compressing the song so the metronomes are not as loud and instruments sound 'clearer'. so it sounds great with headphones but when i pop it in my home stereo, the vocals are hard to hear because the bass seems to dominate most of the song due to the compression. this may be due to the stereo, but i'm not sure. i know i am not over-compressing (only using three decibels - which seems to be the magic number before distortion). is this just something that comes with compressing a fully mixed track? that makes sense since compressing brings everything closer together. anyway, i was wondering if there was anyway to get around this. i've tried compressing on a curve with toned down mids with an equalizer, but that just takes away from the fidelity of the track. any info or help would be appreciated.

3dB of compression on a plugin like final plug should not be causing problems like this. It is more likely that your headphones and/or stereo are not giving an accurate representation of the mix. For example, if your head phones lack bass, you will add more bass in the mix and when you get it to your stereo it will sound too bassy, or if your headphones have a good balance but your stereo is too bassy, then it will sound too bassy on your stereo as well.

The best thing to do is listen to it on a lot of different systems and get an idea of how it sounds, and then remix the track so that it sounds pretty good an all of them.

thanks for your wisdom iain. i'll make sure to do that - it must be my stereo supplying the extra bass... i think most home stereos are built to do that for some reason.

Right! That's why the pros use expensive studio monitors with flat frequency response. From what I've read, final-mixing and mastering should not be done with headphones*. And as Iain suggested, the pros often double-check the mix with ear buds, and perhaps with a boombox, and sometimes in their car too!

The raw mix shouldn't sound that bad, and compression shouldn't make it worse! You can't fix a 'bad mix" with mastering... Mastering (including compression) is supposed to make it sound better! If compression makes it sound worse, don't do it! (A lot of us consider over-compression to be evil, but to the "average listener", compression improves the sound.)

Also, some compression is often applied to the individual channels/tracks before mixing. The mixing enginner might even use some compression on the stereo-mix... So the mastering engineer usually gets a file that's already got some compression.

I agree! 3dB of compression shouldn't cause "distortion". You may need to adjust the other compressor settings (threshold, make-up gain, attack, decay, etc.)

Of course, it depends on what you're starting out with. 3dB "off the top" of a real snare is nothing! In your case, some compression may have already been applied during mixing, and if the snare was sampled it's pre-compressed.

How do commercial rap CDs sound on this system? Most pros keep some good-sounding "reference music" handy. If your mix/master has more bass than your reference track, you've probably over-done the bass. After you've listened to a track several times (during mixing or mastering) you "loose your reference", so it can be helpful to check your work against a known-good recording every once in a while.


Mastering engineers often apply some EQ, and they somtimes use multiband compression. It's a matter of tweaking to get the best sound. And, I understand it's failry common practice to use some EQ after compression, because compression can change the "tonal balance". (The last step is probably a bit more compression/limiting... Just to make sure it's as LOUD as possible!)

A good home stereo (or a good car stereo) should be flat too. It should have the ability to accurately reproduce the bass that's in the recording. But, some people prefer "boomy" bass, and it's easier (and cheaper) to get strong boomy bass (one note bass) than it is to get strong accurate bass.



* I read Recording Magazine, and every month readers send-in their tapes for evaluation & comment. Sometimes they say "We can tell you mixed with headphones."