First of all NO.

Your comparison to a pre master and a post master will be most flawed. A mix has nothing to do with the post mastering using the meters.

In otherwords, what you buy and what you hear in post production has little issue to what you do in the mix. Their are two different realums.

One realum is Original mix. Professional format. Not consumer frendly.

In your post in the other forum , I have other answers.

As far as a book, stick around here and practice and you will gain knowledge to become great at this art..I know you will.

Next realum is mastered works. Consumer friendly.

Your mix is not meant to be right for consumers, rather ready for a mastering engineer to take over and do corrections to put the master in consumer friendly territory.

Remember, it takes years to be at your top in mastering alone.

Two different realums.

Thanks again Bill.
Great point about comparing the premix to the final mastered.

My biggest challenge and hurdle right now is to understand how not to COMPRESS it too death prior to mastering.

Recording in the late 80s was a nightmare due to the lack of equipment for us and the dynamics that were all over between drums to vocals.

With the tools that we finally have and the wonderful knowledge and experience learned from places like this and pros like you, we can finally get a tight mix which is 80% more predictable and controllable and close to what we were shooting for..now I need to learn how to pull back.

Hopefully the 7 books that I just purchased and a group that I just formed with other local studio owners will help me get there.

THANKS!!!
Rich Wood

Originally posted by freaksarise:

My biggest challenge and hurdle right now is to understand how not to COMPRESS it too death prior to mastering.

After you've adjusted your compressors, just back off all of your thresholds and make- up-gains, and try not to squeeze more than 1db to 3db of gain reduction, as a slight rule.

I have a similar question on how to use the frequency analysis tools that I have on my system (Wavelab). I have asked this question several times in several different places, and never got an answer. Never! Not one that I don't understand, or one that was vague and uninformative, but *none*!!!

This kind of led me to believe that there is little use or benefit to these things (like the FET meters), but that is obviously not true, otherwise, they wouldn't be included and so prevalent (would they?).

I would love to hear some tips on how these things can be used to our benefit. What do they tell me that I can then use to improve my mixes and/or my masters?

1) How can they be used on individual tracks in my mix before I mix down to stereo?

2) How can they be used on my stereo mixdown to help with my mastering EQ?

except being fun to look at, they're generally muich slower and detailed as to providing information that my ears and speakers (in stereo and mono) doesn't get better. Maybe in an unfamilliar room with obviusly challenged acoustics they'd be goof at cmparing your stuff to cd's and what you're hearing in the room, to find out what freq's you're boosting/sucking to much of (because of the "bad" acoustics,)
Phase is better to "hear" than see. Anything that is not stictly mono is shoen as tending towards out-of-phase on phase meters; but our ears tell us if it's good out-of-phase or bad out-of-phase.

:D