# How much mixing and mastering do you do in orchestral music?



## Peter M. (Mar 1, 2014)

So I've heard of guys who spend weeks mixing and mastering their orchestral tracks, and then I've heard of other guys that just use reverb, a bit of eq and a limiter in their tracks. What is your process?


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## bryla (Mar 1, 2014)

I'm just mixing some orchestral pieces right now. The things I do tend to be:

1: EQ - Low cutting close mics mostly to minimize bleed from other instruments. 

2: Panning close mics and balancing with the Decca tree. It's also mostly the close mics that go to the reverb. I hate the sound of close mics bare so I try to give them with stereo delays as well. Finding the right balance between close/decca and reverb

3: Mixing in samples

4: changing my mind the next day.

On this occasion I have a mastering engineer (Holger Lagerfeldt to be specific). Mostly because his ears are better than mine and his skills are awesome.
If I master myself I use a combination of Ozone and FabFilter plug-ins to do some M/S equalizing and maybe a tad of reverb and excitement.


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## maclaine (Mar 1, 2014)

After working out the composition, I always bounce out each instrument as dry as possible. Then I mix the stems as if they were recorded live. 

All the libraries I use have natural stage panning, so I don't touch that. The one exception being a piano, which sometimes I want off to the left, sometimes I want front and center. 

Occasionally, I'll need to put some light compression on a solo instrument that has a wide dynamic range, though I try to get it as transparent as possible.

If, within the stem of a certain instrument, the dynamics seem out of balance, I'll push up or pull down the volume on various sections where needed.

Everything goes to a submix that has convolution reverb first for early reflections to get everything sounding like it's in the same room, a bit of EQ to tame the lowest of the low end, then a multi-band compressor to boost the bass frequencies on big hits or low, heavy passages. The multi-band compressor also pushes down the honky mids a bit, and opens up the high frequencies. The submix has an aux send to a tail reverb set to something like a cathedral or large hall.

On the master bus, there's an EQ set to get rid of any additional buildup below 20-40 Hz, depending on the track, and another multi-band compressor that very lightly opens up the highs a bit more after the reverb.

Bounce out the track, take it into Sound Forge for some final processing. Since the stuff I do is going into a video game and will potentially be pushed into the background behind lots of sound effects, I have to unfortunately say goodbye to a lot of dynamic range, so I do some final mastering using a combination of Sound Forge's Wave Hammer, and Normalizing functions.

Typing it all out, it seems like a bit of overkill, but along the entire chain, I try to keep the processing as light as possible while still having the desired effect. This is after a year or more of trial and error, and each mix I do gets better in my opinion.


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## AC986 (Mar 2, 2014)

Peter M. @ Sat Mar 01 said:


> So I've heard of guys who spend weeks mixing and mastering their orchestral tracks, and then I've heard of other guys that just use reverb, a bit of eq and a limiter in their tracks. What is your process?



The second one only I don't use the Limiter.


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## Stiltzkin (Mar 2, 2014)

I think it largely depends on your template really.

If you have a lot of different libraries, it's going to take more time to get it to blend nicely so some more mixing is required.

If you use (for example) a full spitfire template you can pretty much get a good sound straight away with a little research. Based on the info at http://scoringfilm.net/ (a great blog btw) you can basically do a blind mix of full close mics and all decca mics at -4 or so and it will at least sound reasonably good - an algo reverb with 150ms delay at -15db or so with a tail of 1.8-2.1ms and that's basically the recording settings summed up. Then all that's left is some EQ work (I high pass everything inside kontakt so I don't have to waste time redoing it later, since it's something that almost always comes in at the same level each time) just picking what you want fattened up in the mix, giving some instruments their character etc. (Note: this is extremely generic but it's a good starting point)

Mastering wise for that setup I'd then just use maybe a bit of stereo widener on the master, a tiny bit of maximer just to give it a bit of a kick and maybe a final EQ over the whole mix to glue it a bit.

But when you have other libraries to glue together, you have to put more work in to the mix, the mastering section is generally always the same though, by the time it gets to the master it should all sound like it's in the same hall anyway, hence a lot of people are using the same libraries to keep it easier on themselves.


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## germancomponist (Mar 2, 2014)

bryla @ Sat Mar 01 said:


> 4: changing my mind the next day.



+1


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## AC986 (Mar 2, 2014)

Stiltzkin @ Sun Mar 02 said:


> But when you have other libraries to glue together, you have to put more work in to the mix, the mastering section is generally always the same though, by the time it gets to the master it should all sound like it's in the same hall anyway, hence a lot of people are using the same libraries to keep it easier on themselves.



Definitely. Guy Mitchelmore's recent video on balancing one's template was very good. I don't have a template myself, but I can see how useful the balancing technique must be.


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## Chris Lollis (Mar 3, 2014)

Yes! Guys video was incredible! I don't have as many libraries that need managing but for the ones I do have, watching Guys video on template balancing has began a bit of a revolution in my studio...
Still building templates as we speak lol.
It opened my eyes to the fact that alot of the time I've spent and gonna spend on mixing could affectively be cut down by a proper template balance.
I haven't gotten as far getting ALL of my libs template sonically balanced but for what I have it's even helping in the tracking and recording department. Much less build up on the master and my sub groups are no longer screaming for mercy..


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## Neifion (Mar 3, 2014)

Once I have everything to my liking on the monitors I throw the song on as many devices as possible. My current gauntlet:

Cheap $20 headphones
Medium-grade stereo headphones
Those crappy little white iPod earbuds
The iPod speaker itself
The TV
Desktop speakers

I take brief notes: maybe 2-3 things that I don't like about each test, and I go back to the mix and work on those issues. It's time consuming, but it works for me!


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## impressions (Mar 3, 2014)

the only time i feel like I'm really improving the mix is when i export all stems and mix them separately. 
but my mixes are terrible. in the awful degree. thanks for asking though.


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## Richard Bowling (Mar 4, 2014)

germancomponist @ Sun Mar 02 said:


> bryla @ Sat Mar 01 said:
> 
> 
> > 4: changing my mind the next day.
> ...





impressions @ Tue Mar 04 said:


> the only time i feel like I'm really improving the mix is when i export all stems and mix them separately.



I tend to prefer to mix stems - but this requires that you have the time to.... It's not always possible to mix stems so your template is critical.


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