Here's the cypher! Thanks to everyone who participated! Lots of great submissions. This thread will be open for 48 hours so everyone can have a chance to take a listen and comment, compliment, or (constructively!!!) critique your work or someone else's, or otherwise just talk about how it went for you and what you learned/what you'll do differently next time/etc. Don't forget to post in the NEW thread if you want to join the next cypher, and please - submit your final tracks in a lossless format - AIFF or WAV, ideally 32-bit or 24-bit and rendered at 44.1 kHz.


In Order:

Mike Conn
Mussar
AnnieTP
myda
tom
eidolon
Lydian

I think you can go to school and devote yourself to music. In the most extreme example, you can go to school for a degree in music or enroll in a music school like Icon. You can also minor in music while majoring in something else that you're passionate about. You can find a stable but fulfilling career path, and spend your spare time working on music. If you're young, I encourage that you consider something like this. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life when I graduated high school. I'm only just now discovering it, and I'm in my mid twenties.

What you want to do for the rest of your life might change, and odds are that it'll will - and it will change more than once. The hard part is making sure that no matter what, you're going towards things that inspire you and make you feel worthwhile. Besides, it's not like you have to JUST do one thing with your life. Having just one label people can slap on you is convenient but boring. Be multifaceted instead.

I'm not making assumptions, because EQ can go before that stuff and it can go after that stuff. As far as "having a master chain on while mixing" is concerned, that's just an assumption on your part. Assuming that people will have their music mastered at all is what I'm doing. If you don't want your song to have to go through a bunch of remasters or get put out sounding not like you anticipated, I think that's probably not a horribly assumption to make.

Your volume level is actually the single most important aspect of your entire mixdown. Before equalization, before compression, before stereo imaging and harmonic excitement and multiband processing and all that crazy hoodoo voodoo stuff people slap on their chain to make it sound "professional", your mixdown relies upon the level of the different signals.

The reason people rarely mess with volume faders after setting them is because volume determines depth - the louder a signal, the closer it is perceived. the quieter a signal, the further away or "down in the mix" it is perceived. So in the traditional mixing mindset, you want to achieve the best sound possible with the volume faders alone before even touching the pan pots or any post processing. From there you can pan the sounds to give each signal more space in the stereo field, then start post processing with EQ and compression and whatnot only as is needed by the sound and within the context of the track.

EQ and compression can change the overall amount of level of the tracks they're placed on, but that is why they have output gain controls - to trim or boost as necessary to return you to the volume of the signal before it was processed. So if you're doing some surgical EQ and cutting out like 2.5-3 dB of information, instead of boosting the whole track that much you can just add a couple of dB of makeup gain within the EQ.

I don't get the logic. What difference does it make whether you're increasing or reducing volume?

Think about it. I have this vocal I wanna post process. I'm gonna be compressing it, putting saturation on it, sending it through a reverb, and in the end it's all gonna get squashed through my mastering chain. If I start adding frequencies that were not originally present, what do you think might happen when it starts going through all these effects?


Of course, there are no hard and fast rules - if it sounds better to boost instead of cut, do it! As long as you are aware of what is happening and want that to happen, there's no problem.

shitposting bots?

what's next, memes?

If you're not happy with it, go spend another day working on it! There's no need to finish early if you don't have to. If you're not happy with the samples I choose, you're more than welcome to go find the samples you want us to use on Sunday.

And if you read the OP, the instructions are clear:

private message me with your track before 11:59 PM PST on Saturday for your submission to count.

We don't want to spoil it for the other people - I'm gonna post them all on Sunday morning, so please remove the link and private message it to me.

then why the heck did you comment?

you just did the equivalent of walking into a discussion about the best way to throw a football and going "i hate football."