Watch your master bus
The single biggest place that affects your mixing work is the master bus. Of course! Because everything goes through it. But it means we have to watch it more closely than anything else. It can do things to your mix that nothing else can — for better and for worse.
On the plus side: master bus treatments can make your mix come alive in a way that nothing else can.
You can foster interactivity between the elements in your song, through the judicious use of compression and limiting.
You can tonally shape your entire mix, by using tape or tube treatments (or Tupe!), or other forms of saturation.
As mentioned previously on this list, I encourage setting up your master bus before you start working, so that you’re “working into” the treatments you’ve chosen. By raising elements’ volumes, you can push them harder into the compression and saturation and limiting, which can cause interactivity and increased tonal coloration.
But it’s not without limits! Something that happens to me a fair amount of the time is that I get to the point where I’m loving a mix, and I put it to bed for the night, and when I wake up and listen to it with fresh ears, I realize that I’ve gone a bit too far. Perhaps to the point where I’m overloading my master bus!
Pushing mix elements into the master bus can cause distortion, depending on what you have on there. To me, this is good; even when I’m doing a “clean” mix, I still want it to have some distortion. You might not hear it as distortion? It might come across more as liveliness, or excitement, or interest. Because those are side effects of distortion.
But, sometimes, you can go just a bit too far, especially with tired ears — and you might realize the next day that what you thought last night was euphonious excitement is actually over the line into just being straight-up crackly distortion.
Frankly, I’d rather err on this side? Mixes that I’ve hit the master bus too hard on tend to be gluey as hell (i.e., extremely cohesive), and that’s a good thing. And it’s much easier to rejigger the gain-staging a bit and back off things a little than it is to go the other direction.
“Too much excitement” is a great problem to have, even if sometimes it means you go a bit far. I’m the kind of person who would prefer to go a bit too far and have to reel it back; that feels to me like the mixing equivalent of leaving it all on the floor.
I think that it’s a good thing to have plugins on your master bus that can potentially distort — when you get your mix right up to the edge of that, it can impart an interest and cohesion that nothing else can. But keep an eye on it! Especially as you’re in the first stages of building your mix — it’s easy to turn things up too much and get out of control.
Aggressively but carefully — jamie