Dealing with old stereo breaks

[This started as a Facebook post responding to someone wondering about their old break sounding good in stereo but crap in mono. Various suggestions were made, including ‘turn the M up’ and ‘delay one channel because Haas’. Because this comes up a lot, and because I’m very possibly still drunk, I wrote some stuff and […]

VVV quick, vvv important point

Hey all, absolutely busier than than busiest thing you can think of. Not least cos I’m getting married next week. But in the midst of working as much as humanly possible, this occurred to me; Mixing into a fixed / certain master buss chain does NOT help make your mixes more consistent. In fact it […]

Check Your Mix, Don’t Wreck Your Mix Pt. 2: The Wreckoning

This post is a follow up / addendum to a post from 2018 (WTF?!). If you haven’t, I’d suggest reading that first. https://bobmaccsblog.wordpress.com/2018/04/17/mix-buss-compression-limiting-check-your-mix-dont-wreck-your-mix/ I thought I’d continue from that article with a similar terrible title. So what?! Since posting that article I’ve shared it with a few producers/customers, with the intention of helping them out. […]

Interview with Matt Davis

Matt Davis falls into a very specific category for me. I’ve never met him, and never heard any of his work, but I have the highest possible respect for him. Some people just know WTF is what, and Matt knows WTF is what. That we share a love of picking up heavy objects would also […]

Chasing LUFS

Written in response to a fairly standard ‘the numbers say X, can you make it louder?’ email. I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while and it finally burst out. I didn’t direct this at the customer though, poor fella would have wondered wtf was going on… Firstly, in my experience RMS is […]

Quick Bettermaker Mastering Compressor review

Typed this on Gear….. space, thought I might as well bung it here. Lots happening here peeps, sorry for silence. More stuff soon, honest. ********* Ok, I wanted to write more about this comp but here we go. I’ve had it for about 6 months I think. It’s growing on me. The sound: In BM […]

GOLY Dynamic shelving equaliser review

Hey hey everybody 🙂 This review will start with the now-standard apology to the manufacturer, for the lengthy delay in writing this review. I’ll follow that with the same reason I’ve given before: I’ve been too busy using the thing to write about it. So, I’m sorry Gustav, but it’s your own fault. I’ll follow […]

Bob Olhsson quote

Just saw this courtesy of the Gearslutz mastering forum. He puts it much better than I ever have. And you can’t argue with Bob O, I don’t care who you are. ‘Mastering is creatively frustrating. We can work our “miracles” but they’ll never sound as good as getting the basic integrity of the mix right […]

Mix headroom for the 86 billionth time

Response on a friend’s Facebook page, essentially asking “how much headroom is good for dance music?”. Short answer – it doesn’t matter. Just stay under 0dBFS and don’t worry about it. Export at 24-bit, or at 32-bit floating point. I can explain the difference if you need but it doesn’t really matter if you’re under […]

Limiting / clipping things in the mix

“… Do you think it’s degrading my sound quality to be limiting my groups in the mix down process? To be honest, I never use compressors, only limiters if I’m trying to control sharp peaks or potentially smash a snare or clean sound. I just feel like there’s something I’m doing wrong, or some technique […]