In Summary

While no-one is pretending that mixing and mastering engineers’ time is up, the engineering musician can still find themselves in the driving seat. Armed with just two smart audio plugins we check out solutions for the self-op musician…

Going Deeper

A Brief History Of The Engineering Musician

Many musicians understand how record production is the essential vehicle for their music, and consequently have never been more involved in shaping the sound of their creations. While this can be traced back to creators in the 1960’s and 1970’s stealing a place at the console for mixdown, later involvement saw artists becoming producers and even studio owners themselves, further cementing their place in the chair. This century has seen a new self-op generation powered by the DAW with total creative and technical control at their fingertips.

While those working alone can hold their own on mix duties, the often misunderstood Mastering stage that comes afterwards can easily put a barrier between bouncing a mix and selling a song.

Bridging The Mixing And Mastering Gap

The artistic and technical considerations for finishing a mix and mastering a record are vast. For the engineering musician doing the whole thing themselves, a compromise must sometimes be employed that sees mixing and mastering take on a combined form.

Although musical balance is subjective, the ways to it can employ traditional tools as well as intelligent semi-automated ones to achieve clarity. Once that has been achieved, the final deliverables must (if nothing else) conform to the loudness requirements for upload to a given service, and be free of clipping.

Focusrite FAST Reveal and FAST Limiter

FAST Reveal

When it comes to achieving the right balance, the good old fader is the still the first port-of-call. From there onwards, traditional tools such as static EQ can be used to further dial-up sounds’ appeal, or to contrast, scoop, or otherwise make room for conflicting sounds..

Focusrite’s FAST Reveal takes this more prosaic EQ task much further. Taking the signal to be revealed as a sidechain input, this tool intelligently and dynamically sculpts the main target audio to make room for the audio that needs to cut through. Focusrite elaborate:

FAST Reveal learns the profile of your sound sources, then automatically processes your background (main) signal where it masks the foreground (sidechain) signal. The AI-powered smart:engine by Sonible identifies clashing frequencies and only ducks the ones causing issues. Other plugins duck a whole range of frequencies, not just the problematic ones. This can result in also losing desirable characteristics of your sound. Duck only the essential parts of your audio, so that your instruments shine through.

FAST Limiter

More utility than polish, limiting can serve two essential purposes for the self-op mastering musician: loudness and clip protection. By adjusting how hard the program hits a limiter, and turning up the result towards a defined ceiling, a song’s loudness can be regulated. The ceiling also keeps audio safely away from the 0dBFS red zone where clipping occurs. While these limiting basics will be well-known to pro engineers, producing musicians who find themselves in the chair need all the help they can get. Focusrite sum up FAST Limiter:

FAST Limiter helps you perfect your tracks and create release-ready music for Spotify and Apple Music. [Also includes] Reference Mastering functionality and graphic visualiser to make informed decisions with your mastering.

In the video we deploy FAST Reveal and FAST Limiter on a mix to make it ready for any service or physical product. We pipe a lead vocal into FAST Reveal for its AI processing to dynamically and intelligently scoop a synth to hold focus on the song’s top line. We then show how easy it is to achieve clip-free bounces that hit at just the right loudness for the destination.

Can Producing Deliverables Ever Be Fast?

The dedicated mix engineer will spend an entire career honing skills that let them present the music in its best possible light. Likewise, the art of mastering audio is a discipline all of its own that can lend an invaluable perspective and final technical quality check to the audio in question.

While those specialising in these areas cannot be replaced by code inside an audio plugin, their absence on some projects needs another solution. Intelligent tools such as those in the FAST family do indeed make quality mixes for the engineering musician a viable possibility.

A Word About This Article

As the Experts team considered how we could better help the community we thought that some of you are time poor and don’t have the time to read a long article or a watch a long video. In 2023 we are going to be trying out articles that have the fast takeaway right at the start and then an opportunity to go deeper if you wish. Let us know if you like this idea in the comments.