Yea you def right bout that Bridge. Regardless tho, in the box or out, you need to have the knowledge, experience and ear as you said. It's still a totally different aspect of audio engineering that is different than mixing. If you just go hard on compression and limiting without knowing what you are doing you can totally fuck everything up and destroy the dynamics. It's more than just increasing loudness...but regardless of method it's mastering that gives music that polished and crisp sound. Just dint want dude to think Onra bounces his joints out the mpc sounding like that.

I am personally really wonder where he gets his compression from? itb? outboard? at master stage?

If I had to guess i would say 95% of the extreme side-chain ducking you hear in electronic music is Ableton using the generic Compressor. That's how the kick is ducking the mix. On top of that I would say some in the box mastering with the tools I mentioned and possibly a tape saturator type plug.

Oh ya you can also get faux ducking when you slam the mix. If you have a big loud 808 to make room for all the dynamics its eating up the other stuff gets quieter. I really like this method personally.

now THATs exactly what I am doing. bridge, it is a shame that were so far apart - would love to jam out with you buddy.

at least we met on the net

Maybe a collab is in order.

sounds cool! taken to pm...

what's 'slam the mix'?

Strait body slam followed by elbow off the top rope

lol nah I think he just means crank a limiter or w/e, push the levels up high enough so that the dynamics of the kick drum eat up other sounds, giving a sort of ducking effect

yeah them all city cats get the tracks mastered. u definitely gotta turn in the tracks kinda low with head room to boost up.

But people often neglect the final mixing stage before it goes off to get mastered. You can't polish a turd.

they didnt really mention clarity of mixdown obviously u turn in tracks w/ best mixdown possible. but the question was about the compression mostly which u cant have on there too heavy when leaving with engineer. was speakin from experience from dealing with same engineer to get music master on the L.A. 10" series and what i told specifically .

Hey d, just that I got that right - so you turn in the tracks already squashed to death but not limited to the max? is that right? compress and sidechain as hell but leave your ozone at home. is that the message?

i didnt have as much compression on there i would normally and idk about sidechaining really. maybe onra did the same but im sure he didnt have it on there heavy b4 turning in. i learned from when i did cakeology ep on fatcity i had alot of compression on and the engineer was tellin me the science and i had to send some beats back and forth a few times so i just send stuff lower now. if i can find that email ill share . plus u master beats different for cd or digital than u would for vinyl.

Ive been struggling with the "master-ready" concept with my tracks. I use compression heavily to achieve my sound and often times when I am arranging, I will preview the track with the compressor over the whole mix and then turn it off as I mix and record. Without the compressor, my tracks would sound like complete dogshit, because I am adjusting the levels so that the final compressed version sounds great. I think I would have a tough time just sending the uncompressed version and trust that the engineer would know what sound I was shooting for (in fact I guarantee it).

However, I also understand that a mastering engineer also has to consider the overall sound of a record and the track volumes have to gel well with each other. Usually when I am finished completely with an individual track, I raise the volume just before 0 dB (just before clipping). If I am understanding what Dibia$e is talking about, perhaps go ahead and do compression/limiting (if that is your thing) but don't limit the track to the peak point? Maybe leave about 3 dB of headroom, so your peak would be
-3 dB instead of -0.1 dB so your engineer has a little room to play with?

If you read mixing/mastering books they caution about compressing a track before sending it to the engineer. I can see if this is true if you are mixing to a close approximation of how your sound would be, but what about if your sound is defined by heavy compression? I know this is the reason Madlib only submits "2 tracked" beats. If you notice, FlyLo is credited as the mixing engineer on all of his stuff probably due to the same thing.