For our ongoing series of episodes helping you with your home recording studios, our audio engineer from the before times, Don Thompson, joined us to talk about mixing and mastering tips.

We talked about:

• Our songwriting challenge for 2023 to write in an unusual mode
• Our previous episodes in this series:
  • Home Recording and Digital Audio Workstations – Part 1
  • DAW Tips Part 2: All about MIDI
  • All about MIDI 2.0 with Mike Kent
• Gain staging
• Phil recommends ADPTR AUDIO Streamliner – Plugin Alliance (plugin-alliance.com)
• Mix-bus processing, or top-down mixing
• Mixing vs Mastering – What’s The Difference? – TheRecordingRevolution.com
• Phil highly recommends the new SSL Bus Compressor (if you can get it on sale)
• Arrangement tools in your DAW
• The importance of the high-pass filter
• Referencing your tracks against commercial tracks – Phil recommends the ADPTR AUDIO Metric AB – Plugin Alliance (plugin-alliance.com)
• The debate between mastering your own tracks vs. getting a professional mastering engineer
• How To Master A Song In 10 Minutes – RecordingRevolution.com
• Neel recommends the YouLean Loudness Meter Plugin
• Dolby Atmos, and do we need 128 channels of audio?