quote:

Originally posted by DJ RANN I believe NI did this because they knew that your average dj is a complete muppet when it comes to gain staging and clipping, so -6dbfs is safe, and about as low as you can go before the level is too quiet. There's really no need to master a DJ mix; all the tracks are (allegedly) mastered so you're just mastering a master at that point. MSZ is right; for radio they slap mixes though things like the BBE unit and Opto compressors, but that as more becuase of tiny radio speakers and crappy headphones having to reproduce badly squished FM signals. With a DJ mix, the most critical things are a nice clean signal path and proper gain staging. you want your mix at hot as possible (as close to 0dbfs as possible) without any peaks clipping. If you mix to a lower value, then afterwards, try to raise the level (with or without compression) you're making your mix more noisy. Why? because the noisefloor is a set thing and recorded as part of the music. Therefore if you increase the volume after the fact, you're also multiplying the noisefloor by the same gain factor, whereas, if you record as loud as you can without clipping the noise floor remains low while the music is loud.

Thanks for the info Rann. Man, I wish the technical stuff came easier for me.

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Songwriter/artist and reluctant producer.

My Soundcloud

Heya,

Been a while.
It always depends on what you are doing with it.

In truth most if not all of the major mixers don't have the 0db actually at that point, it's often much higher, the same with Traktor etc. They know most DJs even in this day and age red line the shit out of mixers, even the pros.

Getting too obsessed with the mastering aspect is completely unnecessary in my world to be honest. You should be focusing more effort on what makes you NOT sound like everyone else, and I can assure you that this will not be the mastering.

Exactly what Loony4Clooney said, it should be edits and your EQ on the track that really define you. Most listeners will react to what you do to the music more than anything.

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https://www.mixcloud.com/Calvin_Karass/