Mastering And Preparing A DJ Mix For

Delivery
Mo Volans on Oct 28, 2013 in DJ & Live Performance 1 comments

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So, your mixes sound great live, but how can you ensure they stand out amongst professional
releases and promo CDs? Mo Volans delivers a useful tutorial for all DJs.
Lets say youve just completed a perfect mix full of your latest and greatest tunes and you want
to use it as a promo tool. If you plan to send your mix out, it really needs to be at its best.
With this in mind, lets take a look at some things you do to ensure your mix is firing on all
cylinders. Well cover manual editing, some basic mastering methods and essential conversion
techniques.

The Raw Recording

Once youve recorded your mix, you should be left with a file. It might be WAV, it maybe AIFF,
this is not hugely important. What is important however is that its in a resolution and bit depth
of at least 16 bit / 44.1 kHz and is not distorted beyond the point of recognition.
So whether you are recording your mix live or in the studio, try to ensure you have plenty of
headroom and are hitting the disk at a decent resolution. I would suggest 24 bit / 44.1 kHz as this
will give us the most flexibility later.
In this case, the recording was done correctly but you can see that the level is actually a little
low. You can either raise the level by a specific amount or normalize it. Luckily, there was no
obvious noise in the recording so this wasnt amplified with the boost.

Our original DJ Mix recording at a very low level.

Once boosted, you should start to get a decent overview of the file. Make sure there are no
obvious faults, or dropouts at this point. It wont hurt to give the whole thing a listen. Once you
are happy... You can move on and start to think about some processing.

The same mix with straightforward normalization applied.

Manual Editing And Basic Dynamics

The first thing to sort here is the overall level of the mix. This really is key to be honest. Its quite
likely that there are some pretty serious peaks and troughs, especially where you have mixed a
couple of tracks or added effects on the fly.
We will be using some dynamics processing later but for reasons that will become clear, this
simply cant be overdone. Before we apply any plug-ins, I like to manually reduce the really
obvious peaks. This can be done using automation in your DAW or by careful selection in a
dedicated audio editor.

Manually reducing peaks.

As long as you pick sensible points to apply your fades and you dont more than a 1-2db at a
time these changes should be transparent. The aim of the game here is to equalize the overall
level of the mix and reduce its dynamic range so that any processors used later are not
overloaded. You can generally get a good idea if you are done during a quick visual scan of the
whole file.

The manually edited file is re-normalized.

Once you have sorted any peaks and checked the whole thing flows nicely, you can normalize
again if you like to ensure you are squeezing as much level out of the recording as possible.

Go Easy On The Processing

When deciding what processing to apply to a DJ mix, you only have to remember one thing: all
of these tunes have already been mastered. You may have applied extra effects in the mix and
changed some levels but they have most likely all been fed through a chain of pretty intense
processing.
With this thought fresh in your head, it should become clear there is only one real way to
approach this, very carefully. I tend to use a bus compressor but with just a tiny bit of gain
reduction. 1-2db of reduction should be enough to capture any wayward peaks that were missed
during the manual edit.

Some VERY light compression keeps things in check.

Other than this, I wouldnt advise you to apply any special effects, enhancers or anything else
that might overly color your sound. The only thing I might use myself is a touch of equalization,
well look at this next.

Corrective EQ And Light Limiting

If you have recorded from vinyl or you used an analog signal path somewhere in your chain, you
might experience a slight lack of high frequency at some point. It might be the case that some of
the productions you have used were badly encoded, whatever the cause some mild EQ can go a
long way to sorting out potential issues here.
I would suggest grabbing a linear phase EQ plug-in to retain absolute transparency and applying
only a few dB of correction in the problem areas. An analyzer can help you to quickly home in
on these sections.

A touch of analysis, some low cut and very small amount of high end boost.

If you find its only a specific track or section of your mix that needs attention here you can use
automation to introduce the corrective EQ. Alternatively, a more drastic option is to chop out the
dull track, move it to another audio channel and treat it there.

Finish up with a dB or two of limiting to avoid overs.

Getting The Export Right

Finally, youll need to get your mix into a format that is right for delivery. If you plan to burn to
CD or want to play the mix out in a live situation, then you are probably better to opt for an
uncompressed format. If you are burning to CD, you will need to export your mix in 16 bit/44.1
and 24 bit exports can be used to play out directly from a computer.

High resolution export in action.

Remember that if you are moving from a higher resolution to a lower one, you will need to use
dithering. This should only be applied once in the entire process and preferably at the end, so
now is the time to do it.
If you are sending your mix out to a large audience online, or need to email a link to a specific
person, then you will need a compressed format. You have a few to choose from here but of
course MP3 is still the most popular. 320 kbit/s is probably the best choice as its the highest bit
rate MP3 will support. Lower resolutions such as 192 kbit/s will reduce file size and are often
used for online playback.

MP3 export taking place.

Hopefully this has given you some pointers and will be some use to you next time you are
preparing your latest mix for delivery. Happy mixing!