Real World Presentations. 24/5/07
Sadly, work commitments robbed me of the chance to be present for the first day of mix presentations. Needless to say, I’ll be there next week with great enthusiasm! I have come up with a couple of Questions for Steve
Mostly regarding referencing… these have occurred to me in the process of preparing my mix project, and many of them have been prompted by various statements that Steve’s made throughout the semester. So hope you can help Steve!!

The more I think about reference tracks, the more questions I have!

Can you give us a list of some of the finest examples of reference tracks? (Including some genre specific ones)
And/or… can we assume that any song released by a major label can be presumed to be well mixed and of a high fidelity (and therefore suitable for use as a reference)?
I’m guessing that there must be certain songs that are universally regarded as great examples of fidelity… so what might they be?

When we’re engaged in referencing, should we focus our attention on material that has been released in the last 5 years?
Do the ‘loudness wars’ mean that older material is less useful for referencing, or is it still very applicable?
Does the current loudness phenomenon only effect songs at the mastering stage? It this is the case, I would presume that we can still use older material to reference the mix, but not the master.

Clipping.
Steve, you’ve shown us that recent commercial releases tend to have been maximised to the point of clipping – and have shown us the audio files in ProTools sessions to illustrate this. I am wondering:
• Is this kind of clipping achieved on the entire mix, or does it tend to be done only on certain tracks within the mix?
• Is it achieved by just upping the volume beyond 0dB digitally, or is it solely achieved via use of limiters? (I’m presuming it must be via limiters, but would like to know for sure!)
MP3’s for referencing.
Yes, yes I know that this is a first order audio faux par… but I’m still curious. Is it possible to use compressed files as references? Surely the levels of the relative frequencies will still be a reasonably accurate guide to how the track was mixed!?