This post will contain some healthy tips when it comes to mixing and mastering with Reason. It will be useful to people who record music with non professional equipment at home, trying to achieve result closer to the professional.
The minimum requirement when it comes to equipment is a set of decent speakers with decent bass response. For the subtleties shaping, the cheapest thing I can recommend is using good pair of headphones (however, if conflict arises, the speakers should have the final say). You need to spend time getting to know your sound devices by listening to commercial tracks similar to the ones you are planning to create.
If
you are like me and neither have good room acoustics, nor flat studio
monitors, you can at least get some decent flat response mic and
equalize your room by playing pink noise and then using spectrum
analyzers on two channels - one listening to your PC internally and one
to the signal coming from your mic. Try to make the second one`s
behavior the same as the first one with equalizers as much as possible.
If
you don`t have acoustically treated room that gives you correct
representation of the sub bass, one thing you can do is to take a little
bit of shortcut and touch the sub woofer cone, feeling the vibration of
the bass that way.
I divide a track into three elements - percussive mix (drums, snares, hi hats, etc...), melodic mix (leads, basses) and sub bass. In the beginning I mix the first two and when I make them sound somewhat decent together I add weight by the sub bass tones. The sub should not be either too quiet, nor too loud drowning the mix. It is a good idea to clear all the unnecessary frequencies from each sound, even those which you might not hear, but can see on a spectrum analyzer. Some elements require either boosting or reducing specific frequencies. Generally, when boosting frequencies, you create a boost with wider Q, in order for the result to sound more natural, while when cutting, you use thinner Q. If there is some tedious frequency which you want to remove, but having trouble finding, you can make a big boost with thin Q and begin searching where it is trough the spectrum and remove it completely when you find it.
In the global EQ on the mastering stage, you may have slight boosts in the low end and in the high end, but no more then 3db. When you use the stereo imager, you generally need to make lower frequencies more mono, while making the higher ones wider. Compression and limiting amount depend on the genre and taste of the producer - some prefer more dynamics in their tracks, while others prefer LOUDNESS. Generally, you need to boost no more then 6 db above 0 dB when you master the track. You also need to work gently and precisely and not to quicken things up.
You can also check how your track sound in mono if you have trouble deciding how loud some expanded parts of the mix should be, or just to have an idea how it would sound in such devices. You can also solo the frequencies above 200 Hz to have an idea how the track sound without the subs.
One way to clear up room in the melodic content of the song is to cut all the unnecessary frequencies which do not belong to the key scale of the song. Don`t do this on the percussive mix though, because those sounds are not supposed to be on the same key of the song necessarily.
Keys corresponding to frequencies chart.(Hz)
For example, if you use the C major scale which has all white keys, you don`t need the black keys sounding as prominent. Of course, do the cuts wisely - the mix should not sound unnatural.
If you have spare time, you can make yourself combinator patch containing EQ-s, set by a modifying rotary to have thin q cuts on all the minor keys corresponding frequencies. By moving the rotary, you can set the cuts` offset (the relations will remain the same) according to the major scale you are using and cut its unnecessary frequencies. You can create another one for the minor frequency relations as well.
That`s basically it. Listen to your track relative to other similar sounding commercial ones and try to make it sound as close as possible.
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