3rd Wave mix of Patrick Talbot's 'Blue'

[pauli]

"volume match. Automatic gain compensation"? You totally lost me: please elaborate.

Prefix to my post: When I say "best practices," I don't mean to imply there's only one way to mix... I'm referring to general recommendations used by most audio engineers. I'm very sure and don't deny that other practices work better for different people, but I'll try and explain the reason for the "rules."

When you're equalizing and following best practices, you're doing a lot more cutting than boosting, and one of the end results of this is an overall reduction in level on the track being EQ'd.

Again, when following best practices, you'll have already worked up a rough balance consisting mainly of cleaning up the low end and setting levels before the more detailed EQ work comes into play... so tracks requiring more EQ will generally become quieter.

At this point, it can be tempting to simply turn up the faders to re-establish the originally set level, but a better method would be to use a model of EQ that allows you to re-establish the level with a make-up gain feature. The reason for this is that you can bypass the plugin and hear what the track sounded like prior to processing at the same level... in other words, a volume matched comparison. This is important because the brain perceives the frequency balance of louder signals differently and we can fool ourselves... so if we turn up the fader to compensate for the cuts and then bypass the effect, the bypassed version will be much louder, and you can see how that could lead to all sorts of havoc. Some plugins, such as Melda's MEqualizer have a feature that's effectively an automatic make-up gain, which is what I meant by automatic gain compensation. MEqualizer's is pretty good and can be used on individual tracks within a mix, but during mastering the slight distortions created by AGC are more audible and can unacceptably color a mix.

So basically that's all I was saying... if you were of the mind to polish the low end up a bit during mastering, an EQ with automatic gain compensation is good for quick A/B comparisons at a consistent level to see if you're on the right track, but it'd be a good idea to turn of the AGC feature and re-adjust the level manually for a final comparison to make sure distortion wasn't coloring your judgement.

Hopefully that's helpful? I like your mix but I can't shake the feeling it could be a bit cleaner on the bottom half.