Pedaling Prince Mix: Voelund - Comfort Lives in Belief

[Pedaling Prince]

In general, I go as gently as possible on all processing, using only the minimum EQ, automation and compression necessary to get everything to blend smoothly, and under no circumstances do I EVER apply processing or compression of ANY kind at the mastering stage; my goal is to preserve 100% of the dynamics of the original recording.

Do you have some kind of mastering stage? I don't. When I'm happy with mixing I just put a limiter to remove the headroom adn to bring up the volume level a little bit. I check that some random peaks here and there are cut 2-3 dB. But that's not mastering.

Well, if you don't define that as "mastering" then I guess you could say I don't. However, myself I consider "mastering" to be ANY polishing, no matter how subtle, done to the finished mixdown; your process above, therefore, would fit MY definition of "mastering."

That being said, before I describe my process, it may surprise you that, in keeping with my "principle of least treatment," I keep my software fairly simple as well; my only mixing tools are GrarageBand and Audacity.

So. My mastering process. Once I complete the mixdown from GarageBand I import it into Audacity, normalize it to 0 dBFS then trim the excess off the beginning and end. Also, if the song requires a fadeout and/or fadein and I'm having trouble getting it to sound right in GarageBand I will also do this at the mastering stage as well.

But that's it. Aside from pushing the volume to the maximum it'll go without ANY clipping I do no compression, EQ or any other kind of processing whatsoever to get it "louder" the way many engineers do; I consider those tools to be something that should only be used on individual tracks in a mix, not to master a completed mixdown.