Contemplations on the Art of Music Production

Mixing for Vinyl: Don’t Fall for These Traps

If your track comes in from the vinyl press sounding like shit, what would be your first reaction? Bad mastering, right? Wrong answer geeza.. Guess what – I’m blaming it on you. Mixing for vinyl ain’t your everyday walk in the park. Looks like I’ve got a bit of explaining to do while you glimpse at the mirror.

The truth is that in most such cases there were problems with the premaster that prevented it from being cut as it is. The mastering engineer had no choice but to compromise the sound and make the necessary changes in order to be able to cut it in the first place.

 

Mixing for Vinyl – The Art of Noise

So I hit the Masterpiece studios in London recently with Loxy to master and cut our album “Burning Shadows” (out now on Exit Records).

Let us make one thing clear from the beginning: these guys know what they’re doing. The list of their clients is impressive. Besides just about every respectable label in DNB, they have worked with artists/bands such as: Deadmau5, Enter Shikari, Lady Gaga, Skrillex, Laurent Garnier, Eric Prydz, Noel Gallagher… You get the picture.

I never actually attended a vinyl cutting session before, even though my music has been released on vinyl for more than a decade now.

It was a wicked chance for me to go in and do some heavy learning. And so I did – thanks to drum&bass mastering legend Beau Thomas who was happy to answer all my questions and share his wisdom (I hereby want to recommend his services to anyone. I know I will be reaching for him again in the future).

Vinyl mastering is an artform of it’s own. The last vinyl cutting lathes were produced in the early 80’s. It’s quite amazing that we are still running this equipment if you think how much the world has changed in the past 30 years.

Appreciation aside – while the cutting lathes are truly magnificient machines and properly maintained stand the test of time beautifully… The format itself was not made to reproduce the kind of loud and often distorted music we have today.

Vinyl is an analogue format and sounds great. But with that come some physical limitations. Digital formats like CD and MP3 can reproduce anything where as vinyl is more unforgiving.

This is where your skills in mixing as well as the mastering engineers skills come to play. You have to make sure the track is engineered and mixed in a way that allows the mastering engineer to cut it without changing it too much.

The mastering guy is not going to run the risk of damaging the cutting equipment. He will play safe and make the necessary changes on your track if it’s not good enough to cut as it is.

It is important to understand that the sound of your track will be compromised if there are problems with the mixdown.

Next up let’s find out more about the main problems areas when mixing for vinyl. Read on to learn how to avoid the biggest traps and make your mixdowns perfect for a vinyl cut.

 

Put your highs on a leash

Loud high frequency sounds are dangerous to the cutting equipment. They may also not play correctly due to physical limitations of the system. You MUST understand this when mixing for vinyl. Treble distorts before bass on vinyl. The stylys has problems tracking extreme high frequency content.

Two common things that cause mastering engineers headache are loud fx noises/sweeps and vocals with loud sibilants. Tame the highs on those. De-ess vocals if needed. If the sibilants are too loud the mastering engineer might have to chuck a de-esser on top of the entire track. He won’t enjoy doing that, and you won’t like it either, but it might happen.

If you have loud high pass filtering going on, it’s best to counter the high pass filter with a lowpass one that starts to kill some of the highest frequencies as the band narrows. This way you won’t end up with your filtered drums replaced by distorted white noise on the record. Check out the Brainworx BX_Cleansweep V2. It’s a free plugin that comes very useful in situations like that.

Tracks with tons of loud high frequency content or fixed high frequency sounds may have to be cut quieter or heavily EQ’d. It is not very uncommon for mastering engineers to encounter tracks that are simply impossible to cut on vinyl because of this.

There was a track on our album with this exact problem – loud drums with a constant high frequency distortion running all the way through. Beau went in an extra mile and we were quite surprised to be able to salvage the situation and achieve a good cut in the end. We were in luck though as it could have gone either way. We were already considering our options in case we had to drop that track. A valuable lesson learned there.

 

Every groove is different

The distance around a groove on the inside of a 12″ record is about half of an outside groove. As we know the record plays at a fixed speed. What does this mean? It means that the outside grooves of a record can store more information per second and thus sound better. In digital terms you could think of this as gradually losing resolution as the record plays on.

You will start to lose treble and definition as the needle progresses towards the inside of the record. The inside is also more prone to distortion. This is why most engineers prefer to keep the grooves as narrow as possible, allowing to cut on the outside of the record only, leaving the poorer quality inside untouched. With really long tracks or records with several tracks on the same side this may not be possible of course.

If you are putting several tracks on the same side, you should consider the sequence. If you want maximum sound quality, you should put the hottest and loudest tracks on the outer side and leave the inner grooves for the tracks with less high end.

Keep the track lenght reasonable. The shorter the track, the louder it can be pressed and the better it will sound. I would recommend a maximum track lenght of 7 minutes for drum&bass or dubstep music.

 

Center the bass

Make the bass mono when mixing for vinyl. Always and absolutely. With bass I don’t only mean the bassline. I mean all low frequencies – the bassline, the low end of your drums, percussion, any bassy effects, etc. No panning, no stereo effects. Make it mono.

With stereo bass content the needle has to do big vertical movements which easily results in skips. Also the record will have to be cut quieter.

While mixing, use m/s monitoring and a spectrum analyzer to spot any low frequency stereo content. Put special attention to any percussive sounds, bass stabs, bass guitar and such.

Arrangement wise, the place where a record is most likely to skip is the drop. The needle is put to a test as the record quickly switches from a soft part to full mayhem. Watch out for any stereo percussions and such in the drop.

Making everything under 100Hz mono should be pretty safe. There is not much to lose anyway in doing this – our ears are very poor in picking up directional information from low frequency sounds. Everything below of about 70Hz is completely non-directional to us.

 

Mixing for Vinyl: Quick Tips

  • Watch the distortion. Don’t get me wrong… I love it dirty. Just be careful as digital distortion easily becomes more apparent when transferred to vinyl.
  • Don’t limit the mixdowns too much. While limiting makes the average level of a digital track louder, it will cause lots of trouble at vinyl mastering. A heavily limited premaster will actually cause your track to be cut quieter in most cases. Let mastering engineer worry about loudness.
  • Don’t let anything get out of phase. Even if you think it sounds cool. Check the mix in mono – out of phase material will cause cancellation of frequencies. Steer clear of psychoacoustic stereo enhancers. Phasing results in cancellation of frequencies. The cutting equipment is unable to reproduce that. Out of phase material makes the cutting head try to pull in two different directions at the same time. The result is a the result is a the result is a [nudge] skip.
  • You can always provide alternatives. In doubt on how a particular mixdown translates to vinyl? Send two versions. Let the mastering engineer decide. Just make sure to let him know what the deal is.
  • Have the track titles, running order and other documentation ready. The mastering engineer will need this info so that the pressing plant will get everything right.

 

Final Words

So there you have it… Mixing for vinyl in a nutshell. With these points in mind you should be able to roll out good mixdowns and make your tunes translate well to vinyl. Maybe you’ll spare the mastering engineers from some grey hair too and everyone wins.

Beau, if you’re reading this, thanks again for the advice!


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21 responses to “Mixing for Vinyl: Don’t Fall for These Traps”

  1. Wooda Avatar
    Wooda

    Hi, thanks for the tips, i have a question. If you have a bass sound for example that has sub-bass (i.e bass under 90ish hz) plus other frequencies that are above 90ish hz, how would you go about making just the sub part mono while keeping the higher parts stereo. Would you split the sound into two separate channels, one for sub and one for mids?

    1. Resound Avatar

      Yeah splitting the frequencies of the sound across different channels works well. It also gives you further control across the different frequency regions – for example you can apply distortion or other effects on the highs without ruining the sub.

      There are also plugins such as Sonalksis Stereotools and BX_Control that can make the sound mono below a set frequency. The plugins I’ve mentioned here will cost you though, I am yet to encounter a free plugin with this functionality… Someone should get on the case.

      1. Chris Avatar
        Chris

        More and more EQ‘s are sporting M/S processing nowadays, which is super handy in situations like this. You can, for instance, just cut the side signal of say eveything below 100hz and leave the mono signal untouched.
        Cubase Pro for instance, comes with a EQ that does M/S processing.

        1. Ilpo Kärkkäinen Avatar
          Ilpo Kärkkäinen

          Yup! It has become quite common recently. Thanks Chris.

    2. George simpson Avatar
      George simpson

      Many use a mid-side eq. And just hi pass the sides.

      There are other enhancer plugins with negative ‘width’ and cutoff frequency too. MEqualizer, Ozone. A lot do the same. Some may pull the sides into the mid rather than remove them- reaper has RBJ stereo plugin. Depends on the arrangement. Imho e. G. orachestral stuff (strings on pop sometimes) you want to keep everything and yet it will have bass all over the spectrum.

  2. bluflake Avatar
    bluflake

    Check out Tone Projects’ plugin Basslane. It does that, and it’s free. 🙂

    http://www.toneprojects.com/products/plug-ins/basslane/

    1. Resound Avatar

      Thanks for sharing, PC users should definitely grab that one.

  3. Malte Ess Avatar

    Users of the DAW “Reason” can easily use the M Class Stereo Imager to set bass freq’s to mono under a given value

  4. cuntflaps Avatar
    cuntflaps

    this “mono your bass” is absolute balony….

    1. A Garso Avatar
      A Garso

      This would be easier to take if you offered us a “why” to your blanket statement (and spelled bologna correctly).

    2. justin james Avatar
      justin james

      “With stereo bass content the needle has to do big vertical movements which easily results in skips. Also the record will have to be cut quieter” what about that is ‘balony’?

  5. Max Cherry Avatar
    Max Cherry

    What is it that causes problems with high end? Also is there some sort of guideline, eq-wise that can be referenced for mixing for vinyl? Such as ebu standard or something.

    1. Tyler Avatar
      Tyler

      This is a total guess, but check out the RIAA curve. When cut, records have the high frequencies boosted really loud and the low frequencies made quieter so they can fit more music on the record. This is why you need a phono preamp to listen to your turntable; it undoes the EQ curve applied when the record was cut. This would mean that high frequency sounds in your track will effectively be much louder than low frequency sounds from the cutting head’s point of view. Again, this is pure speculation on my part.

      1. Dan Mills Avatar
        Dan Mills

        The issue for replay (Which is usually the limiting factor surprisingly) is that the playback stylus has a certain radius, which implies a limit on the radius of curvature of the groove wall that can be tracked.
        For a given linear velocity (Depends on playback speed and diameter in the obvious way), this imposes a limit on the maximum level that can be tracked without a huge increase in distortion.

        That there is also a power dissipation issue in the cutter at high frequency is true, but the limit is basically mechanical/geometric on the playback side.

        Remember the output of the inverse RIAA cure is effectively velocity, you have to integrate to get displacement which is why the bass still occupies more area then the treble in spite of the massive boost thru the IRIAA network (It works out to a factor of about 8 between 20Hz and 2kHz IIRC).

        On the mono bass thing, the tool is called an eliptical equaliser, and if you try this with an M/S plugin it will work but you will only get a 6dB slope no matter how hard you highpass S unless you also put an allpass in the M channel having half the number of poles. Lacking that the phase shift screws you. The term is ‘Eliptical equaliser’ on acount of how it makes the goinometer display look.

        Significant out of phase content is an interesting gotcha even well away from the bass, as it reduces playing time alsmost as much as lound content does, large S components force a deeper cut (you cannot have the cutter lift off the disk or it wont track on playback) and that forces a wider grove (Grooves have 45 degree walls) increasing spacing if you wish to retain a reasonable land size.

        Large out of phase low frequencies for a quieter cut because you absolutely do NOT want to cut so deep that the cutter hits the alumimum substrate, at best it sounds awful, at worst the cutter stylus needs replacement which is a hundred bucks or so and an hour or so of faffing about.

        The AES has two anthologies of papers on disk recording that are worth having, and Larry Boden published an interesting collection of papers and diagrams, good collection, purely crap binding…..

        1. Ilpo Kärkkäinen Avatar
          Ilpo Kärkkäinen

          Hey Dan,

          Thank you for the insightful message! Loved reading it.

          1. Dan Mills Avatar
            Dan Mills

            I am (gradually, sparre time project) working on building a modern record cutting lathe mostly as an excersize in precision machining and kinematics.

            I am curious to see if ~40 years of tech improvements lets me build a competative machine using off the shelf servo drives and (mostly) laser cut plate materials for a lot less then a VMS70 would wind up costing me.

            I am in two minds abut the signal chain, part of me says, fuck it DSP for the win, just write the damn processing in software, which is easy, obvious, accurate, and will be looked at seriously askance by the vinyl crowd, and part of me says design real analog doings (Expensive, somewhat fiddly), your thoughts?

          2. Ilpo Kärkkäinen Avatar
            Ilpo Kärkkäinen

            Very interesting. I’m by no means very knowledgeable on those things. But I feel like there may be something going on in analog domain that we still don’t completely understand that makes analog music sound good to us.

            My thoughts were amplified as I recently participated in a listening session at this Finnish full analog studio called Astia Studio. We did a lot of A/B between vinyl and digital sound. It was quite clear there was more emotion present when listening to the same songs from vinyl. It wasn’t even close to a scientific test though, it was more of a discussion event. In any case, the guy who runs the studio (Anssi Kippo) has actually managed to convince some physics guys at the LUT University to start a research project on the topic. You might be interested to read this blog writing of his: https://astiastudio.fi/vinyl-records-and-how-to-improve-enjoying-music/

            Anssi would probably be happy to talk to you if you wanted to discuss it further, too.

  6. justin james Avatar
    justin james

    I would recommend a maximum track lenght

  7. Machine 23 Avatar

    Is the overal loudness important when providing digital audio files for cutting vinyl at all? Will the cutting engineer always cut the loudest possible version to vinyl, regarding lenght of the side, peak and rms levels of the audio? I hope I was clear enough with the question 🙂
    Thanx

    1. Ilpo Kärkkäinen Avatar
      Ilpo Kärkkäinen

      In my experience having sufficient dynamic range is more important when delivering premasters for mastering. But it’s also style-dependent. In some styles the loudness is a part of the sound which is reflected in the premasters. It would be best to get in touch with the engineer before to make sure you are on the same page about things.

  8. Jez Butler Avatar
    Jez Butler

    Thanks – very useful! As a rule of thumb, to roll the low end off, where should I start, e.g. 60hz to be achieve -30dB by 20hz? And how steep the curve… 24 dB per octave This is something I’ve never seen answered with. Ditto top end: start at 10 khz…? Some typical figures and diagrams would be incredibly useful if possible. Cheers!

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