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Mastering Directly in the Mix

I watched this masterclass with Sub Focus. I learnt so much and it got me thinking. He had his master track right on the mix master bus. It’s what I do, but I thought that was a no-no. But seeing a pro do that got me thinking.

Is there really a point to have separate project files for each production stage? Can’t I just do one project for the entire music production process?

Doing the ‘Right’ Thing

The accepted standard is to export all project stems to a new project for mixing once a demo is done. After that, you export the final mix for mastering in another project. There are two good reasons to do this. The first is that it spares processing power on your computer, since you work with audio files instead of live plugins when mixing and mastering. The second is a workflow advantage: it is useful to separate the production process in these stages to focus on different things at every stage.

Or… Just Do Your Thing

But thats’ just the thing. It’s not that practical to have to export stems to mix. Say you realise a sound isn’t exactly how you want at the source after all when mixing. Having the option of going back to the plugin to change that easily is great. Going back to another project just to move a knob on a plugin and then re-render is just a pain! Also, exporting stems takes up a hell of a lot of storage. Same for mastering: I find it extremely useful to hear how a mix will react to the mastering chain. It makes it easy to adapt individual tracks accordingly. In fact working like this helps me realise what is eating all the headroom in my master, and what is problematic in the mix.

So yes, I do the unorthodox thing of going through the entire process in just one project file. Computers right now are powerful enough to run many plugins at a time, and worst case I can always render a CPU hungry track. But that made me think: is there a disadvantage to this?

Comparison

A common thing I heard is mastering effects don’t sound as good when you put them on the master bus of a mix. Apparently because they are designed to work on a single mixdown track. So I decided to put this to the test. I took a project I am working on where mastering effects are applied directly to my mix on the master bus. I bypassed those effects, rendered the raw mix, and added it as a track in my project. I then re-enabled the mastering effects. This way, I could switch directly between my mixdown and the summed individual tracks in the project, all being routed through exactly the same mastering chain on my master bus. It sounded exactly the same.

My personal conclusion

Using Reaper as a DAW and IK Multimedia’s T-Racks for mastering, it did not change a thing whether the mastering chain was on the master mix bus or applied to mix down in a separate project. I’m not saying it’ll be the same for everyone. Try it for yourself. But as far as I’m concerned, the case is solved. There is no significant advantage to making separate projects for production stages, albeit workflow preferences, sharing projects when more than one studio is involved and saving processing power. On the other hand, there are major advantages to keeping things in one single project in my opinion: all-in-one projects that are easy to oversee, more flexible workflows, and a hell of a lot of storage space spared from not having to export stems.