If I’m prepping a patch for a proper release, most often I’ll record it as a multitrack and do a full mix on it before I go to the mastering phase of the process. I’m a producer at heart, and this is how I’m used to thinking. However, I also do a lot of mixing in the rack while I’m making a patch. I have dedicated EQ’s, compressors, delays, reverbs, and mixers that allow me to control frequencies, buss groups of sounds through different sound-shaping processes, and do a lot of what I’d normally do in my DAW right in my eurorack system. This means that sometimes I do most of the mixing stage in the rack, record it as a simple stereo track, give it a quick go-over when I’m starting the mastering process, and call it mixed. There’s something very satisfying about leaving as much as I can in the hardware domain as well, and sometimes stuff sounds great coming straight out of the rack so it just makes a lot more sense.

In this example, the patch I’ve recorded is some acid house nonsense and only consists of a few layers: kick and snare from two Basimilus Iteritas Alters, cymbals from Intellijel Plonk, an acid line from Loquelic Iteritas Percido, and some reverb from the Make Noise Erbe-Verb on top. I’ve mixed the percussion through my Erica Synths Drum Mixer and done some EQ and compression on my drums with a Happy Nerding Tritone and a WMD MSCL, and I’m ducking the LIP and the reverb to the kick with another MSCL. Everything is then summed in an Intellijel Mixup (simple and gets the job done) and then goes out to my soundcard and into Pro Tools. As I said, lots of mixing in the rack, and sometimes it would make more sense to do much of that in Pro Tools, but this time I liked how it sounded straight out of the rack. That said, there’s one thing I want to do right off the bat to make sure things are sounding okay: I want to check my noise floor. Most of the modules I’m using here are pretty quiet, and the noise floor of my whole recording system is relatively low, so I’m not too concerned about it being an issue. If it were, I’d put a noise gate on, and tune it to take out as much bad noise as I can without eliminating good stuff or causing sudden cuts. Then, it’s on to the first stage of the mastering process. I’m going to be doing all of this twice in two separate masters: once using Ozone 8 by Izotope, one of the most popular suites of mastering-oriented tools, and once using some of my personal favorite plugins by other companies. Remember, this is about concepts, not specific pieces of equipment, so try it out with the plugins you have at hand. I’ve tried literally hundreds of plugins for this sort of thing and they all do it a little differently and have their own uses, but again, the concepts stay the same.

Let’s master!

So, here we go. Let’s jump right in. It’s not scary, I promise. The water’s fine. I have a clean slate in my session, my full mix on an audio track: