Yeah frequencies are not my strong suit lol. I actually did that car thing today. I played it in my car and it just sounded a lot more empty. Besides my chords though, I actually write the rest of my song with the chords playing in the background. I think a lot of my problems come from a lack of knowing how to master better haha. I'll mess around with a couple of things though and see if I can improve on any of it though.
I guess I'll post a screen shot of my project file once I have finished touching it up.
If it sounds empty then it might be some phasing issues. Chech the mix in mono before exporting it. Otherwise you might be compressing badly (or not at all?) A dynamic track in a car stereo gets really quiet. Do you run the mix through some kind of brickwall limiter? It's necessary to some degree if you want it to get louder.
A basic mastering chain should look like this:
1. EQ
2. Compression
3. Limiter
Mine looks like this:
First some mixing things I do which is taken in consideration when I master:
Drums routed to a EQ n compress, same with all my keys and bass but the keys and bass are then routed to another single channel that is slightly compressed with the fx channel. The sub bass goes directly to the master channel cause I want the most pure sine wave I can get.
Then all those are routed to the master channel which isn't actually the master channel its a seperate channel which I just routed everything to. I do this to be able to simply turn off my whole mix if I wanna reference it to some reference track I have.
In the "master channel" I have:
1. EQ
2. Multiband compressor and limiter (aka dynamics)
3. Sometimes I have a saturator here
4. Sometimes I have a stereo widener here
5. Brickwall limiter
6. Sometimes an post EQ
My RMS is around -8 dB in the breakdowns, -6 in the intros and outros and around -3 in the drop. The mix is always as loud (in RMS) in mono as it is in stereo.
Edited by Hinkik, 11 March 2015 - 01:20 PM.