Reply To: Mastering chain

[Kaleb TreacyParticipant]

Hey guys! I was going to ask this down the track but this topic seems like the perfect place to ask. How do you go about level matching when say you're doing an EP or album? I'm all for my tracks to go out to a proper engineer for commercial mastering when it happens but sometimes I get asked to do it as the budget isn't there. I tend to master the tracks individually from each other in there own session but when I bring the songs together, I can hear some of them are a little louder then others even though they're all hitting -4db. Would it be alright to do a basic mix at the end to level them up or is that a mistake? By basic mix, I mean 5 stereo tracks, a song on each and tweaking the faders.

Cheers,
Kaleb