Hi
So I have quite a lot unfinished projects on my octatrack. Had the chance to listen to a lot of them on a pretty funky kirsch pa and noticed that everything sounds not right.
How do you approach on mixing and mastering your tracks on the octatrack?
i play digitakt and octatrack inside a zoom h6. i use my ears and sometimes the level meter on the zoom, thatās it. Concerning the mastering, i feel that it canāt hurt to have a third ear, so i give it to a friend of mine whose job is masterisation.
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Do you use monitor speakers ?
Mixing: Levels, pan, eq, compressor are all available on the OT
Mastering: I leave that job to someone who knows what heās doing, and who has a the proper studio for that
I also tried Landr, which has surprisingly good results imo
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All good advice. Youāll be surprised how far you can get just at mixdown if you concentrate on your compression, eq and panning on each track of your final mix.
Mastering a poor mix will never get you the same results as good mix mastered well.
I preprocess (and develop) most samples on the computer, especially kicks, subs, percs, hihats. Plugins like Kush Pusher, UBK-1, Shaperbox, Fabfilter tools and proper limiters help a lot. -> goal: bring each element roughly in the right position and the transients into a proper range before loading it into the OT. You can then easily mix on the OT with itās filters etc, OT-processed kicks ftw (dist/srr->flt).
@mastering: I would not even try that on the OT. focus on the mix.
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Mixing on headphones isnāt the best way to do it. Monitors ideally but also consider the room that youāre inā¦ bad acoustics will make your mix sound even worse when you listen back elsewhere. That said headphones are good for AB comparisons. In fact for your final mix you want to listen back as many ways as you canā¦ laptop speakers, home hi fi, headphones etc. You might find those last few tweaks
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my mixes got substantially better after buying sonarworks reference 4. Not cheap but worth every penny. When I get into mixing mode I run my audio through a DAW with reference 4, Voxengo span (spectrum analyzer) and youlean (metering) to get some visuals on whatās happening. both very good and free plugins! If there are big issues, you could transfer a sample to a DAW, process, and transfer back into OT.
I think a good headphone getās you further than good monitors in a random not treated room.
especially if you know your headphonesā¦
And finally I have a master chain of Alesis microlimiter (for gentle compression and glue), Strymon Deco (very good tape saturation emulation), and if I have the space for it, sometimes AH (gentle warming and the EQ is handy if there is no sound engineerā¦)
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thatās my opinion too.
In my room, even the best monitors would get me too far I believe. I rely mostly on my headphones and Iām ok with my mixes
Donāt forget relative levels of each track!
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Agreed 
Good headphones, good monitors with good acoustic, no drugs!
If you donāt have one, buy a car to check your mix in it. 
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No wheels required. A modded oil barrel (for the extra industrial sound) does the job as well ā¦ 
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And if it doesnāt sound good in this car get another one 
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THIS may sound funny/weird but apart from using a set of near field monitors and 2 sets of headphones, this has helped a lot.
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Itās not weird at all! Iām sure a lot of folks (me included) do it!
That was the point I was trying to get across in my post. Same with laptop speakersā¦ how does the mix translate on lesser quality speakers? Same with the car ( but hopefully with better speakers ) 
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Iāve been meaning to help on this thread as Iām a mastering guy for quite a few Breakcore / Briandance / Idm people (including myself) but I donāt know where to start, so instead you guys could ask me specific questions and iāll answer them. What do you think ?
As a proof here is my mastering āportfolioā on Soundcloud :
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