I think -6dB is a pretty standard level where your mix should peak at for mastering. It depends on who is mastering it and their individual requirements though. I think I have seen some places that say -3db too. If you have it peaking at about 0db without clipping and are happy with your mix just pull down the master fader 6 db's and it should be fine.

Mastering Engineers want a stereo (2 track) mixdown of your song. They don't want the individual tracks and have to piece them together, that is for the mixing process and the mixing process will be concluded when you mix all your tracks down to the one stereo track. And yes it will sound quiet because you are peaking at -6db's and the final master will be peaking around 0 db's. They need it to be quieter so they have headroom to boost some eq's, add multiband compression, harmonic exciters, etc. When all those are done they'll slap a limiter on the end of the chain to bring the level up so it peaks at 0 db.

I had a quick question about Olav's tutorial. In the tutorial he uses a drum rack then uses separate MIDI tracks to send MIDI data to the pads in the drum rack. If you are going to have separate tracks for each drum instrument/sample wouldn't it save some screen space and be a little easier to mix if you just forgot the drum rack all together and just made a MIDI track for each drum hit with a simpler on it? Then you could control the volume levels for each drum in the Arrangement view as well as the Session view. You also would save time because you wouldn't have to route each track, and could just group all the simplers together. Hope that made sense.

Have you guys ever considered including a download of the project files with your tutorials? Or at least a zip with all of the samples used so we can follow along properly? Thanks! Colin

Hopefully you guys can get one in soon after they come out with Reason 5/Record 1.5