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llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Thu Feb 05, 2026 12:39 pm Ok I got one - is it possible to slightly raise the level of section of a song relative to another in mastering or would that be a disaster?

Not talking about not making the chorus bump in a mix - just wondering how it would work to clean up the other side of dynamics where you’ve got a bunch of stuff going on.

Maybe with stems? Falls back to mixing engineer IMO. You could try some very creative dynamic eq? Dunno about other weird magic. I DID do a thing the other day where a guy had a 2 track live recording and wanted the vocals above the drums a little so I ran it through Izotope RX's stem separater thing and added the vocal stem back into the dry 2 track record. Worked amazingly well, and with a tiny short reverb slap added to the vocal stem it was hard to tell it was faked.

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Thu Feb 05, 2026 12:39 pm Ok I got one - is it possible to slightly raise the level of section of a song relative to another in mastering or would that be a disaster?

Not talking about not making the chorus bump in a mix - just wondering how it would work to clean up the other side of dynamics where you’ve got a bunch of stuff going on.

Not sure I understand your second sentence there, but turning a section up/down is no problem at all in mastering. Not something I do regularly but I've certainly done it plenty.

Sometimes a track will sound fine on its own, but once in context with the whole record, its intro might feel loud/quiet coming out of the song before it. So just adjust the intro a couple db and do a long crossfade (to hide the volume change) into the body of the track

Sometimes if the mix is real compressed, it can work really well to just make some little 1db moves either way, turn the choruses up or the verses down.

I did a track the other day where the breakdown after the second chorus just felt screaming loud, I pulled that back a couple db.

There was another one that was kind of an epic, bunch of different sections, started super quiet got real loud at the end. And it was actually too dynamic overall so I did a couple different volume boosts, either at section changes or with long crossfades between them. Which compressed the dynamic range without actually compressing anything, worked great for that track.

Thanks, well in this case its a single 30 minute long track (guess vinyl is out) - maybe just short of album length - with noisy outros, quiet sections, loud sections, etc. and then of course a& b parts within those sections. And then its not a bunch of solid black line gained out guitar, its based on nylon and steel string acoustic, wurli, electric bass, pedal steel, cleanish electric etc. Real plucky.

So when faders get moved for each section its been a little tricky to plan a semi consistent volume relative to the other parts, not just the sections that occur right before or after. But want to retain dynamics but not to the point where the listener getting up and changing the volume in a quiet room is part of the listening experience.

So, not talking about using mastering to orchestrate all that, just adjust up or down here or there - sounds like yes

Absolutely yes, no problem. Sounds like a cool project!

For that sort of thing (working on my own at the moment), the best way to really know if you've got the overall dynamics right is to listen to it front to back. Which is of course time consuming! Needle dropping around is a good quick way to see how different sections relate. I do that on every record, when I feel like I'm done I skip around real quick from song to song and ideally it should all seem like one big song.