Hot answers tagged mastering
25
When mixing, you are making sure that the stuff you recorded sounds perfect on your studio monitors inside your quiet control room. When mastering, you are making sure that the mix that sounds perfect on your studio monitors, is going to sound decent in your home, your car at route 66, the crappy loudspeakers that came with your PC etc.
When mastering, ...
12
There are a few misconceptions here. Normalization, in the most basic sense, raises the gain of the ENTIRE track to a nominal level. What you are trying to do with normalization is maximize signal. The relative dynamics of the track are not changed. There are actually two types of normalization, but the most common is peak normalization, where the loudest ...
7
There are two questions here that I think should be addressed separately:
Question 1: "is this a bad method of practice?"
As I understand it, the reason it's considered "better" to compress individual tracks and not the master bus is because you have a finer degree of control, especially in today's digital world where you could instance a compressor on ...
7
I am a lot more dynamic with the control room volume fader. Unless you're producing music for a very specific audience, then you need to make sure the mix is properly balanced at both high and low levels and everything in between.
One of many great lessons I picked on in mixing workshops years ago, was to frequently turn down the music to the barely ...
7
The lissajous shape is generated by graphing the left signal on one axis against the right signal on the other axis. So consider a few scenarios for a sine wave tone.
Mono signal: L is always equal to R, so the point (L, R) is always on the x=y line, so the plot is a straight line. Vectorscopes usually rotate the axes 45 degrees, so x=y goes straight up ...
7
On the microphone front, you will find that a lot of the better quality microphones have XLR connectors and many require phantom power. Because of this, you can't simply buy a good microphone and plug it straight into your computer without an good audio interface as well. However, for screencasting, where you generally require just one microphone, you can ...
6
The important thing about such sounds is that the sources aren't coherent, neither the deviations in rythm and frequency nor the actual audio phases and amplitudes follow any predictable relationships. That's unlike the extra signals normal chorus/delay/phaser effects add, where the modulation is usually at best periodic and the relation very simple, only ...
6
Well, there area lot of things that can affect this. #1 is what you're listening to your mixes on. I wouldn't say it matters, so long as the "what" is not just one thing.
On ALL testing speakers, you want to use something as a reference. Some professional recording that you think does a good job of accomplishing what you want, and then your tracks.
On ...
6
You should use an expander when an outright gate will sound really unnatural (and that is not the desire). For example, if your vocalist has a really distracting breathing sound when idle, an expander will reduce that without completely eliminating the attendant ambiance that makes a track sound coherent (which is why it's important to record a minute or ...
5
The process you're describing is broadly known as mixing, and there are a few basic parts to it:
Setting volume levels appropriately using track levels and equalizers
Moving the sounds left and right in the stereo field (known as panning)
Moving the sounds "forward" and "backward" in the mix, generally done using a reverberation effect
Getting a good ...
5
I assume you mean bit-errors on the physical medium. The CD format uses a technology called cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon code (CIRC), which adds checksums and redundant data to allow detection and correction of low-level bit errors. Usually, this is handled transparently by the CD player's firmware. Upon detecting errors, the firmware will first try to ...
4
If your music is lacking dynamic range, it could be a case of having an issue at mixdown, not necessarily something that can be fixed during mastering.
Consider mastering as taking your already well-produced track and making very subtle changes to get it ready for all of the audio devices you can think of - your computer, the car stereo, an ipod, so on.
To ...
4
Mark,
While "sims" in your comments is correct that it does depend on the source material, and I've never met two professional mastering engineers with the same signal paths, I will give a shot at trying to answer your question based on my own mastering work.
Generally my chain ends up in blocks, in the following order, though any block may be in or out at ...
4
I currently do a few podcast and have some input on your workflow.
1) You have your high-pass and low-pass terminology backwards. A high-pass filter cuts low frequencies, a low-pass filter cuts high frequencies. Not a big deal, just remember that "low-pass" is only letting the lows pass, and blocking (filtering) everything else.
11 kHz is far, far too ...
3
There is Peak normalization and Loudness normalization, not sure which one this is, you might want to check the manual.
Peak normalization simply changes the volume of the entire song, this will also amplify quiet stuff too. If you do it on a classical symphony track you will hear the sniffs and AC of the concert hall louder.
Loudness normalization will ...
3
From the individuals I know in this space, I understand there is an element of side-chaining which is utilised in many high end games, but apparently an equally important aspect is in composing your score to include multiple paths:
I haven't got the right terminology for this, but effectively what they do is use side-chaining to reduce the volume of the ...
3
Yes and yes! Unless you know that your music will be played on equipment that can reproduce those subsonic vibrations, you should remove them. Otherwise, they are just eating up space in your mix.
It can also help to remove audible low frequencies. It seems counterintuitive, but a kick drum often sounds better if you cut out some of the lower frequencies. ...
3
Obviously, you need to find the correct frequencies – what gives definition to the kick is actually something like 6000 Hz rather than the bass frequencies. But the most important thing is, trivially, that the kick is simply loud enough. It is the only instrument you should allow to reach 0 dB. Don't try to get your mix loud by giving too much power to the ...
3
Have you tried simply pulling the threshold right down on the Ozone Loudness Maximiser? See my recent answer on loudness wars though for why this might not be a good idea.
2
Whilst being true that you shouldn't limit yourself to one or another level, there is still a level you should be able to come back to. You should have a read through Equal loudness countour curves, or phons.
This are some curves developed some time ago (became known as Fletcher-Munson) that shows how messed up our hearing really is. It shows that our ...
2
If you're looking to create dynamically interesting music then you should go easy on the compression. Compression can give a kind of 'warmth' by making everything sound bigger and bringing out the bass.
I've over compressed everything in the past trying to keep up with the 'pros' and I just can't do it like they do. It makes my ears hurt. And even the ...
2
Both plugins are not very well-suited for mastering, I'm afraid. Tube-style saturation/overdrive is great for single input signals because its asymmetric clipping adds not just odd harmonics but also warmer-sounding even ones; but in the mix you will already have plenty of both and these asymmetric characteristics are rather a drawback when you want a tight ...
2
Interesting reading on the subject: LucasArts patented the iMUSE (Interactive MUsic Streaming Engine) in the early 90s, which was a (genius) musical system that transitioned between music as the player transitioned between scenes.
Essentially, when the player chose to move from one scene to another, certain instruments would fade out, and new ones (with a ...
2
Here's a small selection of books I've found useful. This may be more than you're looking for but there's a lot to know and these will teach you a good amount to get you started.
The Sound Reinforcement Manual - General audio equipment explained, general audio terminology, very broad book that's a great reference and read.
Understanding Audio - More ...
2
Just one suggestion, try to get clean audio as much as possible and then Normalize/Amplify your sound before any of the hi-pass low-pass and filtering adjustments. This will eliminate the tiny, computerised sound that over process and re-processing cause. In other words, do steps 4-8 before 9.
Try using a stage mic (dynamic) over a studio mic (condenser) ...
2
A good track starts with a good mix. A good mix is needed before any mastering is done on it. The 'dull soft' sound is due to a number of factors and you have mentioned most of them (eq, compression, stereo spread, saturation and volume). As each sound in your mix is different, there are no hard rules to getting this sounding 'bigger'. Different parts of the ...
1
Dull and muffled sounds to me like frequency space. That is, there aren't high frequencies where you would expect them. The low frequencies are lacking, etc... Within Reason, that is probably an issue with EQing.
The volume issue is likely related to something called gain structuring. Imagine, instead of Reason, you actually had all of that outboard ...
1
It's definitely bad if ultra-low frequencies take away a significant amount of the power from the rest of the mix. However, that only happens if they are in fact as loud, or louder. If these frequencies fit in principle well in your material (i.e. not just rumble, but nice rythmic sub-punch) you should not kill them completely, rather just push them well ...
1
You can't create this effect, at least I was unable to do so.
I tried in the past creating street carvanal drums sounds (they're similar to a marching band) but it's kinda useless to use the same sound sample, since it gives a flanger effect.
If the sounds are higher pitched (like claps) it would probably have some frequency cancellation that would ...
1
The way mp3's are encoded and compressed doesn't lend itself well to this at all, so you need to convert to wav anyway. The way I would do it is to script up the following:
convert mp3 to wav
pipe wav into FL studio
run the plugin
export as mp3
(if the FL studio steps can be scripted too, all the better, but I don't know the app)
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