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Topic: Mastering (Read 4791 times) previous topic - next topic
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Mastering

Ok, this might not be the right place for this but...  I've seen so many times people on the forum commenting that these days cds are mastered so poorly, with extremely high levels, etc.  Now I'm wondering whats the ideal way to master a track?  I have some self-produced stuff that I'd like to get sounding a bit more pro and I'm wondering where to start.  compression?  hard or soft limiting?  normalization?  Thanks for any ideas/links, general or specific you might have.

Mastering

Reply #1 –
Bah. Forget all those techno-hooey enhancements. Just run your mix-down tracks through the Apex Aural Exciter Type C before burning.

<< Ducking >> 

Mastering

Reply #2 –
You realize that "pro" means "compressed to 1 dB dynamic range" these days, right?

Mastering

Reply #3 –
lol...
this is a funny question.
It's impossible to just generalize some thing to reply to this.

The main point we want with todays masterings is larger headroom, and ofcourse that it doesn't clip.

My advice to you - if you're serious about this - is to get a copy of Bob Katz mastering book, and practise and practise and practise.
Mastering takes lots of time and is something to grow into.

edit: typo

Mastering

Reply #4 –
Quote
Mastering takes lots of time and is something to grown into.

Well, depending on the materials I have to work with, I often groan into it. 

    - M.

Mastering

Reply #5 –
I'm glad somebody has asked this question and at least got 1 response

I have a load of self-produced stuff, a lot of which sounds awful from the amount of clipping or distortion.  I am currently going through and remastering each track...  and have wondered if there is anything else I could be doing because I really know nothing of the technique..

All I'm doing is lowering most tracks by 6dB to keep them from clipping, and running an FFT filter over most of my samples as they were processed several times by an 8 bit program

I never really understood compression..  I use hard limiting when I need something louder without it causing clipping..  and I don't know what the difference between soft limiting and increasing the amplitude is
< w o g o n e . c o m / l o l >

Mastering

Reply #6 –
By the way... I have added that book to my wishlist on Amazon, it has earnt a lot of praise it seems

My question is how applicable is it to electronic and rock music?  I don't want to spend a hefty amount of money on a book that deals purely with classical music, because I really don't deal with that
< w o g o n e . c o m / l o l >

Mastering

Reply #7 –
Quote
Ok, this might not be the right place for this but...  I've seen so many times people on the forum commenting that these days cds are mastered so poorly, with extremely high levels, etc.  Now I'm wondering whats the ideal way to master a track?  I have some self-produced stuff that I'd like to get sounding a bit more pro and I'm wondering where to start.  compression?  hard or soft limiting?  normalization?  Thanks for any ideas/links, general or specific you might have.

yup...


floyd..

use your ears.. whats sound natural & clean is good..
the music have been more & more "overdone"
the last 10. years..

forget any "mastering - tut`s"..
interesting reading though.. but in practise
they aren`t that good.. (ex: Katz "bible")
although.. it depends very much.. on kinda music..


Mastering

Reply #8 –
heh...

DO read Katz tutorial, it DOES make sense and it IS a good idea.
You can't start from scratch, and from what you've told sofar you should be pickng up some reading and familiarize yourself with the terminologi and the usage of different processes involved in editing and mastering in the digital domain. This book by Katz will guide you through the mastering procedures in a well structured and informative way.

@n68, if you don't know what you are talking about (which was clearly revealed) don't post. Your posts withholds no valuable additional information to this thread, hence unuseful.
Anyone with experience would pay his respect to the work of Bob Katz, there couldn't be any person who would claim his work not to be informative and useful.
READ the book before judging it, it's also clear that you have not done this.

Mastering

Reply #9 –
Quote
heh...

DO read Katz tutorial, it DOES make sense and it IS a good idea.
You can't start from scratch, and from what you've told sofar you should be pickng up some reading and familiarize yourself with the terminologi and the usage of different processes involved in editing and mastering in the digital domain. This book by Katz will guide you through the mastering procedures in a well structured and informative way.

@n68, if you don't know what you are talking about (which was clearly revealed) don't post. Your posts withholds no valuable additional information to this thread, hence unuseful.
Anyone with experience would pay his respect to the work of Bob Katz, there couldn't be any person who would claim his work not to be informative and useful.
READ the book before judging it, it's also clear that you have not done this.

yup...


as i said: interesting reading.. +
it`s depending on material..

the katz tut. is likely to be the best paper around.. 
but i have tried to follow this.. on
everything from pure vocal..
to NU metal and prog. jazz-rock..

and it doesn`t sound perfect to me.. 

further more.. don`t flame me coz am not sharing
your view. what make 100% sence.. on paper..
would not mean that it sounds 100%.
>how many master recordings have you done<
and i dont mean cleaning or remastering..



Mastering

Reply #10 –
It's worth searching the CE user forums for tales of mastering, and attempted mastering.

Go to the general search page:
http://www.syntrillium.com/common/search/
type in mastering, CHECK THE "SEARCH IN FORUMS" box, click SEARCH, and have a read through the results.

(the actual forum search function at forums.syntrillium.com is terrible!)

Cheers,
David.

Mastering

Reply #11 –
Eventhough I won't call myself a mastering engineer, I do on occassion have to 'master' some demos or live shows and my favorite tools of choice are Samplitude and Izotope's Ozone plugins.  Both are excellent quality. 

Take a look at http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/ozon...teringGuide.pdf for a very general introduction as well as Bob Katz's http://www.digido.com/portal/pmodule_id=11...der_page_id=31/    and    http://www.tcelectronic.com/media/bobkatz.pdf

Good luck!

Mastering

Reply #12 –
Lol.. I get the feeling that disagreeing with one of MRTH's opinions will be put in the Hydrogen Audio TOS, it's just not the done thing.

What n68 sais strikes a chord with me.  Will Bob Katz's book teach me anything about mastering electronic music, drum'n'bass, metal or ambient electric-guitar stuff?

At the moment I go by ear as he sais, I just change the volume of part of a waveform if some of it is too quiet or too loud, so I don't get what dynamic compression does other than stops me having control over which bits I want loud or quiet?
< w o g o n e . c o m / l o l >

Mastering

Reply #13 –
While I haven't read the book in question, I do know that it's not a "Mastering for Dummies" kind of book. Considering Bob's knowledge and career, I can't belive it to be like "first you press this, and then you add this amount of that and then it sounds great". Rather, apart from dealing with the many technical issues of mastering, I suspect it'll provide an insight to why such a book would be pretty much worthless, and why Mastering Engineer is a profession and not a plug-in. Anyone can read a book about brain surgery...  The key to good mastering is the experience and talent of the mastering engineer, in addition to top notch tools and a suitable monitoring setup.

But if you're sitting in your bedroom without a dime and just want to slap some compression and EQ on there, why not? - it's your music. If you know enough to have made the music in the first place, there really are no secrets to reveal of how to go about do-it-yourself-mastering. Same stuff, only a broader perspective. Tweak away until it sounds good to you and double check your decisions on as many playback systems as possible. Just don't expect it to replace a real mastering session.

uosdwis

Mastering

Reply #14 –
Quote
While I haven't read the book in question, I do know that it's not a "Mastering for Dummies" kind of book. Considering Bob's knowledge and career, I can't belive it to be like "first you press this, and then you add this amount of that and then it sounds great". Rather, apart from dealing with the many technical issues of mastering, I suspect it'll provide an insight to why such a book would be pretty much worthless, and why Mastering Engineer is a profession and not a plug-in. Anyone can read a book about brain surgery...  The key to good mastering is the experience and talent of the mastering engineer, in addition to top notch tools and a suitable monitoring setup.

But if you're sitting in your bedroom without a dime and just want to slap some compression and EQ on there, why not? - it's your music. If you know enough to have made the music in the first place, there really are no secrets to reveal of how to go about do-it-yourself-mastering. Same stuff, only a broader perspective. Tweak away until it sounds good to you and double check your decisions on as many playback systems as possible. Just don't expect it to replace a real mastering session.

While this is undoubtedly true, I think it's a little arrogant to say that nobody but a professional mastering engineer can achieve decent results.  An analogous situation would be software engineering -- there's no way someone who is not a professional software engineer can design and code clean, reliable, modular, extensible, and maintenable software on a large scale.  But this doesn't mean there's no use at all for books explaining it -- there's quite a few things that can be taught to a non-professional in relatively little time that have a lot of impact (design patterns, etc.).  They're not going to make you an expert, but they will do 80% of the job.

Similarly, I'd bet there's a lot of things that could be said about mastering that wouldn't cover all situations, but might get you 80% of the way there, which is probably good enough for most home-recorded stuff.

Mastering

Reply #15 –
Quote
Similarly, I'd bet there's a lot of things that could be said about mastering that wouldn't cover all situations, but might get you 80% of the way there, which is probably good enough for most home-recorded stuff.

Exactly what I'm looking for.  I'm not expecting perfection: thats what the pros are for.  This is just for my own audio education and to make my tunes sound a little bit more polished.  Thanks for the links and all the ideas, everyone.

Mastering

Reply #16 –
Hmm, the more I have read the links posted here, the more I've been put off buying the book! 

There are some points coming across to me, I'm not sure if my interpretation is right though..

Mastering isn't really the black art I thought it was, it's making small adjustments that "turn your music into an inspired work of art".  How that is achieved by ordering the tracks correctly, leaving the right gaps between them, balancing the volume of the tracks as a whole, and using a small EQ if needed, I don't quite get..  I do that myself, probably not well, but I understand what I'm doing and why.

If I were to try mastering properly myself, I would need a much better system (I use a hifi connected to my pc) and more importantly better ears..  I know for a fact mine just aren't good enough.

If I wanted my work mastered properly, I'm better off getting somoene else to do it, as I am biased by what I want it to sound like, rather than being objective about what sounds good to the majority.

My recording techniques are far behind my mastering, I record only in mono and usually only have 40-60dB of dynamic range.  To me, that's just part of the sound
< w o g o n e . c o m / l o l >

Mastering

Reply #17 –
I'd say that more important is the list of things you shouldn't do (yes, shouldn't, you might use them, but for many people these don't sound good):

- Overlimiting - applying a limiter with very high gain (or much compression + amplifying/normalising):
destroys dynamics, isn't good for any type of music. Reduces 'punch'.
Unfortunately much of new 'music' is made that way...
Better use an expander if you critically want to increase loudness, it sounds better.
- Normalising to 0.00 dB - leave at least 0.01 dB, because some (CD) players clip on max volume.
- Don't forget that (esp. noise shaped) dithering changes amplitude of some frequencies and they may clip...
- Applying too much gain = adding clipping.

Good practices:
- Use 24bit (or more) for processing, it increases quality if you add multiple effects or mix tracks.
- Don't forget to dither the output on conversion to 16bit.
- A good practice is to normalise to -3 dB or lower before applying any effect. It shouldn't clip this way.
- Listen to the final product thoroughly...

Experimenting is fun...

EDIT:
I haven't read any book about audio mastering. Practice, practice and once more practice.
ruxvilti'a
 

Mastering

Reply #18 –
What I have done in a quick soundfont-based cakewalk Sonar 2 XL work:

From Cool Edit Pro, set MIDI recording volume to 50% (play with it if you want more loudness, but be beware of clipping).
As I'm on a SBLive (which resamples to 48000Hz, in order to get maximum quality I set:
48000Hz, 32bit float, Stereo.
Then, start recording. Play cakewalk then once it has finished stop the recording.
As many times I've done that, the tracks don't reach clipping or get too low volume.
Then delete starting-ending silence and resample to CD quality (quality 999, triangular noise distribution, no noise shaping and 1bit dithering).
After encoding with MPC, replaygain volumes are around +0.10 or -1.40 or that. Pretty good mastering, right?