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AH... Mastering..
Here goes man....
1st..question "what's it good for?' and What's the difference between mixing and mastering?"
Mixing is where you take all of the tracks
laid..... vocals, drums, guitars..etc.. and you place them
where they need to be within the stereo field.
There's a lot of room in that field.. it's not just left to
right, but up and down(not speaking of volume),
backward and foreward. All of these areas can be
reached through different methods.
By using the fader(volume slide) you can place
a guitar way back or up front. You can pan it all the
way to the left where the guitar is only coming
out of the left speaker or you can put it at 9:00 where
some signal is coming out of the right, but
most is coming out of the left. You can raise that guitar
by using EQ... or lower it(height)..
Things to remember when mixing:
1- KNOW THAT ALL INSTRUMENTS occupy certain
freq's. It's called MASKING. It's not a great
thing. Example.. Bass and the kick. Both occupy
the same freq's for the most part. Thus they
become... "muddy".. unclear.. so you need
to create room for them to exist together. Cut the 300
area of the kick, and boost the 300 of the
bass. You just allowed them to mesh, so to speak. So
study... study.. study....
2- Keep the mix balanced.. In other words,
don't let your left side be louder than the right DUE TO
more instruments and voices being placed more
so to the right.
if you are putting the project into the commerical
arena, MASTERING is a great thing. It's like
putting a clear coat on a paint job.
NOW... Let me back up.
There's an old saying that goes like this..
"you can't get milk out of an old boar hog".. In this case it
means that a mastering house is not going
to be able to take your mix if it sounds like dogs barking
at the moon and make it into an angel singing.
That goes the same for mixing.. if what was
recorded sucks, you mixing it all day ain't going to make
it into to a #1 hit... That a total false
thought in most peoples mind. Nothing worse than to hear a
guy say.. "OH.. they can fix it in the mix.."
NO SIR..
So my point to all of this... It starts with
the recording of the tracks. If it's not there, your mixing
and mastering is not going to anything for
it.
If anyone is looking to phatten up their drum
track/loop then try using Ampitube instead of the standard Lo-Fi plugins.
You can get some very suprising results
Here is a good tip for mastering if the bottom end is quite messy or slightly out of phase.
Works best in Cool Edit Pro 2.
1) Load the track into wave editor
2) Apply a 100% High Pass Filter (FFT) cut
@ about 400Hz
3) Save file to Trackname(No Bass).wav
4) Re-open the original file
5) Apply a 100% Low Pass Filter (FFT) cut
@ about 400Hz
6) Save file to Trackname(Bass).wav - note
save this file to a mono file.
7) Use your wave editor/sequencer to mix the
two files together again.
Finished.
If done right you should notice that the bottom
end is a lot tighter and sit's right in the middle of the Pan spectrum.
It should give you track some extra energy
This is something that alot of people might have already read somewhere but...
If you're a guitarist (for example) and have
a bunch of riffs that you don't use because you're sick of hearing them,
instead of hitting the delete button, chop
them up and stick them in a sampler and trigger them with a keyboard.
Make each riff have its own key or spread
the riff over a few different keys - C triggers the 1st half and C# triggers
the 2nd half as well as different pitches
etc
Program a groove and just start improvising
with the riffs. I've had many happy accidents and found combinations
of things I wouldn't have discovered any other
way. Kontakt is perfect for this sort of thing.
The first is to get T-Racks (which i know i
love) as this is a seperate program dedicated to mastering. And is probably
the easiest thing to use for any beginners
out there, but that is not to say the results are poor. The results can
be truly
outstanding when set right.
The other option is to get a hold of some plugins
which deal with the seperate processes involved. For this I would first
recommend Steinberg's Wavelab 4, as it has
very good features (Phase Scope, Live FFT analyser,etc..) and supports
DirectX and VST plugins. Cooledit pro 2 or
Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 6 are also quite good wave editors with their
own unique features and effects.
So what plugins do I use ?
Some of the best mastering plugins come from
Waves, the Waves Master Bundle, which includes Multiband Compessors,
10-way EQ, Limiters, Stereo Expansion and
Dithering plugins. These effects are exceptional and easily comparable
in
quality to hardwear counterparts.
Also availble is the Steinberg Mastering Edition
plugins (note: these are included in Wavelab 4) which are useful and
can also produce some great results.
Basically these are some of the best options
for mastering but there are other programs out there.The software you
use should be because you like it and CAN
use it, as with making music - mastering is a matter of personal taste
and
hence determines the software to be used as
they each have their own sound
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