Professional Mastering

[kaivai]

how do i master my tracks then master the final mix properly to bring out a professional sound i have sound forge cool edit cubase acid reason all at my disposal but id rather just use sumthing like acid and sound forge to bring everything together, someone recommended that i use pro tools but that prog is hard out expensive ova hea (can anyone say $1000!!!!!!!!!)

 

[beats18]

how do i master my tracks then master the final mix properly to bring out a professional sound i have sound forge cool edit cubase acid reason all at my disposal but id rather just use sumthing like acid and sound forge to bring everything together, someone recommended that i use pro tools but that prog is hard out expensive ova hea (can anyone say $1000!!!!!!!!!)

First get the best mix you can in your sequencer program or on your real mixer. Especially eq each channel or instrument properly. Eq on individual tracks is the most important. Mastering should just be "adding flavor, not the whole meal". Once your mix is next to perfect, mix it down to two track. Then use a program like Wavelab or soundforge to master. Make sure you loudness is maximized, and add high end, cut bass to taste. There are no hard and fast rules since each song is sonically different. But use Wavelab, it is a great mastering program. I use Cubase Sx to do everything and wavelab to master.

 

[boneyboys]

The two key processes are equalisation and compression, so I generally run it (in sound forge) through paragraphic eq, multi-band compressor, a vst limiter running through a wrapper (anyone know a good free dx limiter btw), and if it needs it a second run through an equaliser just for a final leveling out I put it through that. Lol, and if I'm feeling stupidly extravagant I'll stick it through a spectral exciter just for a laugh. Do a search on here for compression and equalising which will give you some tutorials for getting the best sorta sound from this stuff.

 

[Formant024]

'em... Not to kill your modus, but for mastering there are a few primaries you should think of first.

1. A balanced out " dead room " for mastering puspose, not control room.
2. The correct nearfields, farfields and reference monitors.

Note that size and positioning of point 2 depend on the cubic size of point 1.
Hehe, oke forget it. Your in your bedroom blazin' them 35watt out the Sony.

3. Turn of the damn loudness switch from your amp.
4. Does your hifi-speakers create excessive low frequencies ? Turn down the fuckin' bass.
5. Open up your windows mixer and kill (mute) everything besides the wav fader.
6. Headroom! Look it up. ( if not I'll post later )
7. Unless you're dealing with recorded acoustic material, screw panning. This is dance music.
8. Hello! Bass is mono. In fact, most instruments are mono besides digital synths. Less signal paths means more headroom.
9. Dont realtime sequences, dont realtime fx, actualy dont render realtime fx at all, dont realtime dynamics ( comp/lim/gate/saturation & eq ). Render all instrument- and drumtracks from your platform as dry and clean as possible and have them signals maxed to - 0.1 db @ the highest resolution supplied by your audio farm card/codec.
10. (Optional)Group your instrument material in the daw busmixer, a group can be your drumtracks ( kick, snare hats ). Balance/blend them in a mix, add the correct compression etc. and route them to bus 1(L) and bus 2(R), or mono bus 1 .
11. Repeat the same for the remaining instrument tracks and keep routing them to the bus mixer ( mostly no more than 8 chnls are needed ).
12. Depending on what your used to, but in in your DAW mixer, use sends for fx and route them stereo to seperate chnls. FX should be dealt with individualy, not on direct chnl return.
13. Dont overkill in plug-ins. Good sample material is half the works. Dont overkill in reverbs, its for noobs hehe.
14. The rest remains undefined since everybody uses different utilities to work with for different purposes and different appeal. But these are bottomlines as far as you can really talk about mastering on a pc in your bedroom.

 

[ACEBEATZ]

huuu...

They already said a lot....

Wut could be different hum????

anyway first of all, wut we call mastering at home is pretty much more pre-mastering.
We can't compare our jobs with them done in those 100 000$ and more studios with 20 years experienced engineers. It's not the stuff that do the music,but the technician, but a good technician cannot do all he can without proper equipement (IM STUCK WITH THE MINIMUM TOO).

But since it's hip-hop, rules r messed up a little. One thing i could say to you, since you dont seem to have lotta cash, you should try to save up for some monitors. You can buy m-audio bx5 for less than 300$ bi-amped or the new 2.1 system with a sub for less than 300$ that will give you far more response than a home system (monitor is my prefered piece of equipment, its the survival knife of the engineer). If you cant buy some, at least work ya ears. Listen to some music you like at a low level, and analyze the volumes of low,mid and high frequencies. And oh!Put your eq at 0 everywhere,close all bast boost or any special 3-d simili IMAX options and shits.

NOW we can begin to mix a little,keep in mind that everything (including wut im sayin right now) can be alterated. I mean, there is no rule, if it sound good, it's good. But, after your mix is finished, one thing i could recommand you to do, is to try IK Multimedia T-Racks.
It's a simili analog mastering plug-in, install it,put your mix in it,and mess around with presets. Look over the parts :comp,eq,limiter. solo em and see how they work and wut they do to the sound. Play with that for a while. If you dont plan to make music for serioous productions, why not stick to this software with some presets you like for your own fun. If you wanna take it more seriously, check out for the same plug-in (a comp, a eq and a limiter) in sound forge and you will make a more precise job.

With a eq: you change the overall dynamics of the mix for final tweaks (gentle).
With a comp : you boost the music, raising the lower peaks and squeezing the higher, to make your mix more coherent
with a limiter : you limit the beat to a treshold and sometime you can boost it a few db more,without clipping.

Try some of that and some of what others said. But there is no rule, find your own technique, dont be scared to experiment, open pro beats in sound forge and analyze the wave form and the frequencies. Try every plug-ins in sound forge, read on the net.
ITS A BIG WORLD OPENING TO YOU!!!!!!

If you wanna know more, ask questions again.

Holla Ace

 

[spin]

i remember on "genius" in another forum... they had a topic for mastering and some tools and the guy said i am not mastering my tracks i want them to sound dirty and underground


does anyone uses T-Racks for mastering in here?

 

[Formant024]

^^^^ Listen to my tracks online, none of them are mastered. I just tried to get the best out of a 16bit soundcard using FL and on occasion Reason. Tracks that get more attention will be balanced and mixed in Cool edit pro 1.2 ( hehe ), those are rendered and mastered into groups, like drums. In those cases I do use T-racks for dynamics and Vintage warmer for eq'ing and a bit of saturation. Eventualy I can alter the high frequencies to get the brilliance from all sounds matching the high frequency range, like really high frequencies that actualy seem to matter, try out PSP mix treble, a good adition to your mastering utilities. Eventualy I dont use normalise to the master but a plug from DSPFX6.0 called Optimizer, which you simply set to 16bit, 44kHz and give it an output level to -0.1dB. It does a miracle on your budget daw hehe.
If I dont use the seperate track rendering I will use these plugins in FL because it really saves time for me, I'm almost used to master while a track is in the making, once the track is finished, it's mastered. And, another tip, though I dont have it, T-racks has released a vst version of T-racks 2.0 ( 24bit version ). If I had it I would heavily abuse the shit out of it, but I dont, so I hardly touch it anymore. I got Vintage Warmer which makes up for it quite wel.

Oke, now check the other tracks, them studio files, no its not hiphop, but that's not really the issue. These arent mastered either, but they were made with hardware in a control room, real studio facility and some tracks were made with logic @ home on a P3 1800 with a simple Audiowerk 2 ( 48kHz ) card. Most tracks have been through the console and but none have had compression, just some on the fly eq' ing.

The monitors used on the hiphop tracks were JBL control-1 and Altec Lansinc PC speakers ( quite loud, but very wrong for reference, just loud hehe ). The studio files were done on Genelec 1031a and Mission speakers.

Now, the point of this post,

1. You can either invest in good gear and re-arrange your habitat into a studio cave

or ....

2. You produce your tracks on your pc only as dry as possible and preferably use a card that enables a minimum transport of 48kHz . That means just normalise every instrument per channel and really do jack shit about mastering or fx, only on pre production you add a fake reverb for you reference. Why ? Because, when people want to use your beats for an album you can master them in the studio on their expenses and where the correct and expensive gear is at hand. Chances are that when you're a big pimpin' producah! you'll be mixin your beats with an engineer in a class A studio on a budget by big pimpin records. Unless you're a gear freak like me, dont bother and just produce and edit your material as dry and clean as possible.
Same goes for them broke mc's spending their money on a U87( no, thats not a german submarine ). That's stupid, mc's should buy a SM58, because if they're contracted they wont ever need their own mic because you record in a good studio with very nice and better mics (U67).

So,
Just practical sense... for all you big pimps... Save the loot.When it's weekend you need money to go out and if you must spend on some top gear ( read "really benificial top notch gear" ) at least then pick the right stuff and looky look into this links ( off topic ).

http://www.analogjapan.com/index.html
( especialy their akai page hehe )
prices include shipping

 

[ACEBEATZ]

Reply

i remember on "genius" in another forum... they had a topic for mastering and some tools and the guy said i am not mastering my tracks i want them to sound dirty and underground


does anyone uses T-Racks for mastering in here?

I don't use T-racks cuz i think its a big toy, but i like that analog compressing sound it give. I would use it as a creative effect on a rock or metal song, but i dont like the squash it gives on hip-hop. Personnally i prefer to use my Waves System plug-ins and my timeworks plug-ins. I get more control in order to keep dynamics. But it is really good to start off, to create some wanted effects or to make a fast job, like when you bring your mix to radio and you only gotta 5 minute to burn it up.

Holla Ace

 

[Formant024]

^^^^ what plugin aint a toy then ??? It's like saying FL sucks because of the name.

But, after your mix is finished, one thing i could recommand you to do, is to try IK Multimedia T-Racks. It's a simili analog mastering plug-in, install it,put your mix in it,and mess around with presets.

The wave plugs emulate a C2 comp and timeworks, so far I know, hasn't released any real dynamic plugs, just fx.

Unless you know how a real comp/lim/gate sounds, you can be easily satisfied and make such a plug a reference for your mastering while in effect, you could've been better off with a cheap ass 3630 compared to the whole wave kit ( the c2 in particulair ). The dynamic algorithms ( or algorhytm per emulated model ) can be found buggin in various situations where a bit more is to be expected from dynamic signal processing, like a gate. Most programs including the wav C# cant handle the same setting from a dbx166xl, making the program a waiste of storage. Good things about T-racks and Vintage Warmer, them engineers didnt put in a gate hehe, which makes it more practical to use since it remains an algorythm that won't fuck up or sound shitty.

dbx 166xl is cheap as fuck these days and them algorhytm cant be emulated.

 

[ACEBEATZ]

reply

i got a 3630 i use to rec vocals.

Yeah i know waves plug-in like many plu-gin cannot do the same job as having an avalon comp or some shit.

But it works well. When i,ll get money,next thing i buy though is a dsp card mackie uad1 or tc powercore they come with theyre own plug-in,and its sounds great for the price,plus you got processing only for the plug-ins from the card, savin up pc cpu.

listen to this link, i mastered this with waves and timeworks.But i know wut i'm doin with them though, i had a real studio for 8 months and i worked with technician so i learn the base, thenm after i built my own techniques like everyone.


go in the showcase 28-30 april see my link for the contest of disney i made.

 

[Formant024]

Im listening to medion speakers, I dont have 1031's for online listening/monitoring hehe. I checked it though but the little thumping kick means little right now.

I wouldn't know what to choose from both farmcards, like the UAD has classic emulation of all sorts but the TC sports the new and expensive virus.

I think I'd go for the tc.

 

[ACEBEATZ]

timeworks dynamics

timeworks have realeased a pack called millenimum pack with : an analog style compressor, a limiter/gain, a mastergin eq and a analog style reverb,and 2 or 3 more i dont have installed.

They sound great especially for the X-Compressor with VU Meter like on avalon.

Holla Ace

 

[Formant024]

I'll give it a check, I pretty much hooked on psp gear for now.

 

[Kojote]

If you need some final mastering plug-ins look out for the "Wave-Plug-ins 4"

 

[ACEBEATZ]

I'll give it a check, I pretty much hooked on psp gear for now.

I tried psp delay reverb once blue with red leds numbers plug-in, was lookin cool then my comp need reboot so i lost it

Holla Ace