crazy_diamond
New member
hello all! new to the forum and I was hoping you could help me out a bit...
I've been recording piano covers over the past year or so to practice my mixing and mastering skills with the goal of producing my own original music soon. the quality of my final products has continued to improve, but overall I'm still not happy with it. here's my latest one so you can (hopefully!) check it out and see what I'm talking about:
some info on my equipment/process: reaper, casio privia px330 keyboard, focusrite scarlett 2i4 audio interface, asio4all, 24bit 88.2 khz...the piano track has added eq, reverb, and a noise gate, and I put a limiter on the master. I don't like to compress my piano tracks and usually just go with a limiter to give a little boost and prevent any clipping with the peaks but I'm starting to think I may be using this entirely wrong lol. I can post pics later if that would help.
the main issue is that the final product always comes out sounding too quiet and just not very full or impressive. it sounds decent in my DAW through my monitors/headphones but the final render never sounds quite as good for some reason (have been listening to it on my crappier work speakers to see how it translates). the RMS is -2 and -4 for each signal during rendering so it seems like that should be a fine volume level. I know this kind of comes with the territory with a piano track--some of the quieter bits are as low as -20 db while the loud bits get all the way up to -2--and I certainly don't expect metal-level volume, but I still feel like there must be something else going on. I have to turn my computer volume/ speakers up way too much and then the quality suffers.
that's another thing: I don't understand why I start to hear distortion and a bit of a crunchy sound when I turn it up loud, considering I make it a point never to come anywhere near clipping level when I'm recording and mixing, and I'm using a master limiter. I've always read that if you keep the levels reasonable and master at unity and just turn up your speakers when you need more volume you shouldn't be having these issues, so what am I missing here?
any tips? I have a decent understanding of the fundamentals at this point but am definitely still a noob, so it's entirely possible I'm missing or misunderstanding something very basic. oh and my mastering skills at this point mainly consist of using a master limiter
so that could very well explain my whole lack of fullness problem. any insight or advice would be so, so greatly appreciated! it's surprisingly difficult to find specific tips about piano mixing or these kinds of issues, at least in my searches thus far. thank you in advance!
I've been recording piano covers over the past year or so to practice my mixing and mastering skills with the goal of producing my own original music soon. the quality of my final products has continued to improve, but overall I'm still not happy with it. here's my latest one so you can (hopefully!) check it out and see what I'm talking about:
some info on my equipment/process: reaper, casio privia px330 keyboard, focusrite scarlett 2i4 audio interface, asio4all, 24bit 88.2 khz...the piano track has added eq, reverb, and a noise gate, and I put a limiter on the master. I don't like to compress my piano tracks and usually just go with a limiter to give a little boost and prevent any clipping with the peaks but I'm starting to think I may be using this entirely wrong lol. I can post pics later if that would help.
the main issue is that the final product always comes out sounding too quiet and just not very full or impressive. it sounds decent in my DAW through my monitors/headphones but the final render never sounds quite as good for some reason (have been listening to it on my crappier work speakers to see how it translates). the RMS is -2 and -4 for each signal during rendering so it seems like that should be a fine volume level. I know this kind of comes with the territory with a piano track--some of the quieter bits are as low as -20 db while the loud bits get all the way up to -2--and I certainly don't expect metal-level volume, but I still feel like there must be something else going on. I have to turn my computer volume/ speakers up way too much and then the quality suffers.
that's another thing: I don't understand why I start to hear distortion and a bit of a crunchy sound when I turn it up loud, considering I make it a point never to come anywhere near clipping level when I'm recording and mixing, and I'm using a master limiter. I've always read that if you keep the levels reasonable and master at unity and just turn up your speakers when you need more volume you shouldn't be having these issues, so what am I missing here?
any tips? I have a decent understanding of the fundamentals at this point but am definitely still a noob, so it's entirely possible I'm missing or misunderstanding something very basic. oh and my mastering skills at this point mainly consist of using a master limiter
so that could very well explain my whole lack of fullness problem. any insight or advice would be so, so greatly appreciated! it's surprisingly difficult to find specific tips about piano mixing or these kinds of issues, at least in my searches thus far. thank you in advance!
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