why can't I master my own stuff?

Maybe he should design his website a bit more like this?

http://seifer.soulnet.tk/

Is that more in line with what you'd call a well designed website?

A site that does nothing but talk about how much you hate homosexuals? Or openly search for ripped versions of the software that you claim to "master" here in these forums?

Why can't you just go away? Nobody here wants to listen to your drivel anymore. Whatever amount of credibility you thought you had, is long gone here by now, isn't that much obvious to you?

I think I hear the bell ringing, you must be late for class.

Run along now.
 
Everything I've ever put on that site is a joke, and if you couldn't tell then you should kill yourself for being so stupid.
 
ds21 said:
Just kind of proves the point, sweeting is fine, but real mastering take experience, plus the room speakers and tools. Who did the "mastering" by the way? as far as I know the nearest Mastering house is in Chicago.
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I think you missed my point. This guy had major label mastering credits in his suite, using all the killer gear and expertise. I on the other hand used budget gear and a low end DAW, and smoked him.

We both "mastered" a CD. His Red Book spec CD played just fine in every CD player I played it in. I am sure it would have been accepted just fine at any duplication house.

Mastering a CD is actually quite simple really. Get your songs in order, put in CD track start/stop markers, author a Red Book spec disk. It is really THAT simple to do mastering for a CD. Call it Mastering, "mastering", or mastering, or "Mastering", or MASTERING, I don't care.

Sweetening a mix is a whole other story. THAT is what takes experience.

That project was three years ago, and I for the life of me cannot recall what the guys name is. The client checked out his previous work before hiring him, and verified that he did that work in the same facility. I am even sure that dude could probably do very good work. He just didn't in this case. I didn't find the client unreasonable in any way. He wanted a fairly "hot" master with a good balance between the low's, mid's, and high's. Nothing new there. The mixes were somewhat challenged, but by far not the worse I have worked with! Why this guy butchered this clients mixes the way he did is beyond me. For the $700 the client paid him, the client got ripped badly! I was happy that he found my work acceptable given that at the time, I only had one credit on a small label. I was actually quite surprised the client even asked me to take a listen and possibly consider re-mastering his mixes for him. But upon listening to this other guys work, I could surely see that even The Seifer could have done just as good.

Some "pro's" don't give a very good effort on some projects. I have re-mixed songs for clients because the "big shot local guy" that mixed them didn't deliver something that they felt was worth releasing. Some "ametures" just lack the "ears" to hear what they are really doing to the audio. Often, it is more of a case that they get fixated on one particular thing about the audio, like it isn't as loud as a commercial product, and "sweeten" their mix to match that, and don't hear how they butchered the sonic integrity of the mix in doing so.

The truth is that most ametures in mixing are also ametures in tracking. Combining not so great tracking with not so great mixing makes for a very difficult mastering session when you want to play the loudness game using current major label releases as the reference. The fact is that most around these parts DO NOT have a mix that is capable of being "pushed to the max" like major label releases without serious artifacts to the sonics happening from the attempt to do so, REGARDLESS of what quality of gear is used!!! This is where an experienced mastering engineer can be very helpful, and why I stated earlier that working with a experienced mastering engineer can be an "excellent" learning tool. They can of course probably make much better decisions about what to "fix", but can also show just how far you can take things before the unacceptable artifacts show up in a master.

In about 10 minutes of work I could master The Seifer's song better than he did. I was going to post a "quickie" but working with an mp3 is just lousy after the second encoding of it....:(

So, let's clarify:

1 - Mastering a CD is actually pretty easy! Compile the songs, set their order, and burn a Red Book spec disk.

2 - Doing sonic "enhancements" to a song is MUCH harder to do well.

I do agree that many guys are asking how to "master" a song, when they really should be asking how to "enhance the sonics" of a song. Sonic enhancements are only PART of the mastering process. It is also the hardest part of doing it, and years of experience pay off when doing so.

I also agree that louder isn't per se "better" when doing sonic enhancements. Usually, with the low grade tools available for doing so, they do more harm than good. If you just used limiting on The Seifers mix to bring it up to current major label release volumes, you would need about 8-10dB of gain reduction in serveral places in the song!!!! YIKES!!!!! I am sorry, but the L2 just start sounding pretty lousy after you reach 4-5dB of gain reduction.

Of course, I am generalizing in the above. I have successfully used up to 8-10dB of gain reduction to achieve decent results with a L2 on a mix! But generally, the kick drum peaked around 6dB over anything else in those mixes, and I wanted the sound of the L2 doing that much gain reduction on kick drum hits.

In listening to The Seifers mix, so many other things struck me as being odd. The drums of course sound stale and lifeless, mostly a result of them being samples and probably something like Fruity Loops to compose the drum track.

The guitars sound like a POD. Again, lifeless and without character. Usually, you have to roll off so much low end out of the POD that you are left with a stale sounding guitar track. But what really sucks about the POD is that the guitar just seems to "sit there" in a static depth. Regardless of where you play the chords, it just seems to have a sameness to the sound. Everything just seems to stay "upfront" in the sound. :(

The bass. No body in the low end at all. It lacks good compression too to make it really pump. I doubt he will ever get that kind of pumping on the bass with plugin's anyway.

The reverb on that mix is a mess! It isn't seperated from the snare at all. You can hear the heavy early reflections.

So really, before we can even talk about effectively mastering this song, we should talk about making the mix better. For a mix that uses pretty much all sampled sounds, it isn't too bad. But I seriously doubt that this mix is going to improve that much using such poor sounds. Indeed, a skilled mixing engineer could probably improve upon this quite a bit, but these kinds of source sounds are going to leave him going "I wish this sound more like this, and that sounded like that"...etc.....

Anyway.........

Let's next talk about the approach to the master. Personally, he tried to make this as loud as like a Linkin Park song. Really, he should have been using some Joe Satriani mixes to reference with. I think he would have found that there would be less midrange and a LOT less volume overall. Pushing a song like this "to the max" just seems silly. This is listening music, not mosh pit music, and my approach would have been to make it listenable, not fatiquing like it is.

The Seifer has tools good enough to make an improvement to the original mix. He just lacks the vision to use them well. Nobody can give him that vision for the sonics. Nobody can really say that he should do it differently than he did. Until he "hears" how bad he mangled it, he will believe that it was a big improvement. Bruce thinks his Hackie is "good enough" for what he is doing, The Seifer thinks T-Racks, or whatever he mangled this mix with is good enough. It is obvious at this point that both think their tools are sufficient for what they want to achieve. Having listened now to work from both, if I cared about my audio, I would definately hire Bruce, even with his crappy Hackie console to work on my stuff before I would even let The Seifer second engineer in a session for me. Cool. Bruce doesn't need to be told his Hackie sucks, and The Seifer doesn't need to be told T-Racks sucks. Each needs honest feedback about what is not quite right about their audio. Even old Bruce makes some bonehead decisions concerning audio. Granted, he makes FAR fewer of those decisions, and the severity of those decisions are of less concern overall, but neither is doing work that is going to win them a Grammy for it! ;)

We would all like better tools. We all have to "make do" with what we have. Hell, I am currently working with "crappy" ADAT Type I converters for multitrack D/A, and a badly clocked MOTU card, and a stupid Allen and Heath GL 2200, and a bunch of $100 compressors and gates. None of my clients right now can afford the $100 an hour mastering suites that are around that can in half the time do much better work than I can do with Wavelab and Waves plugin's.

So..............................

Let's all just work with what we got, and if you got some information to share on how to use your cheap gear a little better, well, SHARE IT! If you dont' have something to share, SHUT UP. :D

I umpire baseball. 13 years now. Before taking a 5 year break, I worked my way up to NAIA level college ball (step below NCAA). Had I hadn't taken that break, I would be doing Pac 10 games. I also have done Semi-Pro tournaments that qualified teams for the Semi-Pro World Series. So, you could say I have worked at the highest ametures levels there are (by the way, I never went to the pro school for umpiring because by the time I decided I would even want to do that, I was too old to ever get a minor league contract........also too short....they want them at least 6' and 24 years old!).

Anyway, as a "veteran", I get to do "spot evaluations" for less experienced umpires. The assigning commissioner trust only a handful of the veterans to supply him with evaluations as to how the person is doing at their current level, and if they might be capable of a higher level, or should possibly go back to a lower level. In a sense, my feedback can help decide whether to move a guy ahead or behind the level he currently does.

Now, you can think that I probably wouldn't want to have guys moving up, possibly competing for "choice" assignments with me. I have seen umps that think that way. They don't do these evaluations either! ;) In reality, I want EVERY guy I work with to be AT LEAST as good as me! There is nothing worse than being in a close, difficult game and working with a guy that is lazy, slow, unknowledgable about obscure rules (trust me, the obscure rulings ONLY come out when you have a crappy partner! LOL), and makes too quick of decisions on plays. Really, your crew only looks as good as it's weakest link. So I WANT all these guys to be better.

Some just don't have it though. They want to have it, but they don't. They call safe/out's too quickly. They are never in the best position to make a call. They have too low of a strike zone. They confuse rules. Etc......

It is interesting to give these guys feedback. They know I am evaluating them, and they really want to know how they are doing. In a lot of cases, a guy might only have a "thing or two" that he needs to work on, and they usually realize it and ask questions about how I might have overcome those same things. These kinds of guys are very cool to work with, and make me trust that 5 years from now, they will be right up there working the highest level games with me, DOING A GREAT JOB! Others though, no matter what I tell them, they have an "excuse", or "disagree" with what might be a "better way" to do things. They feel they made every call right, and were always right where they were supposed to be. Sometimes, they even argue with me about rules (got a 96 out of 100 on the rules test, and that was after a 5 year break! If I dont' get a 100 next year, I will lick home plate clean on my first game....:D). Anyway, these kinds of guys are difficult to talk to obviously.

Will they move up in level? No. Not until they improve. CAN they move up? Yes! When they improve.

What I realized is this. With the guys that dont' want to listen to the voice of experience, I can either blast them in the evaluation and argue points with them, or I can make "suggestions" to them and leave it up to them to believe that I have a clue as to what I am talking about or not. It seems a bit rediculous that a guy in his first year of doing small school varsity level baseball would argue with a guy who does college and semi-pro level. But I cannot "make" them listen to what I have to say.

You know, some guys just don't want to work at it that hard. Really! Some guys go "Well, I call that low strike because it makes the game go faster. I know nobody likes it, but that is what I am going to call" (even though my experience suggests that calling the low strike DOES NOT in fact speed up a game at all!). Some of these guys are okay with doing JV and small school varsity. To them, I cannot offer much help. I DO however offer whatever suggestions they ask for. But I don't take it personally if they don't want to do things in a manner that will help them move up a level. That is there decision.

Anyway. Maybe this whole home recording thing is a lot like my umpiring experience eh? Some guys who are new display skills that will get them to a higher level fast. Others are just lazy and don't want to work that hard. Others are too bullheaded to listen to experience.

In no case though is it my job as a human to call names and tell a guy he is being an idiot, even when he is. That is just wasting bandwidth.

Ed
 
Wow

sonusman - man that was about the longest posting I've see ever. :D My eyes hurt....but you make some good points.

Not everyone is in the same place with regard to their ability, equipment, experience, desire, etc. However, everyone has room to improve their skills, I know I do. I agree that name-calling does nothing but undermined the spirit of a free exchange of information.

Thanks
 
amen!! I just wish that a couple of specific people would take that into consideration and also ditch the condescending use of the:rolleyes: icon at the same time too.
 
sonusman said:
Let's all just work with what we got, and if you got some information to share on how to use your cheap gear a little better, well, SHARE IT! If you dont' have something to share, SHUT UP. :D
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That might be the most useful statement in this whole thread. Wow. I guess I can go to bed now.
 
sluice...I don't think you are allowed out of the mp3 clinic.... you better get your ass back over there and keep your yap shut!:D


zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!


when is your bedtime, btw??:eek:
 
The fact is that most around these parts DO NOT have a mix that is capable of being "pushed to the max" like major label releases without serious artifacts to the sonics happening from the attempt to do so, REGARDLESS of what quality of gear is used!!!
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Nice post and huge too, wow that was a long post.....lol. I just wanted to make a few comments in regard to making a song loud or "hot". Through my experience most songs(unless butchered with over processing) can be made as loud as commercial CD's with very good results. I agree though that the louder you go the worse the quality gets no matter who's doing the mastering.

The thing is how it's done. There are many steps taken to control dynamics before even using a compressor or limiter. I don't know if you know this or not (and I'm not assuming either way) but I just thought I would mention it. For those who don't know and think it's just a matter of using a limiter/compressor to saw off those dynamics, is misinformed. It takes more than that to get a song up to commercial levels.

sonicpaint
 
The thing is how it's done. There are many steps taken to control dynamics before even using a compressor or limiter.
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Nice thought sonic.

Mother Nature makes one of my favorite dynamics processors - Air molecules, my next favorite are reflective and absorptive surfaces. Bering that in mind then it would be no surprise that I enjoy the 'live' or mostly live recording captured in a room that properly supports the whole affair - both listening and recording.

Failing that in my project studio where unnatural isolation and tracking and layering often occur the dance of the dynamics and EQ processors (created by humans) begins. Ha Ha !

At any rate I use both EQ and dynamic processors to adjust loudness of an already generally well balanced final mix.

Is that what you are referring to ?
kylen
 
Regebro: "And my song obviously sounded so crappy it wasn't even worth trying. :p"

Sonusman: "The two song I did mastering for were [...] very easy fixes to make as their mixes were outstanding in the first place."

That's what I said, wasn't it? :p



It would be interesting to know which ones you "sweetened", just to see if these are some of those I really thought sounded extra professional. :)
 
mixmkr said:
sluice...I don't think you are allowed out of the mp3 clinic....

and.....

is that a real Les Paul....or is that a Sears Les Paul??
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I knew I'd have to leave the clinic if I was to ever to find you again. :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: (is that how it's done?)

The Les Paul is Gibson, but the poncho is definitely Sears. :)
 
Less is more.

Nice comments about nature kylen.:D Those applied well during tracking make a huge difference in the Mastering stage too, though even in the Mastering stage there's steps before the limiters/compressors. (I was referring more to the Mastering stage but your comments for tracking were great points too)

That brings up some other good points. Maybe because the technology has gotten to the point where "pro gear" has made it's way in to the home and project studio, it's given us too many options. It's easier to use an EQ (or should I say faster) to correct a signal while recording, then it is to play around with different mic's and placements. I think most of the time we just have too much to chose from in the DAW's we use today and it's always good to go back to basics.

sonicpaint
 
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Can I at least make some excuses for why I suck so bad? Here is how I made my horrible mix:

First of all, that was the first song I have ever recorded on my DAW ever, because I just built it. I was using a 4 track tape deck before. Then I arranged some cheap drum samples by hand, transcribed, recorded, and mixed the rest of the song in < 2 hours by plugging my les paul into a very cheap distortion pedal and then into my audio card. Holy shit maybe I should get some better stuff!

p.s. I also mixed it with headphones from K-Mart
 
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