DrewPeterson7
Sage of the Order
So, I've been doing home recording in some form or other for damned near... 20 years now, I guess. It's a hobby, one of a couple, and one I don't have as much time to dedicate to as I'd like, but it's one I do take pretty seriously and over the years I've gotten to the point where I'm fairly happy with my recording and mixing.
Mastering has always been sort of a dark art to me, however. I've done the half-arsed "normalize, then lit it with a limiter and makeup gain to get it up to CD volume" thing on my own recordings, when it came time to master the album I released a couple years ago had a buddy of mine do it rather than trust myself (and normally I'd rather have a second set of ears on a project anyway), etc... But, I'm just wrapping up a folk-rock/roots-rock/blues project with my dad and uncle we're planning on sharing with the rest of our family but not really any further, and I didn't want to hire someone to do it for me or call in a favor from a friend or anything for a project that was going to get listened to a handful of times by fewer than 50 people. So, I've been going at it myself.
All that out of the way...
The general approach I've been taking is render all of the tracks down into stereo mixes, then load them up in individual tracks in a new Reaper program, stagger them out in running order so the whole thing plays back as if it was a single one-track CD, then normalize each of the individual stereo mixes within Reaper. Any fades I wanted were applied at this point.
Next, I went through and balanced individual tracks by ear to ear so even if they weren't all peaking at the same point, they sounded about as loud as each other. I haven't really done any EQ work on the indivudual songs because, well, I'm still tweaking the mixes a little bit so I'm trying to get everything right up front in the mix, and because so far everything does sound fairly good. Once all the mixes are 100% final though I may end up doing a little bit of light EQ tweaking here and there to make sure everything sounds as consistent as possible from track to track.
Then, I've thrown a series of plugins on the master bus. Off memory, I've got the Sonimus Britson bus in "loudness" mode (I like the Sonimus stuff, incidently, and used the Britson channel strip and their Burnley73 EQ heavily in this project) both for the slight EQ and to add a touch of crosstalk, ReaComp set for extremely light compression (maybe 2:1, I forget) with a threshold just attenuating the last 1-2db of the audio and with about a db and a half of makeup gain, and that into the Waves CLA 2A opto comp to add a bit of fairly smooth compression and juice the output another couple db (given the nature of the plug it's tough to state in quantitative terms how much it's doing, but the attenuation needle suggests it's taking 1-3db or so off peaks, and I'd guess it's in the 3-4db louder range coming out the other side). From there I'm hitting it with a limiter, Waves I think, to add maybe about another 3.5db to the perceived volume. Basically, stacking a couple compressors on top of each other, none of them independently all THAT hard. I've tried some other stuff - I snagged both the Waves J-whatever and Kramer tape sims in a recent sale and figured that would be a good way to add some of that "magical analog tape sound" to the mix, but honestly I thought in both cases the mixes sounded audibly better without them, more so for the Kramer than the other, and that the music sounded clearer and more dynamic on its own.
Anyway... As far as a general approach goes - line up all tracks in a single project, get them balanced against each other, then process the master bus - is this more or less defensible, or is there something stupid I'm doing here? On one hand, I get the "if it sounds good it is good" argument... But, if it could sound better if I did something else, and there's something that I'm doing doesn't make sense (for example, I could see fading the two tracks I want to fade out before they hit the series of compressors on the master bus meaning there's going to be a difference in how dynamics are perceived, somewhat anyway, between the main sections and the fades), well, I'd like to learn a bit from this project, too.
For now, I've been A/Bing against a couple modern Dylan albums - Time out of Mind and his Tell Tale Signs bootleg series - and while I'm nowhere near the engineer (or musician!) of all parties involved in that one, I'm at least not embarrassed by how they compare. So, I'm probably not doing anything truly stupid... But, I figure you guys will tell me, mercilessly, if I am. Thanks!
Mastering has always been sort of a dark art to me, however. I've done the half-arsed "normalize, then lit it with a limiter and makeup gain to get it up to CD volume" thing on my own recordings, when it came time to master the album I released a couple years ago had a buddy of mine do it rather than trust myself (and normally I'd rather have a second set of ears on a project anyway), etc... But, I'm just wrapping up a folk-rock/roots-rock/blues project with my dad and uncle we're planning on sharing with the rest of our family but not really any further, and I didn't want to hire someone to do it for me or call in a favor from a friend or anything for a project that was going to get listened to a handful of times by fewer than 50 people. So, I've been going at it myself.
All that out of the way...
The general approach I've been taking is render all of the tracks down into stereo mixes, then load them up in individual tracks in a new Reaper program, stagger them out in running order so the whole thing plays back as if it was a single one-track CD, then normalize each of the individual stereo mixes within Reaper. Any fades I wanted were applied at this point.
Next, I went through and balanced individual tracks by ear to ear so even if they weren't all peaking at the same point, they sounded about as loud as each other. I haven't really done any EQ work on the indivudual songs because, well, I'm still tweaking the mixes a little bit so I'm trying to get everything right up front in the mix, and because so far everything does sound fairly good. Once all the mixes are 100% final though I may end up doing a little bit of light EQ tweaking here and there to make sure everything sounds as consistent as possible from track to track.
Then, I've thrown a series of plugins on the master bus. Off memory, I've got the Sonimus Britson bus in "loudness" mode (I like the Sonimus stuff, incidently, and used the Britson channel strip and their Burnley73 EQ heavily in this project) both for the slight EQ and to add a touch of crosstalk, ReaComp set for extremely light compression (maybe 2:1, I forget) with a threshold just attenuating the last 1-2db of the audio and with about a db and a half of makeup gain, and that into the Waves CLA 2A opto comp to add a bit of fairly smooth compression and juice the output another couple db (given the nature of the plug it's tough to state in quantitative terms how much it's doing, but the attenuation needle suggests it's taking 1-3db or so off peaks, and I'd guess it's in the 3-4db louder range coming out the other side). From there I'm hitting it with a limiter, Waves I think, to add maybe about another 3.5db to the perceived volume. Basically, stacking a couple compressors on top of each other, none of them independently all THAT hard. I've tried some other stuff - I snagged both the Waves J-whatever and Kramer tape sims in a recent sale and figured that would be a good way to add some of that "magical analog tape sound" to the mix, but honestly I thought in both cases the mixes sounded audibly better without them, more so for the Kramer than the other, and that the music sounded clearer and more dynamic on its own.
Anyway... As far as a general approach goes - line up all tracks in a single project, get them balanced against each other, then process the master bus - is this more or less defensible, or is there something stupid I'm doing here? On one hand, I get the "if it sounds good it is good" argument... But, if it could sound better if I did something else, and there's something that I'm doing doesn't make sense (for example, I could see fading the two tracks I want to fade out before they hit the series of compressors on the master bus meaning there's going to be a difference in how dynamics are perceived, somewhat anyway, between the main sections and the fades), well, I'd like to learn a bit from this project, too.
For now, I've been A/Bing against a couple modern Dylan albums - Time out of Mind and his Tell Tale Signs bootleg series - and while I'm nowhere near the engineer (or musician!) of all parties involved in that one, I'm at least not embarrassed by how they compare. So, I'm probably not doing anything truly stupid... But, I figure you guys will tell me, mercilessly, if I am. Thanks!