NEWBIES - SOME STEREO MASTERING AND MP3 audio engineering tips.
---------------------------------------------------------------
I know in my last article i said it was my last, and then realised
last night i had not covered mastering your opus or mp3's etc.
so heres a few engineering tips.
1. What seperates the mastering men from the boys ?
The really superb masters of the audio mastering craft can be seperated
from the rest of us by one simple sentence. Their ability to
make a stereo master sound very good on any playback medium.
from dollar store earbuds to small and large home hi fi
and professional speakers and most other formats as well.
So when should you master yourself versus using a pro mastering engineer ?
To my mind the dividing line is if you are a name artist with a label deal.
Until then, in my opinion if like me you are a songwriter/engineer/producer
with your own small studio the expense probably is not worth it.
also to my mind you should learn mastering ANYWAY if you own a revenue
producing studio as it is another tool in your arsenal.
If you finally do manage to get signed by a large label,
as a result of sending out your demoes to labels , probably they will want to redo your songs THEIR WAY with
their own mastering engineers anyway.
so what do you do in the interim ?, or say you are producing small cd runs to sell
at markets and/or fairs or from your own internet site ? until you get
THAT NICE DEAL ? This is what i'm going to cover now.
2. Tools. There are various tools you can use to learn mastering.
firstly you well need a variety of playback mediums as i mentioned
in one of my previous articles. dollar ear buds, one or two old junk car speakers,
maybe a mono speaker from an old tv set or transistor radio, a pair of pretty decent
(upper range) AKG headphones. (eg; i use AKG 240's but there are many other good ones),
maybe a pair of junk computer speakers that came with your computer
(for folks listening to your songs over the internet), and a pair of
normal home hi-fi speakers that you would find in most homes.
supplemented by your own higher end monitors like yorkvilles etc.
The primary purpose being to have your mix sound good on all the foregoing.
you will need some sort of switch box to switch between the various speakers.
radio shack sells one.
the earbuds you can plug into a cassette deck connected to the output of your sound card (use the headphone jack on the
deck with a mini jack to qtr inch adaptor).
Secondly you will need MASTERING SOFTWARE. in your analysis of which software to
buy you should consider the need for the following features as well
as the normal audio editing features. noise reduction, parametric eq,
filtering eq, multiband compression is nice to have but not mandatory
imho particularly if you mixed correctly in the first place.
also if you can get down to sample level editing/redrawing waveforms,
its nice to have. although i find rarely the need to do it with good mixing.
If you have multitrack software already its likely a number of these features
are already incorporated, so you might not need to buy a seperate
piece of mastering software if you know what you are doing.
In my case i use magix audio studio and powertracks for multitracking,
and together they provide me with enough tools/enhancers for my
mastering needs. If you have no money some of the freeware/small shareware payment packages
have some nice features like audacity, and the original inexpensive
cool edit 96 or say goldwave. and there are many others. for more money
you might want to look at sound forge or say dart audio restoration tools,
and there are many many others. I still - my bias i guess - like some of the
original tools in cool edit 96. particular a tool called quick filter.
and the paraeq. because i can compare quickly the effect of some
quick eq filtering ideas on the master to improve it.
3. Preparation for mastering. BEFORE you do your final mixdown
that you will master its IMPERATIVE as i mentioned in one of
my other articles to CLEAN YOUR TRACKS up to obtain a low noise master.
for example silencing the sections where instruments arent playing,
unless your using creative leakage on tracks, and noise reducing say a noisy
guitar amplifier track, and creating clean vocal tracks that have been tailed (subtle fade outs)
appropriately. In summary you want the cleanest, lowest noise master you can get.
3. The mastering process.
3.1. Balancing. bring the master into your mastering software and play it back.
ask yourself if its balanced. ie: there are no major dips/boosts/weirdness in volume.
well you should have spotted this in the mixdown phase of course.
this is different from DYNAMICS. your looking here critically that the song on playback
is balanced. for example - you decide that instead of careening to a stop suddenly
at the end of the song, it might be nice to FADE OUT the song as you
have a nice repeating hook at the end of the song. so try a fade out,
and see if this sounds natural or say the song you feel needs a fade in,
instead of careening in or maybe one part of the song is down a bit in level
more than you would like , so you highlight that part and check off zero crossing detect ,
and do a subtle (NOT TOO MUCH !) volume boost of 3 per cent.
or - say you realise you like this one phrase at the end of the song, lets say a vocal chorus,
but its only sung once, and you would like it to repeat 5 times to fade out lets say;
well you would highlight it, paste it in 4 more times, then hilite the
whole shebang and do a fade out to zero volume. Of course you should have caught
this problem prior to mixdown, but for some new to recording you might
not have thought about it. actually you should have caught the problem in pre-production.
In summary balancing is as the name implies doing subtle corrections
to the mix to balance everything out. A point of note. if your stereo master
is way down in volume when you play it back according to the waveform display and
level meters. rather than normalising it might be a good idea to
redo your mixdown hotter. One more thing one does in balancing is play the song through noting
the highest peaks. The highest peak i aim for is about -3db.
NOT RIGHT ON ZERO db. let me tell you why. If you or your label decides to remaster your mix
this will allow the mastering engineer some room to work in.
Also let me cover off this term ZERO CROSSING. what does it mean ?
if you look at a waveform in detail you will see it crossing zero level many many thousands of times.
if you dont check this option, you could get a POP when editing.
zero crossing ensures you dont hear pops. if your software does not have this option(some do it automatically),
when hiliting a part to edit ensure the hilite starts and ends as
near to zero level(ie; the line across) as you can to ensure no pops.
3.2 filtering. in this phase of mastering you are trying different filtering/eq tricks.
for example firstly (actually i do this on individual tracks prior to mixdown),
look at the very low end below 100 hz. lot of junk down there.
does your mix sound better by doing selective filtering of the low end ?
do many tests with different cut off points. now repeat for low mids, mids, upper mids,
highs, and upper highs. As i said before in another article try CUTS
before BOOSTS. you dont want MUSH. your aim as far as possible is CLARITY on the various playback mediums.
for example you find the mix sizzles badly on earbuds. a likely occurrence, so you
rethink your hi end strategy. maybe at one point in the mix you hear a dominant
frequency that stands out that you dont like. But you dont know where that
frequency is. well one aspect i like about cool edit 96 is it will display the
frequencies of a hilited audio selection for you. i'm sure other
packages do the same. what you do is look at the frequency graph,
and lets say you see a highly dominant peak at eg; 2.8khz. really zoom in
on that bit of the waveform (very fine detailed editing here !)
and use a para eq with a very narrow Q factor with a frequency of 2.8 khz and try cutting 1 or
2 db or more without affecting the rest of the mix. I should say this is very very
detailed editing work, and if you are not experienced it will take more than a little trial
and error. you must of course use the zero crossing technique again duscussed earlier.
This is but an intro to filtering. some packages like goldwave for example have very advanced
filtering algorithms you can custom build for yourself.
audacity has some prebuilt eq algorithms you can try, and there are a thousand and one other options.
If you notice this is far more detailed work than just slapping a plug in over a mix.
but this is the sort of work mastering engineers used to do using
custom outboard hardware years ago on mixes prior to computers with a lot less control
than we have today. A LOT of it is EXPERIMENTATION.
One final tip, compare frequency analysis of your own mixes to commercial major releases
of CD's in a lot of different genres. from old orchestral recordings right through to present day.
you can learn quite a bit this way. But if you think rigidly copying
eq curves will work , its unlikely because every piece of music is different.
and probably you might do more harm to your mix than good in some cases.
3.3 Compression. This is a whole book in itself. i dont use a lot frankly.
at most i use very mild compression. One of my songs at soundclick.com/bmanning called
"Key lime pie" used quite heavy compression because i felt the song
sounded better pumping away because it was that type of song.
and on this one song it seemed to work. but its the exception rather than the rule.
for ME anyway. some people imho go too hog wild on compression of the whole mix.
I come from the old school of everything in moderation. i would suggest
if you MUST use compression to start of with very mild settings, and back off
when it just does not sound good on your various playback mediums.
BE CAREFULL. heavy compression might sound great on one pair of speakers but not on
another. On slower and particularly orchestral type songs i would try the mildest compression settings.
on faster songs and say heavy rock you can try and see if heavier and tighter compression works.
BUT ONE THING NOT TO DO is compresss so the natural dynamics of the
song are affected. Now lets talk multiband . if you have one, certainly try it.
for those who dont know. its all about affecting certain frequencies while leaving others alone.
frankly every time i tried it , it didnt do too much for me. i prefer selective filtering
as discussed earlier. but if it floats your boat - give it a try and see if your mix is better
on ALL playback mediums. you will find - like in magix that i use,
included with the compressor limitor is a noise cut off control often.
many other packages have this feature as well. if you have done your
track cleaning/noise reduction work prior to mixing, eg: if you have a noisy sound card,
you shouldnt really need this. so you can set it very low like say below -40 db.
a word of CAUTION. dont set it so high that you hear music cutting out.
if you MUST USE IT, do several tests until you reach where the nusic cuts out then back off down by say
10 db.
Once again this is but a basic introduction. One last tip, and its a trick to try,
sometimes it works sometimes it doesnt - try a bit of mild compression sometimes on the fade out or fade in to a song.
soometimes i find this can be a tad PLEASING.
3.4. Other tricks/enhancing the master. There are many other tricks you can try on your mix.
Maybe you have a very dry mix BUT you want it to sound more spacious.
in essence you realise your mixdown is not all it could be or lets say a client brought
into your studio a mix to improve. There are many tools once again at
your disposal. You could try adding dimension to your mix. for example the free sound engine editor
you will find on the internet has a 3D type effect you might want to try.
BUT DONT OVERDO IT. various packages like cool edit, and sound forge and many others have hall, cathedral,
and all sorts of "space designer/room designer" type simulation/enhancer effects.
when i'm in a mad crazy experimental mood one trick i do is open up a new project in my
multitrack software, import my stereo mix as track one, then import
as track 2 my effected mix (eg: a hall lets say) then carefully play with
the volume on the effected mix - track 2 - putting it at various levels
under track 1 and seeing how pleasing it sounds. or say i want the effect on the
whole mix for just one part of the song, say on a distance fade out using volume
automation on track 2 and even pan automation if say i want the mix to
pan off to one side in the distance at the end of the song.
you can hear this effect on my song "squirrels" , but in this case the mix fades pretty down centre of the stereo image.
"woohoo" also fades the same way with a fading guitar lead effect.
Sometimes though it just doesnt work ! but sometimes it does. on my song "missile" - the little missile fades off into the distance
at the end of the song. all these are little tricks you might want to think about in your own productions.
I find they are most effective when not used on the whole mix, but maybe a small part of the mix to paint a different sound
picture for the listener. Once again a LOT is trial and error.
4. creating the mp3/cd production.
I'm just going to cover the basics due to time/space cobstraints.
Firstly try various mp3 conversion software to see what sounds good to
you. you basically want a wave format to mp3 convertor software.
There are many available. if your stuck for money try the free lame encoder.
and there are many others available. basically an mp3 encoder software
realises a smaller amount of space. different ones might use different algorithms -
so its best to try a few. after encoding its a good idea to play
your mp3 back both in windows media player and other mp3 player software.
to see if the mix STILL sounds good.
if you upload your mp3 song to an internet music site for musicians its also a good idea to play
it back in hifi and in lofi from the site to see how well it sounds coming off the site.
you might find that a new round of mastering is in order !
Ideally your mp3 should be free of artifacts, but this is sometimes impossible at lofi playback.
You might also be carefull of the bitrate you select for encoding.
some sites only like certain bitrates. you might also consider how you store
your mp3's. some store them off to CD. two hard drives is usefull because
then you can put a folder on each to store all your original mp3 songs,
so if one hard drive goes bad you have the second hard drive as back up.
another way to back up is to store say at a relations
house your CD's of your songs in wave and mp3 format. I call this offsite backup.
A trick from the computer industry. You might also consider if you have a minidisc
recorder playing out your mastered mixes to the minidisc. or say in worse case,
if you dont have any money to a cassette recording. best to do two cassettes in case one goes bad !
another storage/backup possibility is a vhs hifi recorder, or if you have an old tascam half inch 8 track recorder
you dont use much maybe backing up to a reel of tape or even a normal stereo reel to reel recorder.
If you are producing your own CD's. at home say. I might suggest
one tip. remember we talked earlier about the -3db mastering level ?
If you have done your mastering correctly its nice if there is some consistency on levels
between the various songs on your CD , so the listener does not have to keep changing the volume of
his/her receiver when dfferent songs of yours are playing. ie: you dont want one song ultra loud, and the next ultra soft.
something to think about. Once again playback your CD through your
different speakers and even earbuds to search for deficiences.
If you are serious about selling on CD an album of your songs,
also think about the sequence of songs you want on the CD,
and try to ensure a logical flow if there are themes or stories to the
songs that interweave. maybe you want a fast paced song followed by a slower song as an example.
5. Some TIPS if you are using on board sound or a cheap consumer sound card to record songs.
As you are aware - some on board sound chips and cheap consumer sound cards can be quite hissy and noisy.
i often get asked by newbies how to cope with this when they just
see no way to shell out for a pro sound card. they simply must use what they have for multitrack recording/mastering.
If you are in this situation, and ive done it to show friends,
you CAN actually get pretty decent (NOT PERFECT !) but pretty decent results if you follow these tips.
firstly watch your line in levels. some cards seem to work better at stronger line input levels,
other with weaker. so do some tests. NEVER USE MIC input. ONLY LINE INPUT.
next after each track is recorded. do this RIGOROUSLY. NOISE REDUCE each track.
using noise prints. Many editors have noise reduction features.
like cool edit, sound forge,goldwave as examples. audacity has one but
ive not had a chance to try it. after getting the noise print from the beginning or end of the track,
where there is no playing or singing, try MILD noise reduction , around 10 per cent, NOT EXTREME
levels of reduction, BUT try multiple passes.
this is one of the tricks i used to help our fellow bbs member
magichord out awhile back. luckily i could get a noise print off the master where there was no music playing.
I dont know if its still up , but go to nowhereradio.com/attaboy/singles to hear the before and after.
a sweet acoustic guitar piece that i liked a LOT.
so you see you CAN get a pretty decent result with cheap sound cards
PROVIDED you carefully clean up each track afterwards.
once again with cheap sound cards watch the high end from 2k to 7k.
some can be quite shrill. just do subtle cuts of this frequency range on your tracks and/or master if needed.
some mics can be quite shrill in this range as well.
Well thats about it. I'm sure when i go to bed tonight i'll realise ive missed some vitally important point,
and kick myself appropriately for being a dummy.
but i hope ive covered most of the bases to help newbies.
ONE FINAL TIP. through all this make sure you check your masters to see how well they playback in MONO.
I'm guilty of sometimes forgetting this myself !
Please note, i dont consider myself an ace mastering engineer,
but i HAVE picked up a lot of tricks along the way over many years.
best regards to all, and i hope this all helps newbies just a tad.
bmanning.
PS - to GIDGE. i just dont have time to edit this. so feel free.
your a good editor !!
---------------------------------------------------------------
I know in my last article i said it was my last, and then realised
last night i had not covered mastering your opus or mp3's etc.
so heres a few engineering tips.
1. What seperates the mastering men from the boys ?
The really superb masters of the audio mastering craft can be seperated
from the rest of us by one simple sentence. Their ability to
make a stereo master sound very good on any playback medium.
from dollar store earbuds to small and large home hi fi
and professional speakers and most other formats as well.
So when should you master yourself versus using a pro mastering engineer ?
To my mind the dividing line is if you are a name artist with a label deal.
Until then, in my opinion if like me you are a songwriter/engineer/producer
with your own small studio the expense probably is not worth it.
also to my mind you should learn mastering ANYWAY if you own a revenue
producing studio as it is another tool in your arsenal.
If you finally do manage to get signed by a large label,
as a result of sending out your demoes to labels , probably they will want to redo your songs THEIR WAY with
their own mastering engineers anyway.
so what do you do in the interim ?, or say you are producing small cd runs to sell
at markets and/or fairs or from your own internet site ? until you get
THAT NICE DEAL ? This is what i'm going to cover now.
2. Tools. There are various tools you can use to learn mastering.
firstly you well need a variety of playback mediums as i mentioned
in one of my previous articles. dollar ear buds, one or two old junk car speakers,
maybe a mono speaker from an old tv set or transistor radio, a pair of pretty decent
(upper range) AKG headphones. (eg; i use AKG 240's but there are many other good ones),
maybe a pair of junk computer speakers that came with your computer
(for folks listening to your songs over the internet), and a pair of
normal home hi-fi speakers that you would find in most homes.
supplemented by your own higher end monitors like yorkvilles etc.
The primary purpose being to have your mix sound good on all the foregoing.
you will need some sort of switch box to switch between the various speakers.
radio shack sells one.
the earbuds you can plug into a cassette deck connected to the output of your sound card (use the headphone jack on the
deck with a mini jack to qtr inch adaptor).
Secondly you will need MASTERING SOFTWARE. in your analysis of which software to
buy you should consider the need for the following features as well
as the normal audio editing features. noise reduction, parametric eq,
filtering eq, multiband compression is nice to have but not mandatory
imho particularly if you mixed correctly in the first place.
also if you can get down to sample level editing/redrawing waveforms,
its nice to have. although i find rarely the need to do it with good mixing.
If you have multitrack software already its likely a number of these features
are already incorporated, so you might not need to buy a seperate
piece of mastering software if you know what you are doing.
In my case i use magix audio studio and powertracks for multitracking,
and together they provide me with enough tools/enhancers for my
mastering needs. If you have no money some of the freeware/small shareware payment packages
have some nice features like audacity, and the original inexpensive
cool edit 96 or say goldwave. and there are many others. for more money
you might want to look at sound forge or say dart audio restoration tools,
and there are many many others. I still - my bias i guess - like some of the
original tools in cool edit 96. particular a tool called quick filter.
and the paraeq. because i can compare quickly the effect of some
quick eq filtering ideas on the master to improve it.
3. Preparation for mastering. BEFORE you do your final mixdown
that you will master its IMPERATIVE as i mentioned in one of
my other articles to CLEAN YOUR TRACKS up to obtain a low noise master.
for example silencing the sections where instruments arent playing,
unless your using creative leakage on tracks, and noise reducing say a noisy
guitar amplifier track, and creating clean vocal tracks that have been tailed (subtle fade outs)
appropriately. In summary you want the cleanest, lowest noise master you can get.
3. The mastering process.
3.1. Balancing. bring the master into your mastering software and play it back.
ask yourself if its balanced. ie: there are no major dips/boosts/weirdness in volume.
well you should have spotted this in the mixdown phase of course.
this is different from DYNAMICS. your looking here critically that the song on playback
is balanced. for example - you decide that instead of careening to a stop suddenly
at the end of the song, it might be nice to FADE OUT the song as you
have a nice repeating hook at the end of the song. so try a fade out,
and see if this sounds natural or say the song you feel needs a fade in,
instead of careening in or maybe one part of the song is down a bit in level
more than you would like , so you highlight that part and check off zero crossing detect ,
and do a subtle (NOT TOO MUCH !) volume boost of 3 per cent.
or - say you realise you like this one phrase at the end of the song, lets say a vocal chorus,
but its only sung once, and you would like it to repeat 5 times to fade out lets say;
well you would highlight it, paste it in 4 more times, then hilite the
whole shebang and do a fade out to zero volume. Of course you should have caught
this problem prior to mixdown, but for some new to recording you might
not have thought about it. actually you should have caught the problem in pre-production.
In summary balancing is as the name implies doing subtle corrections
to the mix to balance everything out. A point of note. if your stereo master
is way down in volume when you play it back according to the waveform display and
level meters. rather than normalising it might be a good idea to
redo your mixdown hotter. One more thing one does in balancing is play the song through noting
the highest peaks. The highest peak i aim for is about -3db.
NOT RIGHT ON ZERO db. let me tell you why. If you or your label decides to remaster your mix
this will allow the mastering engineer some room to work in.
Also let me cover off this term ZERO CROSSING. what does it mean ?
if you look at a waveform in detail you will see it crossing zero level many many thousands of times.
if you dont check this option, you could get a POP when editing.
zero crossing ensures you dont hear pops. if your software does not have this option(some do it automatically),
when hiliting a part to edit ensure the hilite starts and ends as
near to zero level(ie; the line across) as you can to ensure no pops.
3.2 filtering. in this phase of mastering you are trying different filtering/eq tricks.
for example firstly (actually i do this on individual tracks prior to mixdown),
look at the very low end below 100 hz. lot of junk down there.
does your mix sound better by doing selective filtering of the low end ?
do many tests with different cut off points. now repeat for low mids, mids, upper mids,
highs, and upper highs. As i said before in another article try CUTS
before BOOSTS. you dont want MUSH. your aim as far as possible is CLARITY on the various playback mediums.
for example you find the mix sizzles badly on earbuds. a likely occurrence, so you
rethink your hi end strategy. maybe at one point in the mix you hear a dominant
frequency that stands out that you dont like. But you dont know where that
frequency is. well one aspect i like about cool edit 96 is it will display the
frequencies of a hilited audio selection for you. i'm sure other
packages do the same. what you do is look at the frequency graph,
and lets say you see a highly dominant peak at eg; 2.8khz. really zoom in
on that bit of the waveform (very fine detailed editing here !)
and use a para eq with a very narrow Q factor with a frequency of 2.8 khz and try cutting 1 or
2 db or more without affecting the rest of the mix. I should say this is very very
detailed editing work, and if you are not experienced it will take more than a little trial
and error. you must of course use the zero crossing technique again duscussed earlier.
This is but an intro to filtering. some packages like goldwave for example have very advanced
filtering algorithms you can custom build for yourself.
audacity has some prebuilt eq algorithms you can try, and there are a thousand and one other options.
If you notice this is far more detailed work than just slapping a plug in over a mix.
but this is the sort of work mastering engineers used to do using
custom outboard hardware years ago on mixes prior to computers with a lot less control
than we have today. A LOT of it is EXPERIMENTATION.
One final tip, compare frequency analysis of your own mixes to commercial major releases
of CD's in a lot of different genres. from old orchestral recordings right through to present day.
you can learn quite a bit this way. But if you think rigidly copying
eq curves will work , its unlikely because every piece of music is different.
and probably you might do more harm to your mix than good in some cases.
3.3 Compression. This is a whole book in itself. i dont use a lot frankly.
at most i use very mild compression. One of my songs at soundclick.com/bmanning called
"Key lime pie" used quite heavy compression because i felt the song
sounded better pumping away because it was that type of song.
and on this one song it seemed to work. but its the exception rather than the rule.
for ME anyway. some people imho go too hog wild on compression of the whole mix.
I come from the old school of everything in moderation. i would suggest
if you MUST use compression to start of with very mild settings, and back off
when it just does not sound good on your various playback mediums.
BE CAREFULL. heavy compression might sound great on one pair of speakers but not on
another. On slower and particularly orchestral type songs i would try the mildest compression settings.
on faster songs and say heavy rock you can try and see if heavier and tighter compression works.
BUT ONE THING NOT TO DO is compresss so the natural dynamics of the
song are affected. Now lets talk multiband . if you have one, certainly try it.
for those who dont know. its all about affecting certain frequencies while leaving others alone.
frankly every time i tried it , it didnt do too much for me. i prefer selective filtering
as discussed earlier. but if it floats your boat - give it a try and see if your mix is better
on ALL playback mediums. you will find - like in magix that i use,
included with the compressor limitor is a noise cut off control often.
many other packages have this feature as well. if you have done your
track cleaning/noise reduction work prior to mixing, eg: if you have a noisy sound card,
you shouldnt really need this. so you can set it very low like say below -40 db.
a word of CAUTION. dont set it so high that you hear music cutting out.
if you MUST USE IT, do several tests until you reach where the nusic cuts out then back off down by say
10 db.
Once again this is but a basic introduction. One last tip, and its a trick to try,
sometimes it works sometimes it doesnt - try a bit of mild compression sometimes on the fade out or fade in to a song.
soometimes i find this can be a tad PLEASING.
3.4. Other tricks/enhancing the master. There are many other tricks you can try on your mix.
Maybe you have a very dry mix BUT you want it to sound more spacious.
in essence you realise your mixdown is not all it could be or lets say a client brought
into your studio a mix to improve. There are many tools once again at
your disposal. You could try adding dimension to your mix. for example the free sound engine editor
you will find on the internet has a 3D type effect you might want to try.
BUT DONT OVERDO IT. various packages like cool edit, and sound forge and many others have hall, cathedral,
and all sorts of "space designer/room designer" type simulation/enhancer effects.
when i'm in a mad crazy experimental mood one trick i do is open up a new project in my
multitrack software, import my stereo mix as track one, then import
as track 2 my effected mix (eg: a hall lets say) then carefully play with
the volume on the effected mix - track 2 - putting it at various levels
under track 1 and seeing how pleasing it sounds. or say i want the effect on the
whole mix for just one part of the song, say on a distance fade out using volume
automation on track 2 and even pan automation if say i want the mix to
pan off to one side in the distance at the end of the song.
you can hear this effect on my song "squirrels" , but in this case the mix fades pretty down centre of the stereo image.
"woohoo" also fades the same way with a fading guitar lead effect.
Sometimes though it just doesnt work ! but sometimes it does. on my song "missile" - the little missile fades off into the distance
at the end of the song. all these are little tricks you might want to think about in your own productions.
I find they are most effective when not used on the whole mix, but maybe a small part of the mix to paint a different sound
picture for the listener. Once again a LOT is trial and error.
4. creating the mp3/cd production.
I'm just going to cover the basics due to time/space cobstraints.
Firstly try various mp3 conversion software to see what sounds good to
you. you basically want a wave format to mp3 convertor software.
There are many available. if your stuck for money try the free lame encoder.
and there are many others available. basically an mp3 encoder software
realises a smaller amount of space. different ones might use different algorithms -
so its best to try a few. after encoding its a good idea to play
your mp3 back both in windows media player and other mp3 player software.
to see if the mix STILL sounds good.
if you upload your mp3 song to an internet music site for musicians its also a good idea to play
it back in hifi and in lofi from the site to see how well it sounds coming off the site.
you might find that a new round of mastering is in order !
Ideally your mp3 should be free of artifacts, but this is sometimes impossible at lofi playback.
You might also be carefull of the bitrate you select for encoding.
some sites only like certain bitrates. you might also consider how you store
your mp3's. some store them off to CD. two hard drives is usefull because
then you can put a folder on each to store all your original mp3 songs,
so if one hard drive goes bad you have the second hard drive as back up.
another way to back up is to store say at a relations
house your CD's of your songs in wave and mp3 format. I call this offsite backup.
A trick from the computer industry. You might also consider if you have a minidisc
recorder playing out your mastered mixes to the minidisc. or say in worse case,
if you dont have any money to a cassette recording. best to do two cassettes in case one goes bad !
another storage/backup possibility is a vhs hifi recorder, or if you have an old tascam half inch 8 track recorder
you dont use much maybe backing up to a reel of tape or even a normal stereo reel to reel recorder.
If you are producing your own CD's. at home say. I might suggest
one tip. remember we talked earlier about the -3db mastering level ?
If you have done your mastering correctly its nice if there is some consistency on levels
between the various songs on your CD , so the listener does not have to keep changing the volume of
his/her receiver when dfferent songs of yours are playing. ie: you dont want one song ultra loud, and the next ultra soft.
something to think about. Once again playback your CD through your
different speakers and even earbuds to search for deficiences.
If you are serious about selling on CD an album of your songs,
also think about the sequence of songs you want on the CD,
and try to ensure a logical flow if there are themes or stories to the
songs that interweave. maybe you want a fast paced song followed by a slower song as an example.
5. Some TIPS if you are using on board sound or a cheap consumer sound card to record songs.
As you are aware - some on board sound chips and cheap consumer sound cards can be quite hissy and noisy.
i often get asked by newbies how to cope with this when they just
see no way to shell out for a pro sound card. they simply must use what they have for multitrack recording/mastering.
If you are in this situation, and ive done it to show friends,
you CAN actually get pretty decent (NOT PERFECT !) but pretty decent results if you follow these tips.
firstly watch your line in levels. some cards seem to work better at stronger line input levels,
other with weaker. so do some tests. NEVER USE MIC input. ONLY LINE INPUT.
next after each track is recorded. do this RIGOROUSLY. NOISE REDUCE each track.
using noise prints. Many editors have noise reduction features.
like cool edit, sound forge,goldwave as examples. audacity has one but
ive not had a chance to try it. after getting the noise print from the beginning or end of the track,
where there is no playing or singing, try MILD noise reduction , around 10 per cent, NOT EXTREME
levels of reduction, BUT try multiple passes.
this is one of the tricks i used to help our fellow bbs member
magichord out awhile back. luckily i could get a noise print off the master where there was no music playing.
I dont know if its still up , but go to nowhereradio.com/attaboy/singles to hear the before and after.
a sweet acoustic guitar piece that i liked a LOT.
so you see you CAN get a pretty decent result with cheap sound cards
PROVIDED you carefully clean up each track afterwards.
once again with cheap sound cards watch the high end from 2k to 7k.
some can be quite shrill. just do subtle cuts of this frequency range on your tracks and/or master if needed.
some mics can be quite shrill in this range as well.
Well thats about it. I'm sure when i go to bed tonight i'll realise ive missed some vitally important point,
and kick myself appropriately for being a dummy.
but i hope ive covered most of the bases to help newbies.
ONE FINAL TIP. through all this make sure you check your masters to see how well they playback in MONO.
I'm guilty of sometimes forgetting this myself !
Please note, i dont consider myself an ace mastering engineer,
but i HAVE picked up a lot of tricks along the way over many years.
best regards to all, and i hope this all helps newbies just a tad.
bmanning.
PS - to GIDGE. i just dont have time to edit this. so feel free.
your a good editor !!