Fake Mastering

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Chris Jahn

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What are some good tricks to give your mixes a more mastered sound and VOLUME without the use of "real" mastering software or actually getting it mastered.

I assume just EQing, compressing, limiting etc... on the master fader, but i dont really know were to start, I know this is gonna make the mastering engineers out there cringe, but i jsut want to get my stuff a little clearer and louder for personal "in the car" listening. I will of course have my stuff done "for real" when its time. although i dont have anything good eneough for that just yet.
 
Just throw a brickwall limiter on there and crank it to about 10 db of gain reduction. Then do a high shelf at around 8k. (actually, you might want to do that first :p )

Instant fake mastering. Then you can write "master" on the disc and everything. ;)


Alternatively, you could just listen to the material and decide what it needed in order to be louder and clearer. Nobody knows where to start until they've heard the mix.
 
to get volume, you can normalize or use compression with gain adjustment....

I record my band's rehearsal and then listen back to the tapes in my car and at the gym on my iPod. I have found for my needs a 2:1 compression at 18db with gain (the 2:1 compression default setting on Sony's Sound Forge) This gets my mix quickly up to acceptable standards for critical songwriting and arranging listening. def, not good enough for distribution, but in a pinch its good enough for podcasts and streams.

I have read ALOT about mastering, and still I have a BASIC understanding of the ideas and techniques. I am nowhere near even a novice at mastering. ... and from a textbook perspective the trick i mention here, is NOT mastering at all, more just a dirty volume adjustment. Instead of just using Normalize, I use the compression, because my ears perceive a "smoothing" effect to the overall mix. :D
 
Amnesia Vivace said:
to get volume, you can normalize or use compression with gain adjustment....

I record my band's rehearsal and then listen back to the tapes in my car and at the gym on my iPod. I have found for my needs a 2:1 compression at 18db with gain (the 2:1 compression default setting on Sony's Sound Forge) This gets my mix quickly up to acceptable standards for critical songwriting and arranging listening. def, not good enough for distribution, but in a pinch its good enough for podcasts and streams.

I have read ALOT about mastering, and still I have a BASIC understanding of the ideas and techniques. I am nowhere near even a novice at mastering. ... and from a textbook perspective the trick i mention here, is NOT mastering at all, more just a dirty volume adjustment. Instead of just using Normalize, I use the compression, because my ears perceive a "smoothing" effect to the overall mix. :D
Click to expand...

Normalizing is no different than turning the fader up. If the guy has out of control peaks on one track in the mix and the average level of the whole mix is terribly low, normalizing isn't doing anything to fix that.
You're hearing an effect when you use compression because you are actually manipulating the dynamics of the audio. However, those basic settings you prescribe may work for you and for the way your mixes generally come together, but having no idea what ballpark this guy is in or what his material sounds like it's silly to give him compressor settings.

To the original poster, there are countless threads around here on such topics. You just need to start reading and learn the basics and then go from there.
 
Thanks, ill do a search and see what i come up with, although alot of what you said made sense, and its kinda what i thought anyway, but i wanted to hear someone else say it.

But yeah ill read up on old posts, generally i feel like this is a bad idea, but id like to hand members of my band and other interested parties material with out explaining why they have to turn it up really loud to hear it, and like i said jsut for me to rock in the car. but not for anything serious.
 
When you are cowboy mastering Id say less is more.
It can be easy to take EQ cuts/boosts and compression too far which will make your mix sound worse. And thats the exact opposite of what mastering is meant to do. :)

Just be cautious on how much you change the mix with mastering.
Take rests from mastering and come back to it to freshen your ears from time to time.

Eck
 
Here's my two cents -

Since you mixed it, you already have a great eq balance, so all you should really do is slap a limiter and a dithering algo on it and call it good. One of the things a ME does is offer a fresh set of ears in a fresh room so he may eq songs slightly. He may also adjust slightly to mesh songs together (which you might have to do, but again, this should probably be fixed "in the mix" as they say)

If your mix needs more than this, I'd remix it. :D
 
I suppose I say this a lot, but here goes again...

First things first: any effect on the master buss is a weapon of mass destruction.

Second things second: louder always SEEMS to sound better. At least until you learn to listen very critically to your mastering attempts. So for your first attempts you'll think it sounds fabulous- but a few weeks later it'll probably hurt your ears and turn your stomach. All part of the home brew mastering learning curve so don't be surprised or upset about it.

Learn to use your compressors and limiters on the master buss. Listen to the affect it has on your mix. Play with the settings and see how the effect changes. Figure out how to get the volume louder without changing the overall sound.

Then you'll notice that its really hard to do because the mix gets screwed up when you do that. This or that will be out of balance (where the hell did that hi-hat come from?!) ... then head back to your mix and fix that element. Squish away again and see what pops out of balance this time.

Repeat until a) your happy with the master or b) scared to make any more tweaks because it might be as good as you can get it for the moment.

Then, once dynamics are starting to feel like a useful tool for mastering... whip out an EQ and see what it does to the mix. You can always turn it off so crank those (virtual) knobs around and see where the "meat" and "tin" and "honk" and whatnot is in your mixes. You'll probably start seeing patterns ("Hmmm, everything seems a little muddy in the lows and low mids...")

Guess where you fix that? Yup, back in the mix. Better yet, fix it in your room. You may be finding the resonant freqs of your recording space. Difficult to do much about... but if you don't know what they are you can't do anything.

It takes a while to get at all good at it but you'll learn a lot about every other aspect of your process in the meantime. Just give yourself plenty of time to practice before making copies of your mastered CD for the whole world: its a new skill that will take a while to get down, just like learning a new instrument.
 
Chris Shaeffer said:
I suppose I say this a lot, but here goes again...

First things first: any effect on the master buss is a weapon of mass destruction.
Click to expand...
Tell that to Andy Wallace! :eek:

Eck
 
I find its best to get things right at the mixing stage, for the most part. If you have ridiculous peaks, etc., that master bus compression/limiting is gonna bone things up right quick.

Go back and fix things like that in the mix. I find that in the end, once peaks are controlled and everything sounds pretty damn good coming out of my monitors, running through the mixing desk, THEN after I mix it down to a wav file on my laptop, applying a bit of compression smooths it out a bit. However, when I take the mix out to the car, slap it on the iPod, etc., if I notice major EQ/dynamics/etc issues, I again go back and fix it in the mix.

This is due mainly to the fact that, say, if I mixed the electric bass too high, or that acoustic guitar seems too deep, applying a degenerative EQ on the low-end to the entire mixed track is going to kill everything else... if the vocals sounded great but the acoustic was a problem, that bass cut is now effecting at least a small portion of both instruments (depending on the range of the vocal performance, etc). Can't fix a turd... but if the turd is sitting next to great stuff, you only need to (attempt to) fix up the turd, not the whole package :P

I'm sure this isn't the best way to go about doing things, but it makes sense to me. And Im sure once I actually get a collection of songs that I'm happy with, I'll send em off to be professionally mastered, but I'd say the goal of any recording engineer (at home and in a professional setting), is to get as close to the final product without mastering that they can. Then, the mastering process will hopefully only be useful for making the songs/tracks sit well with one another - you shouldn't be looking to mastering as a cure-all for your poor-quality mixes.

Again, just the way I work... people do this stuff a million different ways, and roughly 999,000 of em are probably doing better than me :)
 
you need someone elses opinion, it's way to hard to hear your own stuff well enough to master it.
 
use eq and compression to get thre levels up...

try doing multiple passes to bring the levels up gradually.

may not work for all but sounds damn good to me.
 
giraffe said:
you need someone elses opinion, it's way to hard to hear your own stuff well enough to master it.
Click to expand...
Ahmen.
I just tried mastering one of my own mixes that is away at http://www.heathmans.co.uk/ getting mastered.
I couldnt get any results to make it sound better. I beleive I have a good ear for mastering but I just couldnt get my mix sounding better by mastering it.

That guy charges £100 an hour :eek: Thats $200 an hour US!
He better be GOOD :)

Eck
 
Yeah I agree it's fucking hard for me to mix my own shit, but a lot easier to mix someone else's.

Amen to that.
 
When I work on demos and want to get them loud (without 'real' mastering) I usually just slap a Waves L2 or L3 on and crank up the level.

In terms of EQ... try putting one on the master buss... set up about +6 db on a parametric EQ and sweep across the entire freq. range. Some freqs will sound good boosted, others will sound bad -- boost the freqs that sound good, cut the freqs that sound bad. But BE CAREFUL. It's very easy to overdue it, and experience plays a big part in your ability to make judgements. Try to get an even response across the frequency spectrum.

You also really need to know your monitoring. For example, a 3 db boost at 90Hz can sound great in your studio but once you pop that CD in your car the bass could be way off. One thing I do (alot) to get around this is A/B against other recordings that you know sound good. Try to "match" their EQ.

Be subtle with master buss EQing. Mastering engineers are often making VERY small adjustments... often as small as 0.1dB. But of course, your EQ curves will depend on the EQ of your mixes... so it's all relative, sometimes huge EQ cuts/boosts could be necessary.

Just my 2 cents.
 
MrLip said:
When I work on demos and want to get them loud (without 'real' mastering) I usually just slap a Waves L2 or L3 on and crank up the level.

In terms of EQ... try putting one on the master buss... set up about +6 db on a parametric EQ and sweep across the entire freq. range. Some freqs will sound good boosted, others will sound bad -- boost the freqs that sound good, cut the freqs that sound bad. But BE CAREFUL. It's very easy to overdue it, and experience plays a big part in your ability to make judgements. Try to get an even response across the frequency spectrum.

You also really need to know your monitoring. For example, a 3 db boost at 90Hz can sound great in your studio but once you pop that CD in your car the bass could be way off. One thing I do (alot) to get around this is A/B against other recordings that you know sound good. Try to "match" their EQ.

Be subtle with master buss EQing. Mastering engineers are often making VERY small adjustments... often as small as 0.1dB. But of course, your EQ curves will depend on the EQ of your mixes... so it's all relative, sometimes huge EQ cuts/boosts could be necessary.

Just my 2 cents.
Click to expand...
Well said dude.

Eck
 
MrLip said:
In terms of EQ... try putting one on the master buss... set up about +6 db on a parametric EQ and sweep across the entire freq. range. Some freqs will sound good boosted, others will sound bad -- boost the freqs that sound good, cut the freqs that sound bad. But BE CAREFUL. It's very easy to overdue it
...
Just my 2 cents.
Click to expand...
I'll add a penny to the pot :).

The ol' parametric sweep is a good idea, however I'd refine it to say (in general, with exceptions - IGWE) to just perform the cuts; boosting the "good frequencies" is often not necessary and can quickly lead to excessive EQ. Especially when one considers that anything that's not a "bad frequency" is, by default definition, a "good frequency". The makeup gain applied to adjust level for the EQ cuts will "boost" the good stuff just fine.

Also, I'd recommend perfoming this procedure before performing the mastering compression/limiting. Get rid of the unwanted stuff before it gets compressed to relative levels that will be harder to clean up. If one wants to do some general post-compression shaping EQ with a dB or two here or there of nice-sounding graphic, that works great, but the "fix EQ" should usually come pre-compression.

G.
 
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