First Album, Mastering Questions.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Leena
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Leena

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Hello musical geniuses,

It's been a while since I posted in this forum but basically i'm after some advice regarding my first album, i'm extremely excited about it and I love what i've created but since this is my first piece of work that I will be charging my fans to purchase, i'm sort of wondering about mastering. I'll be honest and say that I've never, ever given mastering a second thought when creating my music and I've always been pretty happy with how my songs sound but i've started obsessing about getting the perfect "album" sound with these tracks and i'm wondering what I should do.

My biggest problem is cost obviously, I know a lot of you guys will say not to skimp on the Mastering if you're going to do it but it is an issue for me unfortunately.

I mean, i'd love if you guys could maybe have a listen to some of my songs to let me know your opinion on my production skills and let me know if mastering is something I really need to start looking into.

Here's one of my more epic sounding tracks which is a good example of the style of my album :

And this one is a good representation of the softer sounding songs :


Any advice or tips would be amazing, I really appreciate the feedback.

Thanks so much.
Karliene.
 
First song kinda reminds me of Blackmore's Night. Pretty cool!

Sounds pretty good. I just self-mastered one of my band's albums. I'll let you know exactly what I did. I took all 11 songs as stereo tracks, lined them up on 11 different tracks on the timeline. Then on the master buss I applied two-buss effects as needed. Everything I put on was subtle, as the tracks already sounded great (like yours). You may use different effects (or maybe no effects at all!), but I personally used M/S EQ, console simulation, and tape simulation. Livened things up a bit and glued the mixes together. Again, no matter what effects you use here (if you use any), subtly is key.

Then with those effects on the master buss, I took all the songs and adjusted their volumes so that their levels matched. I used the vocals as my primary guide here. Obviously the ballad was softer than the others. I used a VU meter to get things roughly the same, but then I fine-tuned by ear. This may also be a good time to catch to see if there's volume discrepancies...for example, if you have two songs the same volume, but one has slightly louder bass or softer vocals or whatever, then go back into the mix, make the adjustment, re-render and load it back into this master timeline. Don't do anything corrective on the stereo mixdown, always go back into the multitrack files. With that being said, with my album, there was one song I could not figure out for the life of me how to make it not muddy. In the low mids there was a lot going on, I tried to fix it in the mix but I just could not figure it out. So I ended up doing corrective EQ just on the that one song, not the master buss. Again, it was subtle, and it fixed the problem, but that is more of a last resort.

I took the whole master timeline and rendered one long stereo track for the whole album. At this point you have to figure out what you want to do volume wise. Do you just normalize it to -0.3 dB and call it good, or do you want to compress and/or limit some of the peaks to get some more volume? Or just compress the shit out of it so you can fight the loudness wars? Whatever the case, do that here. (I did in between the first and second option. I threw a brickwall limiter and ended up catching only about 2-3 peaks per song, and nothing more than 2 dB's worth, so it barely did anything) Then dither down to 44.1 khz 16 bit and then save the individual songs.

There you go.

Or ignore what I said, and pay someone else to do it.

Really, when it comes down to it, mastering is less about making the individual songs sound better, its about making every song sound cohesive together. And if you want to get purely technical, all mastering is is getting the songs ready for release and distribution, as far as the technical side of the process goes.
 
Leena said:
I mean, i'd love if you guys could maybe have a listen to some of my songs to let me know your opinion on my production skills and let me know if mastering is something I really need to start looking into.
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Just giving a quick listen on phones, it sounds very good. Nice job.

The only one small thing I noticed was a bit of sibilance on the vocal, primarily in the first verse of the first song. As it gets into the song it becomes less noticeable. Really a minor thing. Other than that, it sounds right on.. Best of luck with the project.
 
I think you can get RAMI to play drums on your next song....


...I would play guitar, but then, I'd have to dress like Ritchie Blackmore. ;)



Well done for the genre..
 
Rami, you sir are a pig. To the OP, you have an amazing voice, and the music you are doing is unique. Great job.
 
You're welcome, Rami. I'm glad you took that in the spirit it was intended.
 
bongoboy said:
You're welcome, Rami. I'm glad you took that in the spirit it was intended.
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Well, the last thing I was in a position to do was get confrontational about it, even if i thought you meant it as an insult to me. I realize that, while I was just trying to be funny, what I said could have offended, so it would have warranted a hostile response from anyone reading it.

I really was just trying to be funny. Besides, I can't argue with the fact that I am a pig. :cool:
 
This:

iZotope Ozone 5 Complete Mastering System

Is the mastering suite I use. You can download it free and it will work for 10 days. The guy that recommended it to me used it "for free" to master his whole project. They let you keep your finished files. So they allow full use free, for 10 days.

I would get the download, read how to use the modules and see if you like what you get. If you dont, your under no obligation to buy it. Its very easy to use and it was well worth the $$$ to me.

Either way it gives you a chance to learn and hear a bit of mastering your own tracks.
IMO I think it would add something to an already nice sounding project.
Good Luck!
 
I hear the Blackmore's Night similarity to style/sound. Very nice. I don't have a mastering listening place, so can't tell you what your production needs, a good mastering house will get all the tunes on the same level for overall volume and tone. You could ask Max at Spendourmastering.com about doing it - he did my latest album for a very very good price, got the bass issues cleaned up nicely.
 
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