making it smooth like a shaven yak.

J

jsebastiano

New member
I can make my mixes louder than yours!! but who cares how loud it is if you play it on an unfamiliar system and you have a flabby diuretic rumble and high end spikes sticking needles in your eardrums.... I'd like to bring this up because i haven't seen it mentioned yet... smoothing out the rough edges. Mastering engineers do this as well as brickwall the dynamics out of your mixes (part sarcasm).. i'm no expert, Im an upstart geekling just trying to get a grasp on techniques and methods myself... So, I was wondering if any of you out there have any thoughts, comments, or methods you yourselves use for getting a finished mix to shine when you don't feel like spending $1000 to pay a mastering engineer... which i don't. Because.. if i could afford that, my family would be eating steak. Every night... and maybe even at lunchtime too.

i will say what I have been attempting to do is go into the pre master, and do a cut from 30 hz to smooth out the diarrhea.... but i find that the higher octaves tend to give me more of a fight... multi band copmpression perhaps? cut offending frequencies only to make the rest of the mix a little less there... what do yas think?
 
Sounds to me like your mixes aren't ready for mastering. Most of what it sounds like you're trying to accomplish hints at the fact that the mixes need work. Why are there "offending frequencies" in a finished mix, for example?

Mastering isn't the stage where you should be cleaning shit up and trying to save a mix. It's where you should be able to take a finished mix and make it shine...not save it.
 
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ehh lately it was just a little between 3 and 5 k that was spiking a little too much for my taste... giving it a piercing sound...
 
I would find the track source for those issues in the mix. Cutting and shaving a yak in mastering will affect other tracks that don't need to be shaved. :D
 
jsebastiano said:
ehh lately it was just a little between 3 and 5 k that was spiking a little too much for my taste... giving it a piercing sound...
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But isn't that precisely RAMI's point, that if there are parts of the mix that you the mixer are not happy with, then it can't be finished and therefore mastering would be like putting on the hair gel without having washed and styled the hair first.
 
jsebastiano said:
I can make my mixes louder than yours!! but who cares how loud it is if you play it on an unfamiliar system and you have a flabby diuretic rumble and high end spikes sticking needles in your eardrums.... I'd like to bring this up because i haven't seen it mentioned yet... smoothing out the rough edges. Mastering engineers do this as well as brickwall the dynamics out of your mixes (part sarcasm).. i'm no expert, Im an upstart geekling just trying to get a grasp on techniques and methods myself... So, I was wondering if any of you out there have any thoughts, comments, or methods you yourselves use for getting a finished mix to shine when you don't feel like spending $1000 to pay a mastering engineer... which i don't. Because.. if i could afford that, my family would be eating steak. Every night... and maybe even at lunchtime too.

i will say what I have been attempting to do is go into the pre master, and do a cut from 30 hz to smooth out the diarrhea.... but i find that the higher octaves tend to give me more of a fight... multi band compression perhaps? cut offending frequencies only to make the rest of the mix a little less there... what do yas think?
Click to expand...
I think a big part of being able to master your own mixes is being able to disconnect from the mix and try to hear it as if "you" didn't mix it.

If you have a decent setup and trust what you hear in your room, it's not impossible to do, although I can't see any huge eq changes happening because you would've taken care of that in the mix. It's not like you can say using a certain tool like mbc or cut of boost of certain frequencies will always work, because each recording is different.

Being able to hear what needs improvement just comes with years of critical listening/experience. For the most part that is what you pay for when you would hire an ME.
 
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