My own mastering thread. Oh my...

  • Thread starter Thread starter Roel
  • Start date Start date
Roel

Roel

That SMART guy.
On friday and saturday, some of my friends have this kind of funny thing going on. They do 2 gigs, dressed up like rappers, and rapping funny extremely naughty lyrics. They got about 5 songs. One is made with sampler and sequencer, one is a commercial tune without the vocal track, and the others are made using some program on pc.

I'm the sounddude, so I guess it comes down to making those 5 songs sound alike. Make sure that they have the same amount of heavy kicks in it...

I already started playing with it. Putting a mastering-toolkit from my VS1880 to work, and I'm getting in to it. NOT. Well, I found out how to get the bass pumping. Which is really a start.

But how do you start on that thing? That mastering toolkit has a 4 band EQ, input gainstage, 3-band expander and 3-band compressor, and end-mixer for those bands.

How do you get the do's and don't of this? I never worked with multiband compression. I like it for now, but I hardly have an idea where I'm going, and if I'm going in the right direction.

Help me out. I'll get the tracks to sound alike, or at least, to not differ too much. But I wanna learn about this... So tell me...
 
Roel said:


Help me out. I'll get the tracks to sound alike, or at least, to not differ too much. But I wanna learn about this... So tell me...
Click to expand...

Why do ya want them to sound alike?

Each song requires its own character, but when assembled with the other 4 songs they need to flow in a way that makes emotional sense as well as sonically sensible. We are acually talking about stereo mixing using eq and compression as tool to push or pull frequencies forward and backwards, and if your really good change the stereo field if the balance of frequencies are really screwed up at the mixer. We are also talking about fades and song lengths. The first tool you need is ears that are able to discern the frequencies. The best thing you can do is to teach yourself what everything does through experimentation and bounce the results off of other work that is similar. A book isn't going to help your ears, only your eyes. Sjoko2 would probably have to hear what there is available in the frequency spectrum before he could help. Free tip of the day: Print out a spectrum analysis of a similar, professionally mastered song, then compare that to what your mix looks like. Typical Sum/difference analysis. Once to see what the freqencies are, you can isolate those and commit them to memory so you hear them lateron, similar to voice training. Try and try again. Experimentation equals experience. Every song is different and requires its own personality.

SoMm
 
Thanks! Good post!

The thing here is that the songs they made with the program are done with loops from the sample cd's they got with it. That's enhanced beats, processed and pretty much compressed the hell out of the lower end (I think :)). The song they did with sequencer is done with a kick from a cheap sequencer... Not very big, pretty silly sounding compared to the other one. So I need to compress the low end on that one. I think. If I wouldn't do that, they'd have one song with huge kick and balls, another one with a cheesy kick and some others in between... The coherence would be pretty much lost and some songs would have no power to them. Unless I EQ the hell out of it live, but I'd need to do that for every song seperately. Me no like...

The spectrum analysis is a good idea. What is the "Typical Sum/difference analysis" you talk about? Are there different forms of spectrum analysis? Where do I learn about them, and what tools do you use to do that kinda thing? (Cheap software solution please. :D )

Thanks!!
 
Roel said:


The spectrum analysis is a good idea. What is the "Typical Sum/difference analysis" you talk about? Are there different forms of spectrum analysis? Where do I learn about them, and what tools do you use to do that kinda thing? (Cheap software solution please. :D )

Thanks!!
Click to expand...


Hi Roel, Here is a great place to dig for freebee's
http://www.hitsquad.com/smm/win95/SPECTRUM_ANALYZERS/

Once you down load it and start looking at it it will make more sense.

Additional linkage:
http://chandrakantha.com/articles/spectrum/spectrum.html

Its a start, start grinding!

SoMm
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top