JPF Home Page Forums Southeast US Chapter Message Boards Tampa Chapter Message Board Excellent Article On Mastering

Good info worth passing on.


http://www.austin360.com/music/content/music/stories/xl/2006/09/28cover.html

Great article!
Thanks Steve!

That definitely is a great article. Indie musicians who do their own home recordings are up against it, too. I've really struggled with mastering. My CD's are definitely not anywhere near as loud as commercial CD's - they're not in the same ballpark. Some of my friends have commented on this to me. It's hard to explain the "loudness war" to a non-musician when you're an indie - they think you're making excuses. I think you can crank my recordings up pretty loud and they still sound OK, but I wonder sometimes if I've gone too far myself in terms of compression.

It's not just compression, but multi-band compression. Multi-band compression allows you to bust the song up into four (or more or less) frequency ranges and compress each one separately. There is a great debate about this technique... it makes the mix more exciting, but perhaps a bit harder on the ears. On the other hand, if you don't hype your mix at least a little bit, it sounds pale and flat next to commercial music.

I know I've got a lot to learn about recording and mastering still. But it's great to see more and more people become aware of how bad records sound nowadays. I bought a track from the new Maroon 5 album and it sounds like absolute crap. There's no warmth to the thing, no soul. It's all slick and polished and pumped up to the max. I won't buy their new CD, even though I like the songs on it, because it just plain sounds like absolute crap.

GREAT topic.

I wonder how many other local JPFers are also into audio recording like me. Would love to get together with some other audio recording musicians over some beers and trade notes, stories, and ideas.

Richard,
There is a thread on the recording forum about mastering as related to loudness. I also struggle with it. The best advice I have and I got it from Andy K is find a reference CD that you want to sound like and keep experimenting until you have it. Another thing I've done is pay attention to the volume settings on my vehicle radio or CD player and try to get recording to match in volume level at the same setting.
I think the compression issue gets us all on mastering. I have found that most problems are in the initial recording tracks and/or mix. I try to get good individual tracks anymore that pretty much stand on their own and then use very little compression or limiter on the mastering. I still don't have it right yet. I'm also limited in tools as I use a stand alone machine and not a computer. You have to just keep trying and each generation gets better.
Dan

Steve,

Thanks for sharing...very interesting article.

Mike

I used to wonder why , when My CDs got airplay, they wer so much quieter than the surrounding songs. then an engineer friend turned me on to a mastering software called T-Racks. since I got that, i have no problem producing "Air Quality" recordings.
It aint cheap, but in the longrun, alot cheaper than sending stuff out to the pro mastering places.

I use iZotope Ozone for my mastering of demos and my first CD. I had Bob Katz master my second CD.

With Ozone, I could make my stuff as loud as almost any currently released material by the major labels. But I have backed away from doing that. I simply didn't like the way things were sounding.

With Sound Forge, I'm able to measure the average signal level of a song. I used to shoot for about -11 to -12 db, which is where a lot of modern releases appear to be. 0 db would be clipping, the max you could go. But some modern stuff, such as Green Day's "American Idiot" CD, are sitting around -9 db for an average level. If you look at the waveforms for this CD, it is almost solid black across your screen, lacking the peaks and valleys most songs have. They are clipping almost every wave. And, to me, it sounds kinda constipated.

Meanwhile, when I look at a lot of classic records, they tended to sit around -15 to -18 db for average levels. This includes all the Beatles stuff, Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust," Heart records, Who, etc. This is all rather rocking stuff. Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon," one of the biggest, if not biggest, selling records of all time, is around -21 db. These are all very radio competitive recordings.

So I've been mastering recently for around -14 to -17 db. To me, they sound better and have better dynamics. As for making them sound rocking, I think it has more to do with the arrangement and the emotion of the songs and performances rather than just how loud they are. Getting and capturing emotional performances is really the tricky part. I'm still working on that.

No doubt, Andy. The hardest part is having a really good song and then having a really good performance! There's two different things at play with mastering - how hot the hottest peak is and how compressed the song is. Obviously the more compression, the louder the song can be. Compression is a necessary tool but music today sounds like one of those 500 watt plastic boom box stereos with all the lights and gizmos on it - it's loud and obnoxious and not very musical.

Audio recording was originally conceived to try to imitate real sound events, and as it got better, the goal became to try to reproduce the event as faithfully as possible, and that morphed into being able to sound more hyped than the original event... ie, a voice could be compressed and equalized and you could add reverb to it. No one sings with an automatic grand canyon reverb. And now we've reached an extreme where everything is hyped and it's turned into sonic mush.

But this is the iPod generation and no one wants to hear music that's half the volume of what's coming out right now. We don't have to worry so much about how things sound on the radio as much as how it will sound on someone's iPod or car stereo. I feel like I mix pretty hot but my tracks are still quite a bit softer than today's overhyped tracks. It's just frustrating is all.

Richard,

One trick I use to get my tracks louder and balanced is to use a hard limiter on the finished WAV file and drop the peaks back by some amount like -3 db. Then amplify the whole track by the same amount bringing the newly reduced peaks back up to 0 db. You can pick any level of limiting you want and try it. Start out with -3 db and -6 db.

The purpose of this is to leave the dynamics in most of the song the same, but reduce the volume of the occasional note that is way louder than the rest of the track. Those loud peaks sit at 0 db and hold the rest of the song down. It is possible to have one loud strum hold down everything else on the track.

Colin

Yes, indeed a great article echoing a lot of Chris's sentiments on the subject.

Mastering our album "Perspectives" was a lot tougher than recording it. We spent days on this up until the last minute, but couldn't get a sound we were happy with. So, we finally just had DiscMakers do it. It's pretty decent.

Mastering was an area Chris really had to persuade me on. I grew up listening mostly to pop music, and only got into some of the great classic records a few years back (thank God I did - can hardly stand most pop music now. Ha, ha!) So, I was very used to squashed, loud records. I felt if ours didn't have that loudness to it, people wouldn't think it was very professional.

Chris's argument was that if you mash the levels on the CD, you lose expression. The dynamic range disappears, and all the emotion you put into it is thrown out the window. He guided me to one of Peter Gabriel's recordings (don't remember which one now, but something from 1980something). The recording has a lot of expression. Starts out soft, but comes in loud when everything gets going during the choruses. Anyways, my thought was the only reason this record of Peter Gabriel's sounded this way was because they didn't have the technology back in the day to make it loud like today's CDs. But Chris argued that if you take the same record and squashed the levels to make it loud, it wouldn't be as emotionally captivating as it was.

After much persuading, we did go with a softer sound. And to my surprise, no one has commented that Perspectives is lower in volume than most commercially released CDs. Either they don't know, or they don't care.

After reading this article, I'm glad we went with a softer sound. I too have noticed that I get so easily worn out on most of the new music I buy. After a few weeks, I dont' want to listen to it anymore. But some of my old music, when I first bought it, I listened to year after year - never seemed to get tired of it. I never thought that this was because my senses were being exhausted by the onslaught of sound that never seems to give you a break, but this makes sense. No wonder singles only get played a few weeks on the radio anymore. When I was a kid, they'd play a single for like a year or two. No anymore. Of course, radio today sucks anyways, IMHO.

Thanks for the link Steve. Great article.
-Sheila

TC Finalizer.... Every good studio should have one!!!

http://www.tcelectronic.com/Finalizer96k

Actually, for occasional peaks that are causing the whole mix to be quieter, I often just manually go through the tracks and turn down the volume on the track which is causing the peak for a fraction of a second around that peak. This allows me to turn up the entire mix and still maintain the dynamics. It is basically manually compressing but with less potential artifacts since I am only altering one track rather than the whole mix and I have better control of the fade down and up in volume. A little more time, but a much better result.

I'm just getting back in to the home studio thing after a gigantic lapse in time and technology. Relearning it all digitally, and doing tons of research.

My experience in mix down and mastering was before the equipment and technology was available like it is presently, (early 80's), so the "manual mix, listen close, run out and try the cassette in the car" approach was what I did.

That article really opened my ears, (pun intended), to what is happening in current music and why I have trouble paying prolonged attention to television and commercial radio.

Considering the source of the article, (Austin American Statesman) is from a main hub of the Singer/Songwriter/Americana music, and not the slickened and sickened L.A. or Nashville scene, I will certainly be putting the information to good use.

The project I am starting will probably end up dynamically sounding more like classical music on vinyl. Layers and textures.

Love the idea of the T.C. Finalzer. Just can't drop 2500 on a single piece of gear. I'll go old school and see what kind of results I get , and investigate some of the software options like Izotope Ozone 3.

http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/ozone/

Steve,
Your old school approach is actually very similar to my new school approach... mix, save to iPod, listen in car for a couple of days, remix, save to iPod, listen in car for a couple of days, etc. Repeat until mix sounds good.

My monitors don't do a good job of exposing weaknesses in a mix, such as too much bass. My car stereo does, though. If I've got too much bass, the speakers will fart out. If my mix is shrill, I'll know it. By going back and forth between my monitors and the car stereo, I feel like I get a decent handle on things. I think the approach still works well.

There's a very fine line between a sound having energy and a sound being fatiguing. I'm still learning where that line is.

I have always used 2 different sets of headphones, one good, and one Walkman type, and 2 pairs of monitors in the house, then used car stereos for a final test.

Never had to change too much after all that.

If I could have had anything back then, it would have been a limiter on the mics.Used stompboxes for any effects. The only editing was doing a new take from start to finish. Had one of the first midi drum machines, and usually had 2 bass parts to fatten it up.

Wish I still had some of my old stuff. It was pretty aggressive, non politically correct rock, but it was fun.......

I'd like to hear it! You don't have it any more?

My old stuff is so embarrassing I wouldn't play it for my dog.

Richard,

If I can find anything while I'm sorting stuff out around here, I see if it will still play. The stuff is well over 20 years old, and I was a little over 20 years old when I made it.